Читать книгу The War on Science - Shawn Lawrence Otto - Страница 13
ОглавлениеWherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.
—Thomas Jefferson, January 8, 1789
Houston, We Have a Problem
Thomas Jefferson’s trust in the well-informed voter lies at the heart of the modern democracy that has, over the course of two centuries, come to guide the world. Much like the “invisible hand” that guides Adam Smith’s economic marketplace, so too does the invisible hand of the people’s will guide the democratic process. Faith in this idea is so central to democracy that George Washington emphasized it in the nation’s first inaugural address. “No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States,” he told a joint session of Congress gathered in Federal Hall, which stood kitty-corner to today’s New York Stock Exchange.
But lately the invisible hand seems confused and indecisive. Democratic governments the world over are increasingly paralyzed, unable to act on many key issues that threaten the economic and environmental stability of their countries and the world. They often enact policies that seem to run against their own interests, quashing or directly contradicting well-known evidence. Ideology and rhetoric guide policy discussions, often with a brazenly willful denial of facts. Even elected officials seem willing to defy laws, often paying negligible prices. And the civil society we once knew now seems divided and angry, defiantly embracing unreason. Everyone, we are told, has his or her own experience of reality, and history is written by the victors. What could be happening?
At the same time, science and technology have come to affect every aspect of life on the planet. There is a phase change going on in the scientific revolution: a shifting from one state to another, as from a solid to a liquid. There is a sudden, quantitative expansion of the number of scientists and engineers around the globe, coupled with a sudden qualitative expansion of their ability to collaborate with each other over the Internet.
These two changes are dramatically speeding up the process of discovery and the convergence of knowledge across once-separate fields, a process Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson named consilience. We now have fields where economics merges with environmental science, electrical engineering with neuroscience and physics, computer science with biology and genetics, astronomy with biology, and many more. This consilience is shedding new light on long-held assumptions about the world we live in and the nature of life.
Over the course of the next forty years, science is poised to create more knowledge than humans have created in all of recorded history, completely redefining our concepts about—and power over—life and the physical and mental worlds as we assume editing control over the genetic code and mastery in our understanding of the brain. One only has to recall the political battles fought over past scientific advances to see that we are in for a rocky ride. How that rush of new knowledge will impact life, how it will be applied through technology and law, and whether our societies and governments will be able to withstand the immense social and economic upheavals it will bring depends upon whether we can update our political process to accommodate it. Can we manage the next phase of the scientific revolution to our advantage, or will we become its unwilling victims?
If that were not enough, the explosion of information technology is creating a power struggle between individual privacy and the public good, and between the organizations—businesses, criminal enterprises, terrorist groups, and governments—who seek to use this new technology for influence and control. Sensing technology and robotics are threatening to replace millions of truck drivers and taxi drivers over the next decade, and to mechanize warfare with tiny autonomous robots that carry enough charge and intelligence to hunt and kill humans. These advancements have prompted many of the world’s leading scientists and engineers to warn that we must get ahead of artificial intelligence before it gets ahead of us.
As we are being overwhelmed by new scientific and technological developments, we also are facing a host of legacy challenges caused by commercialization of the incomplete scientific knowledge of the past. Thanks to early science, humans have prospered, but at a cost: significant climate disruption, unprecedented environmental degradation, massive extinction of other species, vast economic and power inequities, and a world armed to the teeth with the products of a military-industrial complex, including weapons that could destroy nearly all life on the planet.
Without a better way of incorporating science into our policymaking, democracy may ultimately fail its promise. We now have a population that we cannot support without destroying our environment—and the developing world is advancing by using the same model of unsustainable development. We are 100 percent dependent on science and technology to find a solution.
