Junto Boys

THE POLITICS OF SCIENCE

If all of my knowledge came from a combination of political rhetoric and the reality in of my own personal experience, I would guess that George W. Bush finally caved to pressure and signed the Kyoto treaty. Otherwise, how would I explain the fact that it’s late September and I’m still waiting for the devastating hurricane season brought about by man’s misuse of his habitat?

When we talk about science in relation to politics we are rarely talking about anything settled. Much of science is a mystery to be solved. Some men spend their whole lives working without ever finding the definitive answers to the questions they tackled. They are the heroes of enlightenment. Others use science in order to gain grants and make a very cushy life for themselves by parroting the political orthodoxy that pays the bills. I’ve noticed that we’ve had more than the usual number of political issues relating back to science lately and it got me to thinking.

A few years ago looking for a change of pace I read Dava Sobel’s book LONGITUDE based on some positive reviews. Those of you who played the old video game “Pirates” know that Latitude at sea can be deciphered simply by measuring the sun at high noon. Longitude at sea was impossible in those days and it was costing ship owners and governments a great deal of money in late ships and wreckage. The British crown offered an award equivalent to winning the lottery to anyone that could solve the problem of calculating it.

Many great minds of the time tackled the question Galileo, Newton and Halley among others and many died before the problem was solved. The best any of the professionals could do was to propose mapping the stars, which was both cumbersome and imprecise. A clockmaker with no scientific training figured it out. If you build a double faced clock with one face reading the time in your home port and the other one based on local time according to the noontime sun, you can do simple math to get a very precise position.

The man who figured it out then spent the rest of his life trying to build the perfect clock that would weather the sea. The British government who wouldn’t have had the guts to stiff a big name didn’t pay up, and then interlopers tried to horn in and take the credit and accusation were flying at the poor man that he stole the idea from someone else. Instead of being happy that an important problem was solved the elite were actually angry that it was solved by a commoner. The relationship between science and politics is still less than noble.

It’s no trick these days for a politician or special interest to adopt a position relating to science and then pile up a bunch of “experts” that wholeheartedly agree. The Left and the media have been getting many headlines for doing just that lately and the smugness of it is irksome. The way they treat opposing views as unenlightened is nothing but a dishonest way of not having to answer the criticisms of their position. That their solution (more government involvement) is the answer to every problem reveals the lack of science in their approach.

What the Left is really offering is the same emotional package of joy (government funding of stem cells will create everlasting life) and fear (government’s inability to stop global warming will cause sure death). They couch it in science when it helps forward the agenda, but their support doesn’t begin with the science. When they are against something like nuclear power they use the “sky is falling” rhetoric about the potential dangers, even when the science has shown otherwise. More people die in coal mines each year trying to fuel conventional power plants. And unlike either stem cells or global warming that are still in the theoretical phase, the uses and safety of nuclear power can actually be measured by a ratio of benefits to deaths.

If embryonic stem cells yield results different from adult stem cells the Right will buy into it like everyone else. Even an ardent pro-lifer will have trouble turning down a cure for his daughter that was brought about by aborted babies. And whether or not the government funds this research, the research will go on and the results will be the same despite the implication that it all hinges on tax dollars.

As far as global warming, why should anyone on the Right think that it isn’t just the crisis of the moment that will soon join the trash pile with Ozone depletion, Ebola, the Y2K bug, SARS, and the bird flu? Remember how each of those was going to be devastating? Not only were they duds, but we never got any follow-up on why we were spared.

On the other hand, liberal theories on the causes and solutions of poverty have been given 40 years to yield results and so far they haven’t made a dent. The same goes for their notions on educating kids and keeping Social Security solvent. If these are people that were only interested in the dispassionate hard sciences they could prove it by rethinking their premises on the realities that disproved their pet theories.

Bill Maher was trying to make a point on his show the other night that he was scared because half of America doesn’t believe in evolution. He doesn’t want to live in a country surrounded by the unenlightened. Penn Gillette (an avowed atheist) said that Maher was foolish for thinking that because the people that need to believe in it like scientists do so. A great answer.

If I were a scientist studying the origins of earthly life I would need a premise like that to start from as I moved forward and backward studying the food chain. And I think most would agree that evolution on the small scale is fact. The separation is whether man was once a stinking ape.

Philosophically, I’m wary to give into that idea because it has harsh political implications for human beings. Totalitarianism is built on the premise that the state is supreme organ and I’d rather be endowed by my creator with certain inalienable rights.

From where I stand there is nothing to be gained seeing the world from a viewpoint designed as a base for the study of the mutations of molecular life unless your a person using that premise to study such things. The pros need to be indifferent to the man species and I don't. Though it might come in handy if I design gulags for a living. Our jails are full with people who behave like animals anyway and they don't need any encouragement from society or defense from lawyers over it. I can with contentment fight for the superiority of man and his natural rights with no measured (maybe science will measure it) ill effects.

There are many who disagree with me for thoughtful reasons and others with no thinking at all. I have done the thinking and don't see the upside. And that’s the part of science in public policy that seems to be missing from the debate.

Enlightenment isn’t about where you wind up in the debate of divisive questions, but how you arrive there. There are plenty of respected scientists that come up with different conclusions from hot button issues. Michael Crichton make a great case against global warming. And when the human causes of global warming are finally debunked or if the earth just starts getting cooler, Albert Gore Jr. or his agents will be onto his next bugaboo with a straight face never explaining to us why we’re not dead from the last one.

I don’t want to hear about the Right’s “War on Science” from a bunch of people who keep supporting the same social policies regardless of their results. I refuse to believe that any Chicken Little theory is more than a way for politicians and special interests to get more of the Washington pie. And I reject being called unenlightened by people who think less about these things than I do.