Preface. This is my book review of Chris Mooney’s 2012 “The Republican Brain. The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality”.
This has grown from a review of this book (far below) to more recent science and writing on the conservative mind. People who want certainty and do not like change or changing their mind have been with us since humans evolved. This is why they are under-represented in higher education — you have to be able to change your mind, to understand why evolution and not God created live on earth.
Another post discussing the difference between people who fear change and those who are curious and exploring is: Garcia, H. 2019. Sex, Power, and Partisanship. How evolutionary science makes sense of our political divide. This is a more profound and apt way of comparison to go beyond political labels of “liberals” and “conservatives” to show how these mindsets have been around since we evolved 300,000 years ago. Both are necessary for survival. For example, curious liberals open to change and revising what they think may be more likely to migrate to greener pastures and die, while the stay-at-home “conservatives” survived. Or vice versa.
Preface. The theory that oil is always being created underground is known as abiotic, or Gold’s theory. This post consists of excerpts from the best paper I’ve found on why this is nonsense. Even if abiotic processes are happening, it is too slow to matter. More oil has been consumed than discovered since 1975. Petroleum took from tens to hundreds of millions of years to create and was made on an Earth under conditions not likely to ever happen again (read the excellent “Goliath’s Curse” to learn more on that).
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