The Whipsaw of Science
Between these two areas—the wild future that is rapidly emerging and the unsustainable present whose repercussions we can no longer ignore—science and technology are poised to whipsaw us in the coming decades like never before. This has the potential to produce even more intense social upheaval and political paralysis at the very time we can least afford them.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the problem is the dearth of conversation about the issues in the policymaking process. Imagine for a moment the potential science-themed questions one could ask a candidate for president, for example, or Parliament, or Congress, in a debate, forum, or news interview. There are multitudes of them, each with profound relevance to both today’s problems and those of the near future. Because of this, they are political, but they are rarely asked or answered in the political process. A small sampling could include:
What is your vision for maintaining a competitive edge as other countries work toward becoming global forces in science and technology? Will you support tripling our investment in mental-health research? Will you support using science to study the underlying causes of gun violence? What are your thoughts on balancing energy and the environment? How should we manage biosecurity in an age of rapid international travel while preserving civil liberties? What should we do about the world’s aging nuclear weapons? How will you tackle climate disruption? Do you support embryonic stem-cell research? What steps will you take to stop the collapse of pollinator colonies and promote pollinator health? What can we do to stimulate and incentivize the transition to a low-carbon economy? How should we handle immigration of highly skilled workers? In an era of intense droughts, what steps will you take to better manage our freshwater resources? What should we do to prevent ocean fisheries collapses? Will you support federal funding to make public broadband Internet universally available? Is Internet access a universal human right? How can we better protect the health of the world’s oceans? How can we improve science education? What steps can we take to better incorporate science information into our policymaking process? What will you do to slow the sixth mass extinction? Should we require children to be vaccinated against human papillomavirus, the leading cause of cervical cancer? Should only evolution be taught in science classes, or should intelligent design also be taught? When is it acceptable for a president or prime minister to implement policies that are contradicted by science? Should pharmaceutical companies be allowed to advertise on public airwaves? What will you do to incentivize the production of generic pharmaceuticals to prevent shortages and extreme price increases? Should foods made from genetically modified crops be labeled? Should we regulate the use of nanoparticles in the environment? Do you support federal renewable energy tax credits? What would you do to end the war on drugs and transition to treating drugs as a public-health problem? Will you support increased funding for curiosity-driven basic research? What steps would you take to repair the postdoctoral employment pipeline so that highly trained workers can get jobs in their fields? Will you support federal funding to study science denial and the threat it poses to democracy? Do you support banning the use of antibiotics in animal feed? What other steps should we take to stop the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria? Should pharmacists be allowed to deny prescriptions on the basis of their religion? Should public officials be allowed to deny services on the basis of their religion? Should the federal government regulate hydraulic fracturing? Should parents be required to vaccinate their children? Under what circumstances should there be an exemption? Do vaccines cause autism? Will you support adoption of new, cleaner nuclear reactors for power generation? Do you support water fluoridation? Will you prioritize an Apollo Project for clean energy innovation to stimulate the economy? Should we initiate a manned mission to Mars? What steps would you take to transition to a sustainable or circular economy? Do you oppose or support plans to mine copper and other nonferrous minerals in or near water-rich areas? How should we balance privacy with freedom and security on the Internet? Do you support reinstating the Fairness Doctrine in broadcast journalism? What steps would you take to control the global population? Do you support or oppose efforts to prosecute energy companies for funding denial of climate science? How can we stop antiscience disinformation campaigns from stalling public policy while protecting freedom of expression? Would you use foreign and economic policy to demand trading partners adopt uniform environmental standards? What will you do about anticipated economic disruptions posed by driverless vehicles and other robotic outsourcing of jobs? What is your position on deploying autonomous, artificially intelligent killer robots in the battlefield? Will you support restoring funding for the US Congress’s nonpartisan science advisory body, the Office of Technology Assessment? Should the morning-after pill be available off the shelf in pharmacies?
The length of the above sample is part of the point—the list is of course much longer—and it is growing as science advances. Yet almost none of these issues are discussed on the campaign trail. All of them evoke strong reactions, and, in each of these cases, policy has become stuck because of our broken way of incorporating evidence from science into the policymaking and political processes. Something’s got to change.
The Battle for the Future
Science and engineering are providing us with increasingly clear pictures of how to solve many of our challenges, but policymakers are increasingly unwilling to pursue the remedies that scientific evidence suggests. Instead, they take one of two routes: deny the science, or pretend the problems don’t exist. Vast areas of scientific knowledge and the people who work in them are under daily attack in a fierce worldwide war on science. Scientific advances in public health, biology and the environment are being resisted or rolled back. Political and religious institutions are pushing back against science and reason in a way that is threatening social and economic stability.
This pullback is affecting leading and emerging economies alike. The name of the radical pan-national Islamist group Boko Haram roughly translates as “Western education is forbidden.” The Islamic drive for al-asala, or authenticity, leads some fundamentalist Muslims to reject Western science in favor of Quranic instructions, says Islamic scholar Bassam Tibi. But radical Islam is not alone in this rejection. The vanguard of the retreat is in the Western democracies, where Christian fundamentalists; postmodernist academics, teachers, and journalists; liberal new age purists; and industry front groups all attack science for their own reasons.
Politically, the war on science is coming from both left and right. But the antiscience of those on the right—a coalition of fundamentalist churches and corporations largely in the resource extraction, petrochemical and agrochemical industries—has far more dangerous public-policy implications because it’s about forestalling policy based on evidence to protect destructive business models. As well, the right generally has far more money with which to spread disinformation and attack science on a host of issues.
