Distrust of Science Is as American as Apple Pie
Our Belief in Equality and Passion for Politics Increase Our Suspicion of Expertise
Fifty years ago, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the Apollo Lunar Module and became the first humans to walk on the moon.
It was this achievement—two Earthlings leaving their tiny white shuttle and making their first tentative lunar steps—that moderator Usha Lee McFarling, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist, evoked to begin a Zócalo/Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County event titled “Are Americans Turning Against Science?”
“You get the sense,” McFarling said before a standing-room only crowd at the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park, “that everyone …