As Isaac Asimov complained years ago, “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the

As Isaac Asimov complained years ago, “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” There was a brief period, roughly coincident with the Apollo space program, when rockets were cool and so were rocket scientists. Since then, the public image of science and scientists in America has been in decline. I believe that religion plays a strong role here. Religious dogma is threatened by scientific knowledge, and nowhere in the developed Western world has the backlash been as strong as in the US, which also happens to be the most religious of Western prosperous democracies. What's worse, the anti-science campaign of the religious is smashingly successful: only 40% of Americans give credence to biology's strongest and most useful theory, that of Evolution. Among the countries sampled in this study: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/08/060810-evolution.html http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/08/060810-evolu... that's almost at rock bottom, undercut only by Turkey.