[Phys-L] The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney
From: Spinoza321 at AOL.COM (Robert B Zannelli)
Date: Sat Oct 15 14:41:24 2005
Should be of some interest.
Bob Zannelli
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Now Mooney is a young reporter who has published a highly-touted book called
The Republican War on Science and he finds himself defending science against
new and cleverer attacks along the same lines. The transparent ruses of
creationists have mostly faded away, replaced by a new anti-evolution doctrine
called "Intelligent Design," which instead of crude attacks on Darwinism,
recruits idealistic Christians to teach school kids and, in the words of the
founders of the doctrine, "replace materialistic explanations with the theistic
understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."
On the right-hand side of the political dial, this is a practice known as
"teaching the controversy". Instead of defending their spiritual beliefs, the
founders of Intelligent Design disingenuously describe their attack on
evolution as a defense of "sound science". In this, Mooney shows, they are following
a trail blazed by the tobacco industry, which for decades profitably resisted
regulations designed to protect non-smokers against second-hand smoke by
claiming such efforts were "political correctness". Mooney quotes memos from
Philip Morris laying out secret plans to hire public relations consultants to
form phony "local" coalitions to help "educate" the public against what the
tobacco manufacturer called "junk science".