Journal of Science & Popular Culture - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2020

Popular science coverage in Soviet countries was often determined by the ideological function of the media. But this was not always the case, especially on the periphery of the Soviet Union. I analyse science coverage in a cult popular science magazine published at the edges of the communist East, socialist Yugoslavia, in the mid-1970s at the height of the magazine’s circulation and during the reign of the country’s communist leader Josip Broz Tito. This analysis shows that at least some Yugoslav media rose above the East/West ideological divide, freeing science from the shackles of US and Soviet ideology, while imparting a unique Yugoslav ideological vision of the world to media science coverage.

The image of the prehistoric hominin is well known: brutish and hairy, the men hunt with impressive weapons, while women tend to children or kneel over a hide. In this article I consider didactic illustrations and re-creations of human relatives in the context of science and art. I argue that these images are laden with symbolic sociopolitical meanings and are heavily biased by not only the newest scientific findings but also ideas about gender roles and civilization/civility in popular culture. Artistic representation in educational materials tends to reflect popular conceptions of ancestral life, more than data-dependent interpretations. For example, there is a bias against artistic depictions of women, children or the elderly and activities typically associated with them. Men and male activities – particularly hunting – are overrepresented. Hairy bodies, stooped posture, acute facial angles, savagery and a lack of material culture function as a symbol of incivility or animality. They are used to code an individual as being sufficiently inhuman to create a comfortable separation between viewer and ‘caveman’, which ultimately reflects our ambiguous relationship to human evolution.

Tracing some elements of the history of science, such as the tradition of map-making beginning in ancient times, this article aims to link together some factors that have led to the contemporary phenomenon of flat earth belief. Springing from a political fringe culture steeped in a ‘will-to-mistrust’, flat earth belief has gained huge popularity in recent years. The total rejection of science in favour of opinion is today a feature of the discursive landscape, and nowhere it is more poignant than in flat earth belief. Furthermore, it leaks from a mistrust of science to mistrust of culture itself. Ultimately it falls to the agency of recent communication technologies, that is, the internet, where this culture is able to gain traction in popular discourse. Through a very simple geometrical argument needing no equipment, I demonstrate that the earth must be spherical (or near-so), and this ultimately points to the technocratic culture today that has paradoxically led to this unpredicted phenomenon. Moreover it is a dangerous trend, and this piece aims to highlight why this is so.

The most significant motifs of Boris Sagal’s The Omega Man (1971) have been heavily scrutinized. Critical literature mentions science vs. anti-science as one of the film’s themes, yet only occasionally and fragmentarily. I contend that this opposition is central to the movie and that a richer interpretation of it can be reached by taking into account more elements in the movie’s action, dialog and imagery than critics have done thus far.