Though plenty has been written about science and politics, there’s lots of fresh food for thought and discussion in the October 17 Scientific American piece: Antiscience Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy. The author, Shawn Lawrence Otto, is author of the book Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America and a co-founder of ScienceDebate.org, an organization aimed at encouraging candidates to debate scientific issues.
According to his bio, he’s also a filmmaker best known for writing and co-producing the Oscar-Nominated film House of Sand and Fog.
(In the same Scientific American issue is the result of ScienceDebate.org’s efforts to clarify science issues in the current election. While the group hasn’t succeeded yet in staging a live debate, they have been able to get answers out of both the Romney and Obama campaigns on 14 science questions.)
In his fascinating piece on antiscience, Otto lists what he considers prime examples from both sides of the political spectrum. On the right, there are the usual suspects: House speaker John Boehner arguing for teaching creationism in schools, Michele Bachman claiming HPV vaccines cause “mental retardation”, and Herman Cain, Rick Perry and others trying to deny overwhelming evidence tying human-generated greenhouse gases to climate change.
On the left there’s the persistent belief that cell phones cause cancer and that vaccines cause autism, despite umpteen studies to the contrary.
Otto’s piece starts to heat up when he takes sides.
Of these two forms of science denialism, the Republican version is more dangerous because the party has taken to attacking the validity of science itself as a basis for public policy when science disagrees with its ideology.
He first lays out the political necessity of science denialism, pointing to pressure on Mitt Romney to downplay the importance of global warming, and the collapse of Jon Huntsman’s campaign after he suggested that global warming and evolution might be real.
But wait? Where’s the political necessity for antiscience on the other side? Have Obama or Biden been pressured to agree with the anti-vaccine lobby or promote the cell phone/cancer link? Creationism and climate change denial have woven their way into mainstream Republicans ideology. I don’t see the same thing going on with the other side. That seems to be a good reason to point to the Republican version of antiscience as the more dangerous.
Otto then gives a long backstory, starting with Thomas Jefferson, who not only embraced science but practiced it. Into the 20th century, Otto reminds readers that evolution-fighter William Jennings Bryan was a Democrat.
His description of events in the 1960s and 1970s went a long way to explaining the current politicization of science:
Science's black eye grew with the broader public as well. In the 1950s children played in the fog of DDT as trucks sprayed neighborhoods, but with the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, we learned it was toxic. This pattern repeated over and over again as unforeseen health and environmental consequences of quickly commercialized science came to light. Similar scandals erupted over the effects of scores of industrial applications, ranging from sulfur dioxide and acid rain, to certain aerosols and the hole in the ozone layer, to leaded gas and cognitive impairment, to the granddaddy of them all, fossil fuels and global climate change.
One quibble here. To me these incidents are not black eyes but triumphs of science. It was science that traced plummeting bird populations to DDT and ozone loss to CFCs. Those were important discoveries that helped inform public policy. I would describe these incidents as points where science came into some conflict with technology by revealing unintended consequences.
Nevertheless, it’s an important turning point in the shaping our current situation, in which Republicans have allied themselves with religion and opposition to regulation. Since regulation is often prompted by science, and fundamentalist religion can’t easily tolerate evolution, scientists starting flocking to the Democrat side.
One question I’d pose to Otto is why he thinks Republicans are “attacking the validity of science itself as a basis for public policy when science disagrees with its ideology.” They don't frame it that way.
People don’t generally go around proudly identifying themselves as antiscience. I suspect many Republicans, including Newt Gingrich, would be all over “I F***ING love Science”, if they aren't already. As Otto points out, Newt Gingrich is a big time science geek but that doesn't stop him from equating embryonic stem cells with "children".
Many conservatives live in a mirror world in which climate change is pseudoscience and Intelligent Design is sound science. Climate deniers can be quite passionate about what they think is science. They’re more likely than the average person to know the correct definition of “albedo” or the exact ppm of CO2 in our atmosphere. Do these people oppose science or have they instead allied themselves with discredited hypotheses, pseudoscience and fringe beliefs.
The other point I’d like to discuss with Otto is how he defines antiscience. It would be cool if you could test it by bringing it close to science and seeing if they mutually annihilate in a massive explosion, but even then people would argue over which part was the science and which part was the anti.
And how do you separate antiscience from pseudoscience or garden variety ignorance? The latter would seem to provide a decent explanation for Michele Bachman’s view on the HPV vaccine.
Princeton University Historian Michael Gordin has just written a book about pseudoscience, The Psuedoscience Wars, and in a talk he gave last weekend in Philadelphia, he discussed the difficulty of creating an all-encompassing definition. People rarely hand out cards identifying themselves as pseudoscientists, after all. Gordin is clear there is a real difference between science and pseudoscience, but it has to be judged case by case. It’s hard work, but it’s important, now more than ever.
Read Otto’s piece. Discuss it. Get fired up. There’s a lot at stake.
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