Science Denialism - Frank Snow, Sec #6
Frank Snow
04/29/2022
Professor Oliver
PHIL 1030-006
Science Denialism
Science denialism is an interesting
topic to discuss, especially these days where these exact topics dominate the
news and multiple social media platforms daily. “In science, denialism has been
defined as the rejection of basic concepts that are undisputed and
well-supported parts of the scientific consensus on a topic in favor of ideas
that are both radical and controversial.”[1] In other words, choosing
to not believe in something that has plentiful scientific research to back it
is science denialism. Denialism itself is common in everyday life. Denying the fact,
it might rain today or denying that there are bad people in the world are run
of the mill examples of denialism. However, Science denialism is a focus form
of denialism that involves people denying phenomenon and/or claims that are
back by scientific research. Examples can be pseudoscience and belittling or
falsely disproving any scientific claims that have been proven true.
Science denialism isn’t anything
new. It has been around since the beginning of human thought. Whenever proven
claims are questioned, they are usually utter motives behind it. This is how pseudoscience
came about. Let’s say a company sells a product that causes its users to become
less stressed. This said product not only becomes widely used and accepted, but
it also becomes very popular as a fashion statement. Therefore, the company
becomes very wealthy and successful. Fast forward some years and the people who
use this stress reliever religiously and even every now and then become sick.
New and lower rate diseases and illnesses become more and more prevalent for
some reason. This is where scientists come in and run countless studies on
multiple different new products circling the market. They eventually find a
link to all the people using this popular stress reliever and an increase in all
these new and low-rate diseases. This causes the company to panic as more and
more research backs the claims that this famous stress reliever is linked to
all kinds of deadly diseases and costs the company millions, if not billions in
lawsuit cases. To lower the costs in all these lawsuits and even try to keep
and get new customers, the company hires its own scientists to run tests and
conduct experiments. Theses new “studies” conduct by the company prove that
their product isn’t that deadly and that the diseases that were becoming more
prevalent were already known and “preventable causes of death”[2].
This company if not already
obviously known is the tobacco industry. The tobacco industry is still in
effect to and still growing, especially with the new era of smoking, which is
smoking, vaping electronic cigarettes. The tobacco industry still uses and
hires their own scientists to conduct studies on how vaping isn't dangerous and
even better for the environment. the tobacco industry has been selling tobacco
products for hundreds of years and there really isn't going to be a way to shut
down their businesses, but all we can do is spread the knowledge of how
dangerous their products are, even though they prove with pseudoscience that
they are safe or less deadly as proven otherwise.
Another example of a modern-day
topic of science denialism is the revolution of fully electric cars. People
boast about how good electric cars are for the environment but have little to
no knowledge about the devastating impacts the lithium mining used in the very
batteries the electric cars need to function. Not to mention the terribly
inefficient and dangerous lithium battery recycling method. this is not to put
down fully electric cars it's just to show that they aren't as good as people
believe them to be, at least in today's world. there is no doubt that in the
future electric cars will run the highways and city streets and the energy used
to charge them will be clean and efficient energy. But as of right now they are
running on Whatever we already use to generate electricity, which is commonly coal
and landfill powerplants. Even though the idea of the fully electric car is
great for the environment we cannot simply deny all the bad that they also
cause. However, they are extremely better than combustion cars. with further
experimentation and testing to find out better ways to produce energy the
electric car can and will replace today's combustion engine cars.
Furthermore, there are countless
articles showing how environmentally safe the fossil fuel industry is when
compared to the electric car industry. This is another example of how an old
and still powerful industries use pseudoscience to say that they're not as bad
as proven otherwise. They have pictures of green fields and beautiful scenery
with a man-made oil pipeline above the ground and put it next to a picture of a
lithium mine to compare how deadly electric cars are to the environment. Well, yes,
the pipeline scenery is beautiful, but it is the wrong pictorial comparison to
a lithium mine. A more appropriate picture would be an oil pump field or even
the disastrous BP oil spill in the ocean or even pictures and diagrams of what
fracking causes when pumping fossil fuels.
In conclusion science denialism is
detrimental to society and to all people. If this continues not only in the
examples that I have written about but of other conspiracy theories and just
straight up denying scientific fact, will ultimately end our modern-day society.
it is right two question scientific articles and studies to a certain point but
when a broad scope of different studies by different scientists proves the same
thing and someone still denies it is completely foolish. Completely denying
scientific fact can go anywhere from believing that the earth is flat all the
way to believing that vaccines cause autism. both have been proven on multiple
accounts to be false but there are still many that believe that they are true
because believing they are true fits their agenda either socially or
politically.
[1] Liu, D. W. C. (2012). Science denial and The
science classroom. CBE life sciences education. Retrieved April 29, 2022,
from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3366896/#:~:text=Denialism%20is%20the%20systematic%20rejection%20of%20empirical%20evidence,number%20of%20common%20strategies%20employed%20by%20science%20denialists.?msclkid=3baec059c7cb11ec9bab19fb4daa668c
[2]
Levine, D. L. (2018, July 19). Science
denialism in the 21st Century. Scientific American Blog Network. Retrieved
April 28, 2022, from
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/science-denialism-in-the-21st-century/
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