Chris Mooney, a best-selling author and science journalist, gave a spirited talk to a full audience in The Hastings Center’s library on July 20 about his new book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.

Despite President Obama’s effort to restore scientific integrity to policymaking, Mooney said, “we still have an unscientific America.” At stake is the soundness of the government’s scientific policies.

In an introduction, Tom Murray, president of The Hastings Center, noted that many of issues that Mooney cites bear on research at the Center, including the emerging field of synthetic biology.

Mooney told the audience that the root of the scientific illiteracy problem is a longstanding disconnect between scientists and nonscientists: only 18 percent of Americans know a scientist personally and 200 years after Darwin’s birth, 46 percent of Americans don’t believe in evolution and think that the earth is less than 10,000 years old.

He said that the disconnect has been exacerbated by severe cutbacks in science journalism and a proliferation of scientific misinformation on many blogs. Mooney says scientists themselves deserve some of the blame because many of them lack communications skills.

To improve scientific literacy, Mooney proposes to “arm graduate level science students with skills to communicate the value of what science does and to get into better touch with culture.”

Mooney is a Knight Fellow in Science Journalism at MIT and a contributing editor of Science Progress. He also writes a blog for Discover magazine, where he discussed his Hastings Center talk. His previous books are The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He coauthored his latest book with Sheril Kishenbaum, a marine scientist at Duke University.