Republican War on Science : Introduction to a Seminar

Man, if we have one more “War on Science” thread on the page, that’ll be a record!

At the Darwiniana blog I have a number of posts working out the ‘democratic war on scientism’, quite possibly with a view to issue generation for the 2008 election. Mooney’s very fine book is flawed by the liberal confusion over Darwin, and the inability to see that this is a losing issue. To get this mixed up with global warming is potentially a disaster in the making.

Terje Petersen: There is a lot of misinformation coming from the right on issues 1, 3 and 4. There might be on 2, but I too thought the objections to that were mostly ethical.

I don’t rule ut the possibility that some think tank has been paid to write that embryonic stem cells are overrated or something, but if it has, then those things are not what are in the front of the debate.

On the other hand, with global warming and the so-called DDT ban, carefully crafted misinformation is everywhere you look. And at least one conservative think tank (the Discovery Institute) has been a vocal advocate of intelligent design creationism.

Perfect timing.

I guess I’ll have to read chapter 12, but I don’t recall the talking heads on Fox ever saying adult stem cells were equal or superior to embryonic stem cells. I don’t recall totipotency being discussed. I don’t remember Bush claming embryonic stem cell research was in its prime and required no further research. Like Harald Komeliussen (9), I’m positive some hacks pushed those lines of thought in order to lend force to Republican arguements. But the debate centered around ethics, not scientific facts.

Course now I have to buy the damned book and read it to see what all the excitement is about ;)

Unfortunately, the left is just as willing to avoid scientific evidence when it conflicts with desired political goals. Some of the folks protesting evolution and the fossil record are not right-wing Christians. Red Earth White Lies ought to be on the reading list for anyone who thinks only the conservative right is fighting science. Perhaps the people who see a Republican war on science would like to explain why none of them have commented on the scientific arguments Red Earth White Lies advances.

SFB

Okay, let me get this straight, we mass murder all sorts of fowl because of an evolving flu virus that may kill lots of humans, yet we ban DDT because it will thin the shells of said murdered fowl, but then again eagles are so pretty and it cool to watch them soar and then nose dive for the kill, and then the mosquitoes, are not they the primary reason for DDT use, yet then again, malaria is only an Africa problem, so how many die annually in Africa from malaria? Or does anyone care?

SFB: I’ve been on the left my entire life, and I’ve never heard of Red Earth White Lies. Try again.

Could we think about segregating the posts in the next one of these seminars in some kind of sub-site? The way you do it now, you’ve got ten posts on one topic going up all at once and pushing everything else off the front page.

(which means I missed my chance to comment on the Nebulas — I wanted to weigh in in support of Spin!)

Bro. Alex,

Thanks for the links, and I had heard about the effectiveness of the ‘insecticide treated netting’ for combating malaria, but have also heard from some missionaries in Africa that the frustration is that when given free netting (treated), the netting ends up being sold in the open marketplace. Some being so destitute that food for the next meal trumps the threat of a possible mosquito bite.

Bro. Bartleby

I wholeheartedly agree with Chris Mooney’s thesis that the Republican party is at war with science, to the extent that science impedes its drive to power. This is obvious accross a range of issues, from Creationist ID, stem-cell research, gun control, anthropogenic global warming.

One should also add to that list the Bush admins headline foreign policy adventure in Iraq. Within the US government most non-partisan foreign policy professional experts opposed the War, basicly on scientific-logistic grounds.

Although, to be fair, there was a special faction of Right Wingers dubbed “Republicans who know what they are talking about” who based their opposition to Iraq war on social scientific and realistic foreign policy grounds. Steve Sailer has been an insistent critic of the Bush Republican party’s opposition to the reality-based community. He likens the Bush Republicans to post-modern deconstructionists.

The Foucault-ification of Republican ideologues continues apace. In French postmodern thought, there’s no such thing as “truth,” just power. More and more, Bush is dependent upon “Fundamentalist Post-Modernism,” the belief that belief is all that matters and that reality is trivial compared to having a positive mental attitude.

