Nine Days to Go: A Call to Arms

In anticipation of the paperback release, the book website is being substantially upgraded. It announces many new tour dates, most recently including this one in Ohio. It now shows the actual paperback cover image (displayed in high resolution below after the jump). Furthermore, there's a new book description; and most importantly for our current purposes, a new introduction from the author (moi).

More features to the site will appear in the coming days. But right now, with nine days til pub, I'd like to highlight some central themes enunciated in the new website intro (the same themes are developed at considerably more length in the new preface to the paperback). Here's a key excerpt from that intro:

I often heard from readers of the first edition of The Republican War on Science that it made their blood boil but didn't explain where to channel their anger. Ever since, I've been thinking about this problem, as my subsequent writings demonstrate (see for example here). And I've concluded that it's long past time that political attacks on science be met with a political response--which is going to require that scientists themselves stand up, in a concerted way, to defend the knowledge they have brought into the world.

If the hardcover edition of my book raised alarm, then, the newly revised paperback represents a call to arms. I hope you will read it in that light, and then join myself and the scientific community in helping to restore scientific integrity to our government and public life.

This new focus on activism must have several different components. For example, at the link above, I focus heavily on how important it is that scientists learn how to communicate their knowledge to the public. Ultimately this should culminate in political communication campaigns just as sophisticated as the anti-science campaigns that attack evolution or global warming, but which actually present good information rather than misinformation.

Teaching scientists how to understand framing and messaging will be a key part of the strategy. Matthew Nisbet and I have actually done a joint public talk along these lines that I will be linking as soon as the video is available; it goes into much more detail. Indeed, our own "message" may be catching on: In a July 2006 editorial in Bioscience, editor-in-chief Timothy Beardsley writes about Nisbet's presentation to the American Institute of Biological Sciences on this subject and concludes: "Although some scientists might want to do no more than lament ignorant attitudes and return to their terminals, they risk being marginalized in an often unsympathetic political climate. Frames suggest an alternative strategy."

But framing is just part of the story. There's another activist angle, one that's equally strategic but more explicitly political. It involves scientists actually opposing candidates who ignore, distort, or attack science, in order to demonstrate that this kind of behavior is not acceptable and not without consequence. Of course, the candidates explicitly targeted in this way would only be the most extreme--i.e., the James Inhofes of the world. And for practical reasons, they would have to be politically vulnerable in the first place.

This is a theme I have long included in my public talks, and I will have much more to say about it in the coming days and weeks, as the 2006 elections approach. But for now, note a central commonality to both of these points: Scientists need to wake up and learn how the political game is actually played so that they can then fend off attacks effectively. In other words, in light of the current war on science, hiding in the ivory tower will no longer suffice.