Scientific Controversies from Creationism to Climate Change

This course examines scientific controversies from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Topics will include evolution, telepathy, eugenics, lobotomy, recovered memories, vaccination, cloning, and global warming. We will study what these controversies tell us about the shifting relationship between science and society, how changes in scientific paradigms occur, why some controversies resolve, and why others persist, even in the face of long-standing scientific consensus. Students will learn to see science not as a progressive series of discoveries in the eternal pursuit of truth, but as an often messy historical process fully embedded in the politics and culture of its time.