It's a whole thing because there's been over a century of concerted effort in the US to cast all of science as an evil plot.
The Discovery institute, and all their donors and connections (including literal politicians) tell millions of children that science is a plot of satan to make you doubt god.
The people who created the Scopes "monkey trial" never went away, are fabulously well funded and organized and connected, and have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams
Now they are trying to expand that belief to all of academia, so that people who never set foot in an academic institution and have never tried any higher education beyond high school and have never even attempted to read a scientific paper are convinced that all Academics are in a concerted plot.
30 million Americans claim to believe God created humans exactly as they are now within the past 10k years.
That's the low estimate of christian fundamentalism and science hostile cohort in the US.
The science hostile cohort is flourishing wherever christian fundamentalism is rampant, in some places most people are exactly this. A lot of the depressing things Carl Sagan mentioned in Demon Haunted World turns out to be true. I had thought that 20 years ago we were on our way to being a rational society but it turned out this notion was on its way out.
Cmon the puritans were one of many different founding cohorts. Quakers, borderers, cavaliers, etc. America was never of one mind on the subject of religion.
I mean it doesn't help that a bunch of Harvard scientists were literally caught accepting money to shape the discussion around fat vs sugar which did irreparable damage to a generation of people.
If only those so offended by this and other (comparatively isolated) incidents, don't apply the same level of distrust of those that behave unethically and corruptly on an almost daily basis i.e. oligarchs and politicians. It's like they see a pot calling the kettle black, except the kettle is grey ("boo!") and the pot is vantablack ("I see nothing wrong here").
What on earth does the discovery institute amd creationists have to do with Alzheimer’s research? Come on. Most of the people I’ve seen criticize the amyloid hypothesis are secular.
The bigger problem and the one that is more damaging to public trust in science is actually politicians (and bureaucrats and other government and non-government institutions) who spread disinformation that policy is science. Their policy is "based on the science" they will claim, and therefore to disagree with their policy is to be a "science denier" they assert, without evidence. These dishonest interests essentially hijack the good name of science by fooling low information voters.
There is a lot of science around epidemiology, virology, vaccines, and medicine. There is no evidence based scientific consensus that it was the "correct" policy to shut down large parts of the economy, subsidize mothballed businesses, admit COVID positive patients to nursing homes, impose emergency policies impinging on human rights like restricting travel and association and medical autonomy, or fast-track vaccines for COVID.
You could argue for those policies, but it should have been completely reasonable to argue against them. That does not make you "anti-science". People can and should question the efficacy of the vaccines, and the lies that were repeated by certain "news" corporations and politicians who had interests in and donations from pharmaceutical companies, with fantastical claims about them that turned out to be false. That does not make you "anti-science" either.
Similar thing with the science of greenhouse gasses and global warming. There is a lot of science around the fundamentals of those mechanisms, there is a lot of science showing that warming can gravely damage ecosystems and human societies and therefore limiting human CO2 emissions would be a benefit. That's great, that is science. What is not science is any particular government policy purported to help this. Proposing to reduce or tax GHG emissions in one country and thereby incentivize production in another country (with far higher emissions intensity of production) is not "science". It's not "anti-science" or "climate denier" to question or disagree with a policy like that, for example.
When you say "science", you need to distinguish between science as philosophy vs. science as an institution. Science as philosophy is a way of thinking - an attempt to understand knowledge and reality. The science as an institution on the other hand has all the imperfections as any other institution, since the people in charge are driven by self interest and not just the search for the truth. So, when you say the people distrust science, it seems bizarre that they doubt science as philosophy, while in fact they doubt the institution. It's perfectly fine to mistrust the institution. If you want to consider a few failures, just in the recent years, I have some for you:
- Hungarian-born biochemist Katalin Karikó, who developed the key mRNA modification that enabled effective COVID-19 vaccines, was repeatedly denied grants and demoted during her career. She and her collaborator, Drew Weissman, struggled for years to gain recognition and funding for their work [1]
- On the other hand, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had no trouble getting grants from NIH [2]
- Surgeon General Jerome Adams was saying that masks are not effective against Covid [3]
- Social distancing was of supreme importance, until it turned out that it's fine not to distance if it's for a good cause [4]
> So, when you say the people distrust science, it seems bizarre that they doubt science as philosophy, while in fact they doubt the institution.
The vast, vast, vast majority of the Christian fundamentalists whom are the backbone of this movement and the subject of this discussion do not distinguish between these things. They do not distrust "big science," they distrust science, full stop. The fact that science as an institution is subject to the same corruptive forces as every other institution is a convenient post-hoc rationalization for the belief they already had and wanted to justify, just like a lot of other post-hoc rationalizations they have for other beliefs they have. They dislike science now because they are told to by their ministers, no more reason than that, and we know this because science and their religion coexisted peacefully and uneventfully for centuries until it become inconvenient for a segment of the church's politics. Excluding of course Gallileo, and for the same reasons.
Science (both as philosophy and institution) gets it wrong, but has built-in mechanisms that correct those issues. Eugenics was discredited by science. Andrew Wakefield's bullshit autism study was discredited by science. Religion gets it wrong and then calls it mystery.
It’s especially ironic to hear institutional corruption invoked as a critique of science, when many of the loudest voices in this conversation come from religious institutions that have spent decades shielding their own leadership from accountability for far more egregious abuses.
The Discovery institute, and all their donors and connections (including literal politicians) tell millions of children that science is a plot of satan to make you doubt god.
The people who created the Scopes "monkey trial" never went away, are fabulously well funded and organized and connected, and have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams
Now they are trying to expand that belief to all of academia, so that people who never set foot in an academic institution and have never tried any higher education beyond high school and have never even attempted to read a scientific paper are convinced that all Academics are in a concerted plot.
30 million Americans claim to believe God created humans exactly as they are now within the past 10k years.
That's the low estimate of christian fundamentalism and science hostile cohort in the US.