Those on the political left often unwittingly abet the right’s antiscience efforts by arguing that truth is relative, harboring suspicions about hidden dangers to health and the environment that are not supported by evidence, and selectively rejecting science that doesn’t affirm their health-food and back-to-Eden value system. While they are right that there are serious environmental and health threats afoot from poorly regulated industries, they undermine their credibility when they extend these suspicions to scientifically unsupported ideas like vaccines cause autism, cell phones cause brain cancer, or genetically modified crops are unsafe to eat. By seeking arguments that support preexisting beliefs (however laudable the concerns that motivate them) instead of looking to scientific evidence, these progressives give up the very critical-thinking and argumentation tools liberals once used to defend modern society against its authoritarian attackers.
The split is happening not just in science, but across the engineering world as well. Unlike a generation ago, when a radio could be made sitting at one’s kitchen table, a smartphone cannot be made in the same way. This lack of plain accessibility is making complex science and technology less a matter of knowhow and more magical. Smartphones and flying brooms are both made by people cloistered away wearing long robes and uttering strange incantations. This inaccessibility makes science and technology more into a matter of belief than know-how, making people more vulnerable to disinformation campaigns. It is also increasingly difficult for the non-science-literate to accurately perceive the threats, challenges, and opportunities of this complex new world so dominated by inaccessible and magical science and technology (something that, for the reader, will hopefully change by the end of this book).
This is having effects across society from education to law enforcement. Consider the case of Xiaoxing Xi, the chair of Temple University’s physics department. Xi was arrested by the FBI in 2015 for leaking top-secret technology information to China. The FBI had intercepted schematics of a sophisticated device known as a pocket heater, used in classified superconductor research, that Xi had sent to scientists in China.
The only problem was that Xi had done nothing of the kind. Independent experts in superconductor research looked at Xi’s schematics and one after another told lawyers that the design wasn’t for a pocket heater at all. Xi was simply doing what scientists and engineers the world over do every day: he was collaborating with colleagues over the Internet. It was an embarrassing acknowledgment that prosecutors and FBI agents did not understand the science involved in their case—and did not make enough of an attempt to learn it—before bringing charges that jeopardized Xi’s career and left the impression that he was a spy for China. “I don’t expect them to understand everything I do,” Xi told the New York Times after the Justice Department dropped all charges. “But the fact that they don’t consult with experts and then charge me? Put my family through all this? Damage my reputation? They shouldn’t do this. This is not a joke. This is not a game.”
Something similar happened in the fall of 2015. Ahmed Mohamed, a ninth grader from Irving, Texas, brought a clock to school that he had designed and built himself using some integrated circuit chips and a circuit board. He mounted it in an aluminum project case with a big LCD readout and took it in to show his new engineering teacher. He had been part of his middle school robotics team and now, a few days into high school, he was anxious to impress his new teacher with what he could do. The teacher told him that it was nice but advised him not to show anyone else. When the clock beeped during English class, the English teacher asked to see what was in his backpack. Ahmed, who was wearing a NASA T-shirt, brought it forward. The English teacher examined it and said “that looks like a bomb.” The police were called and Ahmed was arrested. When he was brought into the principal’s office, one of the police officers said, “That’s who I thought it was.” He was interrogated by five police officers and the principal before being handcuffed and taken to the police station, where he was fingerprinted.
“They interrogated me and searched through my stuff and took my tablet and my invention,” Ahmed told MSNBC. “They were like, ‘So you tried to make a bomb?’ I told them no, I was trying to make a clock.” But the officer said, “It looks like a movie bomb to me.”
With the help of the sci-tech community, the story went viral on social media. The school and police officers were caught by their ignorance of electronic engineering. In the face of that ignorance, fear and racism took over, as our worst qualities often do when we are ignorant and afraid. In the end, Ahmed received invitations from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and President Barack Obama, who tweeted “Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.”
The clash between the science-literate and a science-illiterate society creates unique problems not just for hapless individuals who run afoul of ignorant or racist authorities, but for the mainstream media as well. Budget-strapped and increasingly unable to discern between knowledge and opinion, science-illiterate journalists too often aid the slide into unreason. Many journalists believe there is no such thing as objectivity, rendering otherwise brilliant minds unable to discern between objective knowledge developed from years of scientific investigation, on the one hand, and a well-argued opinion made by an impassioned and charismatic advocate on the other. This problem extends beyond journalists. Cumulatively, newspaper editors have allowed themselves to be heavily manipulated by antiscience public-relations campaigns. One cannot be certain exactly why an opinion editor chooses to run one piece and not another, for example, but in December, 2015, the nonprofit Media Matters did an analysis of opinion pieces that mentioned the recently concluded Paris climate talks and ran in the ten largest-circulation newspapers in the United States: USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Orange County Register, the Los Angeles Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, Newsday, and the Washington Post. Nine of the pieces, or 17 percent, included climate-science denial. Just 3 percent of climate scientists in any way dispute human-caused disruption of the Earth’s climate system. This means that the major US papers expressed views that were more than five times as doubtful about climate change as the actual climate scientists publishing in the field. By engaging in this sort of misrepresentation, the media deprives the public of the reliable information necessary for self-governance.
