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The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It QUOTES

The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

3 " 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: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

4 " . 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: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

5 " 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: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

6 " 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: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

7 " 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: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

8 " 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: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

9 " 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: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

10 " 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: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

11 " 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: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

12 " 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: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

13 " 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: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

14 " 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: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

15 " 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: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

16 " 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: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

17 " 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: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

18 " 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: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

19 " 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: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

20 " 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: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It