The War on Science Quotes

“The point of education isn’t to train students with specific job skills they have already identified; it is to show them what they don’t already know, and that they don’t know they don’t know. In other words, to help them build a telescope so they can discover their own talents and interests as scholars and human beings.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“. Journalists have a wealth of stories at their fingertips once they reject the notion that truth is subjective and start asking for evidence and digging into details. They especially have a wealth of stories at their fingertips when they start exploring how science is being intentionally misrepresented by vested interests.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“What is at stake is the freedom to investigate, debate, and express ideas that run counter to the interests of corporations and their political allies. Attacks on this basic freedom hide behind the guise of transparency but, in reality, are a step toward tyranny.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“unquestioned authority isn’t the message of science. The best science has never rested on “trust me” or “take it on faith.” Authority was the message of kings and popes, the thing Locke was trying to escape. Science’s strong suit has always been its focus on observation and process: See, look for yourself. Don’t take my word for it.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“Even more troubling than the dismal failure of the abstinence-only approach, Webber says, was that repeat teen pregnancy also went up. It turns out that Texas kids thought, “If birth control doesn’t work, why use it?”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“A democracy is not truly democratic unless it's secular.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

“In an age when most major public-policy challenges revolve around science, fewer than 1 percent of US congresspersons have professional backgrounds in it.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“The scans showed that when the Christian subjects were listening to recordings they thought were made by healers, who have special religious authority, they turned off parts of their medial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices, which play key roles in critical thinking and skepticism. Nonbelievers, in contrast, did not shut down this brain system.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“Using the Mount Wilson Observatory, Harlow Shapley redefined our relationship to the cosmos, showing that the sun was not at the center of the Milky Way. Using it, Edwin Hubble created the whole field of cosmology, redefining again our place in the universe, our understanding of its vastness, and our ideas about its creation. Those discoveries did not bear any direct financial returns. They did not add to the national defense. But they did something far more important: they changed our lives and the way we think about ourselves. They are among the most profound discoveries of science, and they had no financial justification whatsoever. They were seeking truth and beauty amid chemistry and light.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“If there is only one issue on which you should base your vote, it is this: whether a candidate supports evidence as the basis for policy decisions.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“When scientists see something that others don’t, they have an ethical obligation to bring it to the attention of the public.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“If knowledge does not have primacy in public decision making, then no truth can be said to be self-evident, and we are left with the tyranny of ideology, with shots called by the wealthy and enforced by might.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“Exxon abandoned its good-citizen approach of funding research, allowing its publication, and discussing ways to transition to a new energy economy. It began to fund climate denial aimed at obfuscating the science and slowing its regulatory response.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“On the left, the antiscience tends to extend worries about health and the environment into areas that are not supported by the evidence, claiming nevertheless that, as in Silent Spring, there are hidden dangers to our environment, our health, or our spirits. Examples include the ideas that cell phones cause brain cancer; that Wi-Fi and other electromagnetic fields cause cancer, birth defects, or allergies; that vaccines cause autism; that genetically modified crops are unsafe to eat; and that fluoride in water is unsafe to drink.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“The probusiness conservatives and libertarians don’t want regulation, while the social conservatives oppose evolution and want to regulate sex, creating an unusual compromise with many contradictions.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“In 1905, the court ruled that states could enact compulsory laws to protect public health.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“Even after thimerosal was removed from vaccines, the antivaccine movement continued to gain momentum, fueled by the same skepticism of science that had propelled the electromagnetic-field scare, the cell-phone scare, the GM scare, and the poison-meme antiscience backlash as a whole.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“legitimate policy questions, such as corporate ownership of genomes, monoculture farming and its effects on pollinators, economic justice, farmers’ inability to harvest their own seeds, and the possible spread of GM pollen. These are issues we should be discussing, but the evidence does not support health concerns.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“But genetic modification is the same thing humans have been doing for millennia, just with more precision. It actually changes less of a plant’s organic genome than hybridization.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“Following this rejection, and Sagan’s failure to secure tenure at Harvard, scientists developed a new term: the Sagan effect. One’s popularity with the general public was considered inversely proportional to the quantity and quality of one’s scientific work, a perception that, in Sagan’s case at least, was false. He published, on average, once monthly in peer-reviewed publications over the course of his thirty-nine-year career—a total of five hundred scientific papers. More recent research suggests that scientists who engage the public tend to be better academic performers as well.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“In the process they created something entirely new: a nation that respected and tolerated religion in every sense, but did not base its authority on religion. A nation whose authority was instead based on the underlying principles of liberty, reason, and science.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“Whereas religious authority and proximity to God could be endlessly argued between different faiths or countries, Jefferson reasoned that a country based on the more narrowly defined rule of men—a democracy—was removed from this, freeing both religion and the government. This being the Enlightenment, Jefferson needed to convince the world’s nations that American independence should be respected as rational and correct, and that they should not intercede in the revolution, so he had to build the most inspiring and unassailable Enlightenment argument possible.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“A man may imagine things that are false,” Newton said, “but he can only understand things that are true.” Newton”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“Eugenics and phrenology are discredited, for example. But so is Newtonian physics.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“Because it takes nothing on faith, science is inherently antiauthoritarian, and a great equalizer of political power. That is why it is under attack.”
― Shawn Otto, the war on Science

“there is no such thing as objectivity, rendering otherwise brilliant minds unable to discern between objective knowledge developed from years of scientific investigation, on the one hand, and a well-argued opinion made by an impassioned and charismatic advocate on the other.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“This dumbing down of the people for ideological reasons is, of course, not new. It is an age-old authoritarian tactic. It happened in China during the Cultural Revolution. It happened in the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Renaissance Italy, twentieth-century Russia, and Nazi Germany—all of them societies whose leaders turned their backs on science, making it subordinate to an authoritarian ideology, and the societies collapsed.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“Let’s say one’s children will be killed if one is wrong. Is it morally defensible to insist on an ideologically satisfying position without demanding it be testable, at the potential cost of our children’s lives? Or is it better to go with what can be tested, and to equip our children with our best knowledge about what nature really says on the subject? Which will likely give them the most competitive edge? The greatest moral and ethical development? The most intellectual rigor? The greatest personal humility? The highest level of honesty? In short, the best chance at success?”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“scientists for the last two generations saw their role as the creators of knowledge and believed they should leave the moral, ethical, and political implications to others to sort out.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science

“It is a vast misunderstanding by a generation of policymakers that has lost touch with—or perhaps never really fully knew—what a good education can do: open us up to wonder, and to the great meaning, possibility, and beauty of life.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, the war on Science