Decline and Fall

When politicians and other non-scientists get involved in discussing science, science almost invariably loses. The LA Times recently published an article by Chris Mooney and Alan Sokal about the war on science, which in recent years has shifted from attacks by the postmodern academic left to attacks by the fundamentalist political right. Their critique of current goverenment poicies is pointed:

...many if not most scientific agencies of our government have become embroiled in scandals involving the misrepresentation or suppression of scientific information, gag orders on scientist employees, or other interferences with the processes by which science feeds into decision-making. Tracing these intrusions back to their source, we almost always uncover the same pattern: It concerns an issue in which one of the two principal constituencies of the current administration — religious conservatives or big corporations — has a vested interest.

You've probably guessed that those vested interests include opposition to stem-cell research, the "morning after" pill and the scientific consensus on global warming.

This attitude toward science as an agency of political dogma directly retards the role that science has historically played in our culture--that of dispassionate investigator interested in the pursuit of furthering understanding of ourselves and our world and making the world a better place to live. The attacks on science from various ideological quarters, be they PETA's opposition to animal testing or the religious right's determination to "teach the controversy" over evolution in public schools, only serve to weaken students' trust of science at a time when their understanding is rapidly falling, especially in relation to students elsewhere in the world.

The authors' concrete recommendations for de-politicizing science are to establish firm whistlblower protections for scientists, revive the Office for Technology Assessment (which was eliminated by the Gingrich Congress), and encourage congressional investigations into the Bush Administration's abuse of science.

These are good and necessary first steps, but in order to free science to do what it is designed to do, there needs to be a fundamental shift in the way the media treat science and the way the public understands it:

At the same time, journalists and citizens must renounce a lazy "on the one hand, on the other hand" approach and start analyzing critically the quality of the evidence. For, in the end, all of us — conservative or liberal, believer or atheist — must share the same real world. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria do not spare deniers of evolution, and global climate change will not spare any of us.

On the issue of the journalistic treatment of science, the problem lately has been the insistence upon "getting both sides" of an issue in order to fend off criticisms of media bias. This approach worksfairly well with strictly political issues, such as tax reform and education policy, but it has no place in science coverage. As Mooney noted in another article a couple of years ago,

the journalistic norm of balance has no corollary in the world of science. On the contrary, scientific theories and interpretations survive or perish depending upon whether they’re published in highly competitive journals that practice strict quality control, whether the results upon which they’re based can be replicated by other scientists, and ultimately whether they win over scientific peers. When consensus builds, it is based on repeated testing and retesting of an idea.

Unfortunately the media is either too ignorant of the special treatment that science requires or too cowed by the haranguing they have received for decades by the right's obsession with the media's "liberal bias" (a conservative article of faith that doesn't hold up to scrutiny) to report science objectively. As the AEI bribery story shows, "experts" can always be trotted out to write non-peer-reviewed articles attacking the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community.

This is not an academic issue. This affects our society at all levels, notably public health. America has long been the world's leader in scientific innovation and education, but this recent trend could put an end to all that. Let's hope congress heeds their recommendations and pursues this issue vigorously.

Mooney, incidentally, blogs here.

Labels: global warmiing, reason