…the mood of the country seems to be moving increasingly toward what I call Christian post-modernism: the feeling that reality is less important than thinking positive thoughts, that problems don’t so much exist in the real world as merely in the heads of those awful, negative-thinking cynics. They are the real problem!

Increasingly, that way of thinking is popular among the more frenzied defenders of the Iraq Attaq. Thus, the WSJ is outraged that the Niger Yellowcake hoax wasn’t “investigated” by a gung ho Republican fanatic who would have reported back exactly what the WSJ wanted to hear.

Look, guys, the President has already admitted that Wilson was telling the truth — we got pranked by forged documents. (Of course, I am as shocked as you are that all communications from Africans purporting to be high government officials with interesting deals to discuss might not be completely on the up and up.) It’s time to pull yourselves out of your deconstructionist death spiral.

Bush’s contempt for science is shown by his appointment of a Democrat as science policy adviser.

the official science advisor for the last three years has been John H. Marburger III, a Democrat. Since Bush is the most postmodern President ever, in that he doesn’t believe in truth, just political will, you can see from the science advisor’s party registration the high priority Bush places on the job.

All this led Sailer to call this period of US political history The Heroic Age of Epistemology:

Between CBS’s dogged defense of their apparently forged documents and the Republican Convention’s repeated conflation of the War on Terror with the actual War in Error in Iraq, American elites appear to have entered into a collaboration to prove Foucault right: that power and the will to impose one’s interpretation are all-important and that “truth” is obsolete in our post-modern era.

I suspect, however, that reality gets the last laugh.

The Bush admins opposition to politically inconvenient sci-tech is not of purely intellectual interest. The US government is by far and away, measured by assets and income, the most powerful and wealthy corporation in the world.

This has immense social consequences, particularly in the area of ecological and technological policy, where the Bushies are definitely running a political agenda.

But I would take the non-Right’s criticism of the Bush admins anti-science political agenda more seriously if the critics were prepared to direct the same criticism towards the anti-scientific Left. Over the past generation the academic Left has placed a heavy blanket of censorship on the application of Darwinian socio-biological analysis to human beings. This does not have immediate political consequences. But it does discredit the Left’s ostensible committement to rational science and free speech.

Chris Mooney, a moderate Leftist, is willing to concede this point.

Let’s be fair: those on the political left have undoubtedly abused science in the past….groups have occasionally allowed ideology to usurp fact…In fact, in politicized fights involving science, it is rare to find liberals entirely innocent of abuses. But they are almost never as guilty as the Right.topics such as the genetic underpinnings of human behavior have often gone unstudied out of a “general left-of-center sensibility that anything having to do with genes is bad.”

Remember, in the Levitt fiasco you guys got your fingers burned by overly gung-ho acceptance of a head-line thesis. So come on Crooked-Timbers, lets make a full confession and see some ideological even handedness in denunciations of politicised anti-scientists.

Oh please. Not that Steve Sailer who uses the work of racist pseudoscientist Philippe Rushton and writes for white supremacist site Vdare…that’s right-wing war on science, all right. *facepalm*

That’s blatantly racist pseudo-science Sailer is spouting there.

Interesting that no one has picked up on Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels With Science yet. The authors include a professor of mathmatics, who is admittedly well to theleft of center. The point is, they correctly note that many on the left, especially academics, have given shoddly scholarship a pass when it supports a cherished political goal. This would aplly to Red Earth White Lies as well.

Also, it is interesting that no one has mentioned the name which used to be synonymous with politically motivated bad science – T. Lysenko.

Having read the comments in this and the other sections of this project, I have enjoyed reading them, but I am not overly impressed with the arguments that the Republicans are waging war on science. It’s a nice sound bite, but not supportable by any research methodology that would pass muster in the natural sciences. It seems to me that a real problem is one of people who bring their politics into their science. This applies on both sides of the political spectrum, and it is why weprobably should be somewhat skeptical of reports issued by scientists paid by any organization with a stake in the outcome. That applies to scientists employed by natural resource extration companies as much as it does to those who are paid by Friends of the Earth or the Sierra Club.

All attempts to manipulate science to support political motives should be condemned.