Anti- science liberals vs anti-science conservatives: who is more dangerous?

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Left-wing antiscience[edit]
One expression of antiscience is the "denial of universality and... legitimisation of alternatives",[citation needed] and that the results of scientific findings do not always represent any underlying reality, but can merely reflect the ideology of dominant groups within society.[14] In this view, science is associated with the political Right and is seen as a belief system that is conservative and conformist, that suppresses innovation, that resists change and that acts dictatorially. This includes the view, for example, that science has a "bourgeois and/or Eurocentric and/or masculinist world-view."[15]

The anti-nuclear movement, often associated with the left,[16][17][18] has been criticized for overstating the negative effects of nuclear power,[19][20] and understating the environmental costs of non-nuclear sources that can be prevented through nuclear energy.[21]

Right-wing antiscience[edit]
The origin of antiscience thinking may be traced back to the reaction of Romanticism to the Enlightenment, French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. This movement is often referred to as the 'counter-enlightenment'. Romanticism emphasizes that intuition, passion and organic links to Nature are primal values and that rational thinking is secondary to human life. There are many modern examples of conservative antiscience polemics. Primary among the latter are the polemics about evolutionary theory[22] and modern cosmology teaching in high schools, and environmental issues related to global warming[23][24] and energy crisis.

Characteristics of antiscience associated with the right include the appeal to conspiracy theories to explain why scientists believe what they believe,[25] in an attempt to undermine the confidence or power usually associated to science (e.g. in global warming conspiracy theories). Another feature of "conservative antiscience" discourse is the widespread use of informal fallacies, in particular the false dilemma, appeal to consequences, appeal to fear, and the appeal to probability fallacies.[citation needed]

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