I haven’t yet read Chris Mooney’s new book Unscientific America, but based o what everyone–Mooney’s critics, Money’s friends, Mooney himself–has been saying about it, I get the impression it revives the current-science-communication-is-worthless line that Mooney, Nisbet, and their ilk have been using for awhile. This line is nonsense, and I know it’s nonsense because I know I’ve benefitted a lot from already-available popular science, and I’ve talked to other people who’ve benefitted from it.

Thus, I propose a blog project, a sort of one-shot carnival: write a blog post thanking popular science writers for whatever they’ve done for you. Send me the link, and I’ll link to it. (EDIT: Okay, people are posting their stuff in the comments, that makes more sense.) It doesn’t have to be long, it could be as little as a paragraph explaining one benefit you’ve gotten from works of popular science. A short excerpt from the “how I became an atheist” story you tell everyone, explaining just the parts of your deconversion story that involved learning more about science and turning away from creationism or woo or whatever. I’ll kick it off with my own thank-yous:

Thanks to the skepticism and debunking community–CSICOP, James Randi, and all the rest. In grade school and middle school I read quite a bit about UFOs, psychics, and so on, and believed it all because no one gave me any reason not to. A science book told me Uri Geller’s powers had been verified by scientists, why would I doubt that? My enthusiasm for that kind of stuff faded as I got older and wiser, but I never quite rejected it until I got interested in sleight of hand as a hoby. One or two of my magic books casually mentioned that Uri Geller was a magician, and said if I wanted to know more about that I should read James Randi’s book The Truth About Uri Geller. Eventually, my senior year of high school I got access to a real research library, went to get Randi’s book, and found along with it many other excellent books by people with real scientific training: Ray Hyman, Terence Hines, and Susan Blackmore. So thanks, guys, if not for you I might still believe in psychic powers to this day. Also thanks for showing me how apparently inscrutable questions can be rationally examined.

Thanks to all the wonderful critics of creationism out there–including Niles Eldredge and the people behind TalkOrigins.org. Again in grade school, one of my friends began pushing Kent Hovind’s videos on my friends and I, and from what I heard of the creationists’ arguments, they seemed plausible. Luckily, my mother has a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and was willing to take the time to explain the more glaring flaws those arguments contained. But as time went by, I kept running into creationism, and while the public schools I went to were supposed to be teaching us about evolution, the actual lessons contained next to nothing on the subject. I had to hit the libraries and the web to read both sides for myself. Eldredge and TalkOrigins were the first two big pro-evolution sources I managed to find. I’m so glad they took the time to do what they did, if not for them I would think creationism perfectly reasonable and have no real knowlegde of evolution.

Thanks to the authors of every popular book on psychology I’ve ever read–First and foremost among them are Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins (who officially is an expert in “animal behavior”), but also Dan Ariely, Robert Cialdini, Malcolm Gladwell, Matt Ridley, and many others. Thanks to you guys, my understanding of why I and the people around me do the things we do is ten times what it would otherwise be.