num_pages: 294
description: In this provocative and headline-making book Michael Specter confronts the widespread fear of science and its terrible toll on individuals and the planet.In Denialism New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter reveals that Americans have come to mistrust institutions and especially the institution of science more today than ever before. For centuries the general view had been that science is neither good nor badthat it merely supplies information and that new information is always beneficial. Now science is viewed as a political constituency that isnt always in our best interest. We live in a world where the leaders of African nations prefer to let their citizens starve to death rather than import genetically modified grains. Childhood vaccines have proven to be the most effective public health measure in history yet people march on Washington to protest their use. In the United States a growing series of studies show that dietary supplements and natural cures have almost no value and often cause harm. We still spend billions of dollars on them. In hundreds of the best universities in the world laboratories are anonymous unmarked and surrounded by platoons of security guardssuch is the opposition to any research that includes experiments with animals. And pharmaceutical companies that just forty years ago were perhaps the most visible symbol of our remarkable advance against disease have increasingly been seen as callous corporations propelled solely by avarice and greed.As Michael Specter sees it this amounts to a war against progress . The issues may be complex but the choices are Are we going to continue to embrace new technologies along with acknowledging their limitations and threats or are we ready to slink back into an era of magical thinking? In Denialism  Specter makes an argument for a new Enlightenment the revival of an approach to the physical world that was stunningly effective for hundreds of What can be understood and reliably repeated by experiment is what nature regarded as true. Now at the time of mankinds greatest scientific advancesand our greatest need for themthat deal must be renewed.
language: English
title: Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives
publisher: Penguin Press