A vast war on science is underway, and the winners will chart the future of power, democracy, and freedom itself. This book is an account of that war, and what we—concerned citizens of all political persuasions, in all countries—can do to win it.
The Silence of the Invisible Hand
The idea behind democracy was pretty simple. The invisible hand of the people’s will was supposed to guide us in our own interests. That was the American Founding Fathers’ thinking, and it worked, more or less, for about two hundred years, slowly marching forward toward the stated goals of liberty and justice for all. Not with perfection, not without injustice, but with undeniable progress. But something changed in the fundamental formula in the last four decades as science has advanced. The times we live in have in some ways become absurd: a century that could rightly be called the century of science whose voters are increasingly willing to reject science and to elect ardently antiscientific politicians.
Can it be that science has simply advanced too far? That the problems are too big or too complex, or that knowledge is now too inaccessible to normal citizens to make good decisions—decisions in their own best interest? In a world dominated by science that requires extensive education to fully grasp, can democracy still prosper, or will the invisible hand finally fall idle? Are the people still sufficiently well informed to be trusted with their own government?
Judging from the US Congress, or recent Canadian or Australian parliaments, or a number of other governments particularly in the developed world, the answer seems to be no. In an age when most major public-policy challenges revolve around science, fewer than 1 percent of US congresspersons have professional backgrounds in it. The membership of the 114th Congress, which ran from January 2015 to January 2017, included just three scientists: one physicist, one chemist, and one microbiologist. If one counts the eight engineers, it’s a total of eleven out of 535 members, or 2 percent. Similarly low ratios are present in Canada’s parliament, where the combined number is about 4 percent; Australia’s, where it’s 4 percent; and in many of the world’s other major governments.
In contrast, how many representatives and senators might one suppose have law degrees—and often avoided college science classes in favor one of the top four prelaw majors: business, English, history, and political science? In the United States, it’s 213, or roughly 40 percent. So it’s little wonder we see more rhetoric than facts in global policymaking. In an age when most major policy issues have large inputs from science, this disparity can be a problem. Scientists and lawyers approach arguments very differently. Lawyers are trained to start with a conclusion, discover evidence to support that conclusion, and craft it into a compelling narrative to win the argument. They rely on the opposing counsel to do the same, and on an impartial third party—the judge, jury, or in government, Congress or Parliament as a whole—to determine who has made the more compelling case. But as any trial lawyer will tell people, such an approach uses facts selectively and only for the purposes of winning the argument, not for establishing the truth. That is the opposite of the approach of science, which starts with observation, accumulates evidence from studying nature, and forms a conclusion based on what the preponderance of the evidence as a whole suggests.
This disconnect creates opportunities for our policies to be led away from evidence by compelling propagandists. The problem is even more pronounced in presidential politics and among the journalists who cover it. Consider the disruption of Earth’s climate system, arguably the greatest public-policy challenge facing the planet. In late 2007, the League of Conservation Voters analyzed the questions asked of the candidates for US president by the five top prime-time TV journalists: CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, MSNBC’s Tim Russert, Fox News’s Chris Wallace, and CBS’s Bob Schieffer. By January 25, 2008, these journalists had conducted 171 interviews with the candidates. Of the 2,975 questions they asked, how many might one reasonably suppose mentioned the words “climate change” or “global warming”?
In fact it was six. To put that in perspective, three questions mentioned UFOs.
By 2015, political journalists had shown little improvement. In December, 195 countries had reached an historic and unanimous accord in Paris to begin to find ways to limit greenhouse gases. The non-binding agreement involved re-envisioning the global economy and paying hundreds of billions of dollars to poorer countries. Just a few days later, both the Republicans and Democrats running for US president held primary debates. Despite the profound potential implications of both action and inaction and the strong differences between the parties on the topic of climate change, the journalists moderating the two debates didn’t ask a single question about it.
