[CFCs] are clearly significant reactants in the chain of processes causing the seasonal hole in polar stratospheric ozone.[22]

And even if you skim Taubes, it is hard to miss Dixy Lee Ray, since there is a picture of her book on the front page.

Nor does it seem plausible that they had forgetten about Taubes when they recommended Ray—they cite him again on the same page in note 24 and then note 25 (in the next paragraph) is the favourable cite of Ray.

The key is that they like bigger guns, bombs, airplanes, trains, crop yields, steel tonnage, etc. National power, national prosperity.

However they don’t like political freedom, which means that truth is untrustworthy. As was said on the ‘Daily Show’ once, ‘John, the facts are biased against the administration’.

These people will go along with the war for the most part, heartily support it sometimes, and oppose it very little. In the end, they’ll support it, because it’s so useful to suppress inconvenient facts. The end result is that those facts inconvenient to any signficant faction of the GOP coalition are in danger, unless they are of significant and direct value to another.

Chris, IMHO this is too strong a statement. Steve Fuller is one guy. One who has been a useful tool for the right’s war on science. To my eyes he’s more of a parody of a left-wing ivory tower relativist fool than representative anything singificant in academia.

Considering AEI’s recent record, including the Iraq war, I’d put the burden of proof on the other side – when has AEI ever shown evidence of honesty?

Robert P: Thanks for the clarification.

Jacob: I think that really casts a light on what the mindset behind this might be. As I said, the “war on science” may not be intentional, but when you get enough think tanks attacking mainstream science, it becomes actual.

All: On peer review, it’s obviously not perfect, but there have to be some standards for the judgment of scientific work—some way of setting up the game in order to hopefully ensure reliable answers in the long run. We do the best we can.

Finally, a few more points in reply to Steve Fuller, who writes: “I suppose the tenor of Chris’ response to me is that he really does believe that there is a tension between science and democracy that somehow needs to be negotiated or compromised. But my point is that this tension is simply reflects the extent to which science by itself is not democratically organized.”

Maybe science could be more democratically organized—and we can talk about that—but I’m trying to rescue science from present day political attack. These are separate issues.

Fuller also writes: “Two, whatever else The Republican War on Science was meant to convey, it really does leave this reader with the impression that it’s all about the revenge of the politically repressed – where science is now proposed as the means by which Democrats and Moderate Republicans can get back at the right-wingers in power, since the ballot box has failed them miserably. That the angels and devils in both science and politics should line up so neatly is implausible, and suggests that science is not, at bottom, at issue here.”

All I can say is that, au contraire, science is the issue here. Think about it this way. Suppose I wanted to unseat George W. Bush. From an electoral standpoint, does anyone seriously think that I would make science policy my issue to use against him? Can anyone think of an issue less likely to have broad mainstream appeal?

Elections are won on matters of economics and healthcare—bread and butter stuff—or else matters of war. Or perhaps “moral values.” But they’re not won on matters of science policy.

If unseating George W. Bush is my goal, I have chosen a curious way to go about it.

With respect to the reliability of peer-review, on short time scales (publications and grant review panels) an error prone process is actually necessary and desirable. Hence, peer review is best at eliminating things that are clearly wrong, rather than establishing which things are correct. To find truth, one needs to take a long view.

The last sentence is certainly true. But is there any way to really distinguish an informed layman from someone uninformed when we democratise science? That is, if the overwhelming expert scientific opinion agrees on the most probably resolution of a scientific controversy – and, like Steve Fuller, one wants to claim this isn’t enough – then what do you really have except straight democracy? How can you judge competency, if you have already discarded expert opinion as insufficient?

My impression is that Steve Fuller is unwittingly aiding this “War on Science” by taking the line he does. One does get the impression that he is frustrated by the political naiveity of the science “supporters” and he is certainly right that if scientists were to loosen up their professional ethics and play more politics, the fight would be a lot fairer. But one really does have to believe that there is nothing but politics and sociology to science to believe that this would actually be of benefit to scientific enquiry.

Sherwood Boehlert, who (as you know) is the Republican congressman chairing(?) the House committee on science and technology(?), is retiring this year after n terms. He is one Republican who is on the side of science. Inasmuch as his district includes an Air Force research laboratory, he has an institutional interest in these matters. (My salary comes from the funding of that laboratory.) Self-interests and positions can be related in complicated fashions.

Now I’ll go read the other blog posts in this seminar – they come out on my browser in weird order.

I think the problem is that too many people (layman and scientists in other fields) think that they’re competent to make judgements in scientific fields where they know too little to evaluate the material. I’ve got a Ph.D. in physics, but I’m honest and realistic enough to admit that I don’t have the background to evaluate topics outside of my area like string theory.

The emergence of the parallel institutional universe has something to be said for it in the social sciences and the humanities. It has essentially nothing to say for it in the natural sciences. But the (chronologically prior) rise of the counter-establishment think tanks and insulated academic spaces like Hoover, the Committee on Social Thought, and Law & Econ centers may have softened some people up to see that as a norm. That is, a right-leaning law professor, social scientist, or philosopher may be well-disposed toward the growth of institutions outside mainstream academia—regardless of whether he or she has benefitted personally from such institutions, even been employed by them. Part of our lore is about stifling left-wing consensuses in mainstream academia. (And then the triumphant denouements when the disciplines must recognize the errors of their ways: Hayek and Friedman win their Nobels, the neoclassical synthesis supplants Keynesianism, neoliberalism supplants dependency theory in development economics, originalism and law & economics become major research agendas within the mainstream legal academy, and so on. Victory is reincorporation into the disciplines.)

Of course, I’m sympathetic to a number of the ideas that were so cultivated. I’m sure lots of the symposium participants aren’t. But I assume we can all agree that those ideas are actually within their disciplines, in the way that ID is not actually within biology. The human sciences are a) less amenable to decisive proof and disproof than thenatural sciences; b) sometimes appropriately tied up with normative values; and c) even when not, easily conflated with normative political positions. So the social sciences and the humanities may well be prone to genuinely important research agendas getting frozen out for essentially political reasons; and alternative institutions may well cultivate ideas that can later be reincorporated into the disciplines, to the latter’s benefit.

The catch is: two generations of conservative and libertarian intellectuals know this story and have habits of mind shaped by it. That might—might—have made it easier for some of them (us) to look favorably on pseudo-scientists claiming to represent the same kind of thing in the natural sciences. Too many habits of mind that say, “We know that the established consensus in an academic discipline can be wrong, and wrong because of ideological blinders! So we should give this ID’er a fair hearing.”

As I say, the analogy is actually entirely wrong. Even someone who thinks neoclassical economics is wrong will, I think, acknowledge it to be wrong in a different way from how ID is wrong or how the “abortion is evil so it must cause cancer” folks are wrong. And probably no one consciously said, “We need to create the Hoover Institution or Federalist Society of climate science!” But there may have been a temperament of distrust of disciplinary consensuses, a distrust of the mechanisms of peer review working in ideologically neutral ways, etc., that may have been a precipitating factor. This doesn’t explain where ID people come from; but it may explain why AEI people are willing to give them a platform, a bullhorn, and a respectful hearing.

A long digression, sparked by the “parallel institutional universe” idea, and not something I’ve thought out carefully. Just… maybe.