Scientists As Organizers?

I interviewed Chris Mooney about his new co-authored book, Unscientific America, over at Campus Progress today. Here's what he had to say about how science is (un)like feminism:

It seems to me it almost has some parallels with the battles that the reproductive rights community goes through, in that they're constantly trying to rework messaging and things like that, but the polling numbers roughly stay the same year after year, decade after decade. Do you see those similarities?

I'm willing to buy it, [though] I don't know the [issue of reproductive rights] as well. I know that it's a long, hard-fought battle. But to me, you're saying that the reproductive rights groups are constantly working on their messaging, and I believe that they probably are. I don't think that's true of the science groups. Maybe some of them, but in science it's different, because there's this whole thing where you're not supposed to have messaging. It's seen as a lack of integrity. And there's no coordinated strategy in the science world about how to handle this.

Read the whole thing.