Similar things could be said of any one of several major topics surrounding science, each of them with vast policy implications. Not a single candidate for president spoke about them, and humanities-trained political journalists did not ask about them. It was as if they didn’t exist. But in a world increasingly dominated by complex science, the answers to such questions will determine the future. Certainly they should be contemplated by voters when making electoral decisions. What could have happened to the media, to make it so derelict in its duties in this regard?
Let’s Have a Science Debate
In the fall of 2007, this divergence was noticed by a British expat: Charles Darwin’s great-great-grandson Matthew Chapman, who wondered what could be going on. A science writer, film director, and the screenwriter of films including 2003’s Runaway Jury, Chapman picked up the phone and began calling friends to see if they, too, had noticed this. He reached physicist Lawrence Krauss, science journalist Chris Mooney, energy scientist and science blogger Sheril Kirshenbaum, science philosopher Austin Dacey, and me. We all agreed that the silence on science issues was astounding. As a group, we founded ScienceDebate 2008 (later ScienceDebate.org), an effort to get the candidates for president to debate the major science policy issues.
We put up a website, placed op-eds in national publications, and reached out to contacts and leading science bloggers. The effort went viral. One of those bloggers, Darlene Cavalier of ScienceCheerleader.com, connected us with the US National Academies and became part of our core team, as did Michael Halpern, a senior staffer in the Scientific Integrity program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Within weeks, thirty-nine thousand people from across the political spectrum had signed on, including Nobel laureates, prominent scientists, the presidents of most major American universities, the CEOs of several large corporations, and political movers ranging from John Podesta, President Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, on the left, to former house speaker Newt Gingrich on the right. Feeling affirmed, we reached out to the campaigns.
They ignored us. This is, of course, a classic campaign tactic. You never give energy to anything that you wish would go away. You simply do not engage, because the moment you do there is a story, the thing gets legs, and if you don’t have your message already developed, you can lose control of your narrative. The question was why they wouldn’t want to engage.
I went on Ira Flatow’s US National Public Radio program Talk of the Nation: Science Friday. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); the US National Academies (of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine); and the nonprofit Council on Competitiveness signed on as cosponsors. Soon we represented more than 125 million people through our signatory organizations. It was the largest political initiative in the history of science.
Presidential Candidates Debate Religion, Not Science
Still, the candidates refused to even return phone calls and e-mails. So we decided to organize a presidential debate ourselves, and turned to the national media outlets for help. We brought on PBS’s flagship science series Nova and its then-news program Now on PBS as broadcast partners. David Brancaccio, Now’s host, would moderate. We set a date shortly before the crucial Pennsylvania primaries and teamed up with the venerable Franklin Institute in Center City Philadelphia to host.
But despite the urging of advisors like EMILY’s List founder Ellen Malcolm, who was involved with Senator Hillary Clinton’s (D-NY) campaign, and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, who was supporting Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), both of those candidates refused invitations to a debate that would center on the US economy and science and technology issues. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) ignored the invitation entirely. Instead, Clinton and Obama chose to debate religion at Messiah College in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—where, ironically, they answered questions about science.
An old joke tells of the three things one never discusses in polite company: sex, politics, and religion. How has political culture come to a point where science is more taboo to discuss than religion? What little news coverage there was of this stunning development didn’t seem to affect the campaigns at all. The candidates continued their policies of non-engagement. It wasn’t because they felt inhibited about opining on issues outside their expertise. They waxed on about foreign policy and military affairs even though none were diplomats or generals. They offered economic plans even though they had little knowledge of economics. They talked about morality and religion even though they were not rabbis or priests. But they refused to debate the many crucial issues presented by science.
Marveling at this odd situation, I began speaking to news directors and editors, asking them why they weren’t covering this remarkable situation. Here we had virtually the entire US science and technology enterprise—which, by the way, is the main engine of the economy—calling for the presidential candidates to debate enormous science policy issues, and the candidates were dodging us. That sounded a lot like news, and yet it was getting very little coverage.
The people I spoke to said they thought it was a niche topic, and the public wasn’t interested. So ScienceDebate and the nonprofit Research!America teamed up to do a little science to test that assumption. We commissioned a national poll and found that 85 percent of the American public thought that the candidates should debate the major science issues. Support was virtually identical among Democrats and Republicans. Religious people clearly were not put off by the idea either. Only the candidates and the press, it seemed, were reticent.
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail
With the window closing for a debate before the endorsing conventions, I recruited Jane Lubchenco, a marine scientist and former AAAS president, to help organize a science debate in Oregon in August. But Obama and McCain refused this one too, opting instead to hold yet another faith forum, this time at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. The scientific, academic, and high-tech communities were stunned. Science was responsible for more than half of all US economic growth since World War II. It lies at the core of most major unsolved policy challenges the world over. How could people who wanted to lead America avoid talking about science? Intel chairman Craig Barrett reached out to former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina on the McCain side to encourage his participation, and Varmus redoubled his efforts to convince Obama.
