MAY 2012

The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science
by Chris Mooney

If Chris Mooney is right about the psychology of Republicans, few of them are going to be reading his new book, The Republican Brain.

That's because the science he relies on-like all scientific research-carries some degree of uncertainty. And one of the key personality traits of a conservative - according to political psychologists-is discomfort with uncertainty!

Mooney is a science journalist and a self-described liberal. He makes a persuasive-but not proof-positive-case that Republicans by nature are more inclined than Democrats to reject scientific facts that conflict with core personal values.

His previous book, The Republican War on Science, documents at length how conservatives are at odds with the science on climate change, evolution, stem-cell research, reproductive health and other ideological hot buttons.

The Republican Brain is a sequel that attempts to explain why growing numbers of Republicans reject mainstream science. The book's subtitle - The Science of Why They Deny Science - suggests that conservatives are intellectually dishonest. But the book is actually more of an indictment of liberals - for failing to understand people who are not like them.

For example, liberals commonly dismiss conservatives who resist climate science as uniformed or misinformed. But Mooney presents substantial polling data showing that conservatives who know more about the issue, or who are more educated, actually are more in denial and less likely to change their minds in the face of compelling evidence. For Democrats and Independents, precisely the opposite is the case.

Liberals' tactic of beating conservatives over the head with their best evidence simply hasn't worked.

This book is Mooney's attempt to help fellow liberals understand why this is so.

To get there, Mooney explored a large body of research on psychological and even neurological differences. Some researchers looked at brain scans, where they found conservatives generally outsizing the liberals in the region that processes fear, while liberals on average had a larger frontal lobe, which influences the high mental activities such as planning and judgment.

Other research shows that conservatives have a larger desire to manage fear and uncertainty - and have a greater need for closure. Liberals, on the other hand, are more curious and tolerant. But they also tend to avoid commitment and favor inclusiveness, which may explain their bias for disadvantaged groups.

The book is not a polemic. Mooney writes instructively. In each chapter, he outlines his points up front, backs them with solid research and closes with a succinct summary. In addition to writing books, he teaches science writing - and his conversational prose shows it.

Liberals wanting to bridge America's growing political divide should crack open The Republican Brain. The insights they gain may change their tunes to ones that better resonate with Republicans.

Listen to an Interview with author, Chris Mooney:

Next month Chris Bowman reviews The Nature Principle: Reconnecting with Life in a Virtual Age by Richard Louv, a prescription for countering the alienating forces of technology.

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Shell Games
By Craig Welch

Sixty bucks is a lot of clams to pay for just one mollusk.

But that's what seafood lovers are shelling out these days for a giant burrowing bi-valve called geoduck (pronounced gooey-duck). With that kind of clamor, it's no wonder big-time poachers are scouring seafloors for the tell-tale siphons.

Seattle Times reporter Craig Welch exposes the highly profitable clam scams in his new book, Shell Games.  

This isn't an environmentalist polemic. Welch doesn't pontificate on the scourge of wildlife smuggling. Instead, he delivers an engrossing detective story. There's a hit man, fire-bombings, undercover cops, shady informants and a boat named Clamdestine.

Who knew mollusks attract organized crime?

That's Welch's point. The depravity of poaching is all the more apparent when you move from the familiar trading of elephant tusks, shark fins and rhino horns to the pillaging of one the world's most hideous creatures.

The geoduck, some say, is living proof that God has a sense of humor. Its leathery siphon is ridiculously longer than its shell. The tip of the twin-nosed tube looks like a pig's snout. Most obviously, Welch says, the organism resembles "the reproductive organ of a Clydesdale stud."

Geoducks fetch a pretty price because they are considered a delicacy, particularly in China where most are shipped. They live only in the Pacific off the coast of the Northwest. Most weigh about 3 pounds and measure 2 feet long. Harvesting them is heavily restricted and expensive.

Welch artfully backfills the clam capers in and around Puget Sound with context and history on wildlife smuggling at large. You meet a flirtatious butterfly thief and pastor who poaches baby sharks from San Francisco Bay.

Shell Games reads like a spy novel. But Welch takes no literary license. He's interviewed dozens of players, combed through piles of court records and reviewed hundreds of hours of surveillance video and audio tapes from the 1990s.

If you're interested in a real fly-on-the-wall look inside the clammy business of wildlife poaching, Shell Games is for you. - Chris Bowman

Moby-Duck
By Donovan Hohn

Some of the best investigative stories unfold when reporters just follow their natural curiosity - no tipsters or whistleblowers pointing the way.

In his first book, Moby-Duck, Donovan Hohn followed his reporter's curiosity to extreme ends. But he ultimately harpoons a whale of an environmental story.

Hohn's imagination caught fire when one of his journalism students mentioned a news story about 29,000 yellow ducks and other bath toys being lost at sea.

The toys ended up in the drink instead of the tub, in 1992, when a ship container headed from China to the U.S. tumbled into rough seas. The ducks were swept away. So where did the ocean currents take them?

The question became an obsession for Hohn, who quit his teaching job to track the plastic castaways from coast-to-coast.

The book is a three-year-long odyssey that takes Hohn from Alaska to Hawaii and to the Arctic. He combs beaches, trawls for floatables, retraces the route of the ill-fated shipment aboard a freighter and talks his way onto the crew of a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker.

At points in the book Hohn himself goes adrift. He ruminates at length on the history of oceanography, the meaning of toys and the physics of cargo ships.

The book turns compelling when Hohn confronts the menace of plastic debris accumulating in the ocean.

Hohn discovers that plastic attracts and absorbs DDT and other long-lived pollutants. Fish that feed on plankton ingest the plastic particles and store the toxic hitchhikers in their fat. And when a larger fish or a person eats the fish that ate the plastic, they absorb even greater concentrations of contaminants in their fat. In other words, the plastic spoons and disposable cigarette lighters we tossed away decades ago may be coming back to haunt our seafood.

Hohn says he never imagined his whimsical duck hunt would become a cautionary environmental tale.  He just wanted to know where the bath toys drifted and why. That's what makes Moby-Duck a good read. His freewheeling curiosity about ocean currents made for an adventure with unpredictable finds.

Hohn never did find a bath toy from the 1992 spill. But others have. More sun-bleached survivors are bound to turn up. Because you just never know what the tide will bring in. - Chris Bowman

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