The late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked that "Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts." A similar rule applies to book reviews: Every reviewer is entitled to dislike a particular book, but not to misrepresent its arguments and contents.
Unfortunately, J. Coyne has taken the latter course with our book Unscientific America ("Selling science," Book Reviews, 7 August 2009, p. 678). He calls our work "shallow and unreflective," but virtually every time he tries to describe it he makes an error—either attributing to us views and positions we do not hold, or claiming the book lacks content that it actually does contain.
The problem is apparent from Coyne's opening sentence, in which he asserts that Unscientific America argues that the problem of American scientific illiteracy "derives from two failings of scientists themselves: their vociferous atheism and their ham-handed and ineffectual efforts to communicate the importance of science to the public." This would be a very foolish position; thankfully, it isn't ours. On the contrary, as we describe it, scientific illiteracy—really, the gap between science and society—is a complex, multifaceted, multidecadal problem. It is hardly something that can be blamed exclusively on the failings of scientists, although surely scientists have contributed to the divide.
Coyne's misrepresentations continue as he asserts that we "claim that scientific illiteracy once was ameliorated by people like Carl Sagan and Stephen Gould but is now exacerbated by the 'new atheists.'" Our views are nowhere near so simplistic. The same goes for this assertion: "Other data contradict Mooney and Kirshenbaum's claim that American ignorance of scientific issues reveals a failure of outreach."
In a complex society and world, in which citizens' views of scientific issues are influenced by the educational system, the news media (new and old), the entertainment media, interpersonal communications, political predilections, religious commitments, and much else, how could anyone hold the naive positions that Coyne attributes to us? We certainly don't. To give just one example, consider our observation about where vaccine skeptics get their "science": "From the Internet, celebrities, other parents, and a few non-mainstream researchers and doctors who continue to challenge the scientific consensus, all of which forms a self-reinforcing echo chamber of misinformation."
The actual task undertaken in Unscientific America is to update C. P. Snow's famous "two cultures" analysis, originally written for mid-20th century Britain, for 21st century America. Accordingly, we repeatedly depict a "two cultures" divide between scientists and other parts of our society. Neither side understands the other adequately, and both sides are responsible for communication failures and disconnects.
Relating none of this, Coyne instead poses the following rhetorical question: "Do [Mooney and Kirshenbaum] really think that if Dawkins had not written The God Delusion, Americans would wholeheartedly embrace evolution and vaccination and finally recognize the threat of global warming?" Here are the facts: Anti-evolutionism is over 100 years old. The latest outgrowth of anti-vaccine activism, over the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal, is about a decade old, but distrust of vaccination also goes back well over a century. Finally, global warming denial goes back decades. With all of these preexisting factors in place, Dawkins' The God Delusion was then published in 2006—and it isn't even about global warming or vaccination. So, no: We are quite confident that these instances of anti-science sentiment would be with us no matter what Richard Dawkins did. Yet this admission does nothing to weaken our argument that the confrontational tactics of Dawkins and the New Atheists (including Coyne), in the present moment, are counterproductive.
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Coyne's review is his use of our own arguments to attack the positions he incorrectly attributes to us. For instance, take Coyne's observation that "The public's reluctance to accept scientific facts may reflect not just a lack of exposure but a willful evasion of facts due to conflicting economic agendas (e.g., the case of global warming) personal agendas (vaccines), or religious agendas." Yes, but how is this a strike against our book? We deal with such factors from the outset; Coyne even quotes our observation that "college-educated Democrats are now more than twice as likely as college-educated Republicans to believe that global warming is real and is caused by human activities." Coyne writes that "the problem of an 'unscientific America' may be far more complex than the authors let on," but in truth, we describe the problem with far more complexity than Coyne lets on.
Much more might be said, but allow us to rebut one final claim: Coyne's repeated accusation that we want anti-religion scientists to "keep quiet." This is simply not the case. In fact, as we observe in an endnote: "We want to emphasize that New Atheists enjoy freedom of speech. No one is asking them to be quiet. However, we have every right to point out the consequences of the divisiveness they are fueling over science and religion."
We welcome vigorous debate over our book's arguments and suggestions, and have been regular participants in that discussion on the Internet. Unfortunately, readers of Science have no way of knowing that several of the errors we note above were already corrected in that earlier discussion after Coyne reviewed our book on his blog—though no note of those corrections is reflected in Coyne's Science review (1, 2). The failure to mention this previous interaction does readers a disservice, depriving them of valuable context about the reviewer's willingness to accurately represent our book.
Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
References
1. E. Scott, C. Mooney, "Unscientific Unscientific America. Part 1," 14 July 2009; http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/unscientific-unscientific-america-part-1/.
2. C. Mooney, S. Kirshenbaum, "Some More Words to the New Atheist Blogosphere on Unscientific America," 27 July 2009; http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2009/07/27/some-more-words-to-the-new-atheist-blogosphere-on-unscientific-america/.
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