Meanwhile, our supporters had submitted more than 3,400 questions that they wanted to ask the candidates. Political staffers at the campaigns told me they were concerned about candidates appearing foolish. One Republican said they wanted to avoid a “Dan Quayle moment.” I explained that we weren’t interested in asking them technical questions about the third digit of pi or the details of cell mitosis. We were interested in big science policy questions. Still, they were skeptical. So, working with several leading science organizations, I culled the crowdsourced questions into “The Top 14 Science Questions Facing America,” and released them publicly as a sort of open-book test.
The Original Top 14 Science Questions Facing America
These are the original fourteen final questions we arrived at. We stated them very broadly—some might say too broadly—in an effort to show how policy-oriented they were. But the candidates still ignored us.
1. Innovation. Science and technology have been responsible for half of the growth of the American economy since World War II. But several recent reports question America’s continued leadership in these vital areas. What policies will you support to ensure that America remains the world leader in innovation?
2. Climate Change. Earth’s climate is changing and there is concern about the potentially adverse effects of these changes on life on the planet. Please set out what your positions are on the following measures that have been proposed to address global climate change: a cap-and-trade system, a carbon tax, increased fuel-economy standards, firm carbon-emissions targets, and/or research. What other policies would you support?
3. Energy. Many policymakers and scientists say energy security and sustainability are major problems facing the United States during this century. What policies would you support to meet demand for energy while ensuring an economically and environmentally sustainable future?
4. Education. A comparison of fifteen-year-olds in thirty wealthy nations found that average science scores among US students ranked seventeenth, while average US math scores ranked twenty-fourth. What role do you think the federal government should play in preparing K–12 students for the science- and technology-driven twenty-first century?
5. National Security. Science and technology are at the core of national security like never before. What is your view of how science and technology can best be used to ensure national security, and where should we put our focus?
6. Pandemics and Biosecurity. Some estimates suggest that an emerging pandemic could kill more than three hundred million people. In an era of constant and rapid international travel, what steps should the United States take to protect our population from global pandemics and deliberate biological attacks?
7. Genetics Research. The field of genetics has the potential to improve human health and nutrition, but many people are concerned about the effects of genetic modification both in humans and in agriculture. What is the right policy balance between the benefits of genetic advances and their potential risks?
8. Stem Cells. Stem-cell-research advocates say it may successfully lead to treatments for many chronic diseases and injuries, saving lives, but opponents argue that using embryos as a source for stem cells destroys human life. What are your positions on government regulation and funding of stem-cell research?
9. Ocean Health. Scientists estimate that some 75 percent of the world’s fisheries are in serious decline and habitats around the world like coral reefs are seriously threatened. What steps, if any, should the United States take during your term to protect ocean health?
10. Water. Thirty-nine states expect some level of water shortage over the next decade, and scientific studies suggest that a majority of our water resources are at risk. What policies would you support to meet demand for water resources?
11. Space. The study of Earth from space can yield important information about climate change; focus on the cosmos can advance our understanding of the universe; and manned space travel can help us inspire new generations of youth to go into science. Can we afford all of them? How would you prioritize space in your administration?
12. Scientific Integrity. Many government scientists have reported political interference in their work. Is it acceptable for elected officials to hold back or alter scientific reports if they conflict with their own views, and how will you balance scientific information with politics and personal beliefs in your decision making?
13. Research. For many years, Congress has recognized the importance of science and engineering research to realizing our national goals. Given that the next Congress will likely face spending constraints, what priority would you give to investment in basic research in upcoming budgets?
14. Health. Americans are increasingly concerned about the cost, quality, and availability of health care. How do you see science, research, and technology contributing to improved health and quality of life, and what do you believe is the solution to America’s “health-care crisis”?
Presidential Antiscience
The war on science wasn’t limited to candidates and the media. The George W. Bush White House had become notoriously antiscience, which legitimized science denial in a way the world is still dealing with. Bush appointed ideologues to key agency posts throughout the federal government and empowered them to hold back or alter scientific reports with which they disagreed. This represented a marked change from the Republican Party of just ten years prior. Consider the following quote by President George H. W. Bush, George W.’s father:
Science, like any field of endeavor, relies on freedom of inquiry; and one of the hallmarks of that freedom is objectivity. Now more than ever, on issues ranging from climate change to AIDS research to genetic engineering to food additives, government relies on the impartial perspective of science for guidance.
