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   I’ve almost finished Susan Jacoby’s book titled the Age of American Unreason.  There are a few passages that wanted to make me stand up and cheer and qualified themselves as sharing material on the blog.  Of course, I can never find them when I want to do the actual transcription, but here is one quote from the chapter on “junk thought’ stating how important grounding in scientific principles are.

“It ought to be unnecessary to have to state that scientific literacy and respect for the scientific method should not be equated with blind trust in experts and scientists and that antagonism toward evidence based science should not be confused with an entirely healthy concern about the need for ethical oversight of scientific research.  But junk-thought has become so pervasive in the United States that as soon as someone criticized, say, religion-based restriction on stem cell research, the hucksters of illogic inevitably remind the public about Nazi doctors who performed cruel and scientifically useless experiments on human subjects; about Lysenkoist biology in the Soviet Union; and, last but not least, about the false and widely publicized claims of successful embryonic cloning by South Korean researches.  The last were of course exposed by other scientists, because all real scientific research must be and is subjected to rigorous scrutiny by peers.  That is what separates science for pseudoscience and junk thought.  Without a basic understanding of what constitutes good science, neither ordinary citizens nor the politicians that represent them can hope to make thoughtful judgments separating quacks, con men, and practitioners of bad science from thoughtful experts whose advice ought to be taken seriously.”

-Excerpt from Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason. p.230