What science book should the next president read?
Alexandra Witze
Thursday, 25 September 2008 13:16 UTC
Nature has just published a special issue on the US elections; don’t miss among the other goodies answers from Barack Obama on 18 unique science-related questions. But our books editor Jo Baker also asked a number of leading thinkers to recommend the single science book the next president should read. Check out their suggestions here.
Here’s one that came in too late to include in the print magazine. Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California, has this to say: We want a president who understands the practical importance of evolution. so he/she should read David Mindell’s The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life. We also want a president who can understand that evolution is a source of startling and delightful insights into why we and all other organisms are the way we are, so he/she should read Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.4-Billion-Year History of the Human Body. And then the president should go forth and support improved funding in science research and science education.
What book would you recommend?
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Replies
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In a spirit of shameless self promotion I will suggest that he read Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet, which I wrote and which will be published in the US a little after election day. It puts the carbon/climate crisis into a whole planetary context, and it celebrates what scientists can do to understand and change the world. And if I don’t recommend it who will?
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I would recommend (1) Stephen Jay Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man” (Norton: 1996); (2) Carl Sagan’s “The Demon-Haunted World” (Headline: 1997) and (3) Richard Dawkins, “The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writings” (Oxford University Press: 2008).
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Anonymous
I believe strongly that you should choose a book that is both able to reach out to conservatives and shows how science is relevant to a free society. So in that spirit, I would recommend “How The Mind Works” by Steven Pinker.
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Anonymous
ah, actually, “The Blank Slate” by Steven Pinker would be better. Meant to say that one.
I personally see dangers on both sides of the political divide. Conservatives buying the religion bunk, and liberals buying the “science is a religion too” postmodernist garbage. You need science writers who are able to communicate across this divide and explain how science matters for Americans.
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I suggest M. Conrad Hyers’s The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science as I think many will find it paradigm-shifting regarding what is mostly a silly conflict between a “religion as dinosaur” camp and a “dinosaur as religion” camp. Both camps are making nonsense of nonscience. Hyers shows how their swords may be turned into plowshares and that the crops of the biblical texts may be harvested when rid of such plagues.
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