Then consider this one by his son’s White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, thirteen years later:
This administration looks at the facts, and reviews the best available science based on what’s right for the American people.
The first approach uses knowledge as a basis for public policy. The second looks first to a predetermined political agenda (“what’s right for the American people”) and seeks only those facts that support it. It is antiscience.
After Bush’s 2004 reelection, scientists noticed that the problem was becoming worse. One example was Bush’s appointment of George Deutsch, a twenty-four-year-old Texas A&M University dropout and Bush campaign intern, to a key position in NASA’s public-relations department. Deutsch set to work muzzling NASA’s top climate scientist, James Hansen, refusing to allow him to interview with National Public Radio because it was “the most liberal” media outlet in the country and telling a contractor that the word “theory” had to be inserted after every mention of the big bang on NASA’s website presentations being prepared for middle-school students. The big bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion,” Deutsch told the contractor. “It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator. . . . This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA.” Deutsch later resigned after it was revealed that he had fabricated his academic credentials, and did not graduate from college.
Other Bush public-relations appointees were muzzling scientists at other agencies, or altering scientific information in official agency reports to fit a preconceived ideological agenda, angering many scientists. (The same tactics would be employed by Canada’s Conservative Harper government just a few years later.)
The problem became so widespread that, in early 2007, the House Oversight Committee held hearings investigating the distortions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was forced to discontinue a project called Programs-That-Work, which identified sex education programs found to be effective in scientific studies, none of which were abstinence-based. On the National Cancer Institute’s website, breast cancer was falsely linked to abortion. The morning-after pill, an emergency contraceptive that prevents ovulation after unprotected sex and may in rare circumstances prevent an already-fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus, was held back from Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for over-the-counter sale even though scientists and physicians had judged it to be safe and determined that it was actually likely to reduce the number of abortions. (Later, it would also be partially held back by the Obama administration, again contrary to the recommendations of panels of scientists.) “Faith-based” initiatives like abstinence-only sex education, by contrast, were federally funded at high levels, even when they were contradicted or shown ineffective by science. And business-friendly FDA administrators failed to remove the arthritis drug rofecoxib (Vioxx) from the market even after it became apparent that it was causing heart attacks, resulting in more than fifty thousand American deaths—nearly as many as the number of American soldiers lost in Vietnam. FDA administrators made calls to a whistleblower-protection attorney and a leading medical journal in an attempt to discredit the scientist who brought the problem to light.
The Watershed
By the 2008 election, antiscience views had become entrenched as mainstream political planks of the Republican Party. The focus was on three main areas: denying the science of reproductive medicine, denying the science of evolution, and denying the science of climate change. Its messaging followed a public-relations playbook that had been developed in part by Southern US tobacco companies to fight the emerging science-based conclusion that smoking causes cancer, and by US agribusiness in fighting the revelations that pesticides were disrupting the environment and hazardous to health. Like climate disruption, these had been facts that, if widely accepted, could undermine entire industries. “Doubt is our product,” a tobacco executive wrote in a 1969 memo to fellow tobacco executives, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”
Controversy is the most common aspect of modern antiscientific attacks, because it takes advantage of the reasonable-sounding but incorrect idea that a “healthy debate” reveals the truth. When such a debate pits knowledge against a passionately articulated opinion, the opinion often wins. “For what a man had rather were true,” as the father of modern science, Francis Bacon, noted, “he more readily believes.”
Today, this is called motivated reasoning, or, more simply, confirmation bias. During a 2006 Alaska gubernatorial debate, Republican Sarah Palin provided a good example of the problem when she came out in favor of teaching creationism in science class. “Teach both,” she said. “You know, don’t be afraid of education. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools.”
By 2008, it had become doubtful whether a Republican candidate for president could get the party’s endorsement without taking a stridently antiscience position. Democrats, in turn, seemed terrified of offending evangelical swing voters, preferring instead to either out-conservative the conservatives or avoid discussing science and technology altogether. Antiscience advocates on the left could be just as vicious as the right’s climate deniers when scientists pointed out that their ideas that cell phones cause brain cancer, vaccines cause autism, genetically modified crops are unhealthy to eat, and similar notions were not supported by the evidence. Scientists hoped that John McCain would somehow rebuff this trend. McCain had long crafted a reputation as a “maverick” and a “straight shooter.” If anyone could stem the tide, they thought, he could. But they couldn’t even get Obama to engage in a debate, much less McCain.
Finally, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, I was hiking in Rocky National Park with my son Jake. He was thirteen, and as the two if us stood on the continental divide, leaning into a fifty-mile-per-hour wind, I was struck by the irony the location symbolized: left and right, past and future, proscience and antiscience. So many divides, and I was trying to straddle them all as the leader of the ScienceDebate effort, while the political wind was trying to blow me away. I had been very public in the attempt to get the candidates to engage, and felt I was letting down my cofounders as well as the entire scientific enterprise that had gotten behind us. But I was there with Jake in the backcountry and it was beautiful on top of the Rockies. We hiked back down and made our way into Estes Park, Colorado, and as we got back into cell-phone range my phone started buzzing with voicemails from the Obama campaign. While Obama wouldn’t participate in a televised forum, he would participate in an online “debate.” Scientists were jubilant. Finally, someone was listening.
Days later, McCain agreed as well, and the press, given a classic conflict frame, was finally interested. The ScienceDebate story, and the candidates’ answers to “The Top 14 Science Questions Facing America” made nearly one billion media impressions—an enormous opening of the floodgates on stories that had previously been ignored. The public finally started seeing discussions of the candidates’ positions on climate change, energy, health care, the environment, economic competitiveness, and a host of other science policy topics. Obama used our mission statement—to “restore science to its rightful place”—in his inauguration speech. And once in office, the candidate who had started out not particularly friendly toward science seemed to embrace it as a central part of his strategic approach. He appointed several of our early supporters to cabinet-level posts. Steven Chu became energy secretary. John Holdren became presidential science advisor. Jane Lubchenco became undersecretary of commerce and director of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Harold Varmus led the National Cancer Institute. Marcia McNutt became director of the US Geological Survey. John Podesta led Obama’s transition team. The administration had more scientists than any in memory. Perhaps, scientists dared to hope, the dark days of unreason had finally passed. They couldn’t have been more wrong.
Are There Really Two Sides to Every Story?
The problem, as we’ve already seen, wasn’t limited to the candidates. Many reporters (and editors, who often direct reporters’ lines of questioning) are—like many politicians—humanities majors who were required to take few or no science classes in college. The classes were hard, and they ducked them, and now few seem to understand science’s unique importance to the democracies they report on. Most seem to think, incorrectly, that the public shares their disinterest. In an age when so many major policy problems are dominated by science, this is a concern.
Another part of the problem may be that journalists, scientists, and politicians each approach questions of fact from differing perspectives. Journalists look for conflict to find an angle, so there are always two sides to every story. Bob says 2 + 2 = 4. Mary says it is 6. It sounds surprising, but Mary may have legitimate reasons for her perspective. The media outlet gets a good headline and an interesting story, the controversy rages, and newspapers or web clicks are sold. A scientist would say that, based on the knowledge built up from observation, one of these claims can be shown to be objectively false and it’s poor reporting to paint this as a controversy, because it’s not. Using four apples, the scientist can quickly and objectively demonstrate that Bob is right. Not so fast, a politician might answer. How about a compromise? Soon we see a new law affirming that 2 + 2 = 5. This is democracy’s problem, in a nutshell, in the age of science.
The modern journalistic approach does not work when applied to scientific questions, and it tends to skew public policy in counterfactual directions, as the above example shows. This is a bit ironic because journalistic techniques were originally developed as a means of fact-checking, akin to replication and peer review in scientific research. For example, reporters would get multiple sources to corroborate a story (which is an account of events in our shared, objective reality), establishing a relative confidence in its veracity, or they wouldn’t run the story. But today, journalism schools teach a mantra that scientists will say is completely false: “there is no such thing as objectivity”—a phrase frequently repeated by some of the profession’s leading figures, and contained in many newspaper reporters’ guidelines.
This conceit may be true when reporting on politics or interviewing the witnesses to a crime, but it is decidedly not true when it comes to reporting on events or issues that have large inputs of objective knowledge from science, even when those issues or events are political. For such stories, we have developed a unique, reproducible, peer-reviewed method of scientific research whose very purpose is to create the objective knowledge reporters seem to think cannot be had. The process of science is designed to cull out reliable knowledge—no matter who does the investigating or reports on the outcome—from our gender identities, our political identities, our religious identities, our sexual identities, our cultural identities, and so on, trimming away all those subjective forms of bias reporters think we can never escape until we are left with knowledge that is provisionally objective in the stories we tell about reality. While it may not be possible to attain total objectivity, approaching it is what science is all about, and the reliable knowledge it produces is responsible for every advance in the modern world. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Peabody-winning news anchor Don Shelby lectures journalists about this misconception often.
“Some journalists don’t even attempt to establish the reality or truth of a story. Instead, they go out of their way to present ‘both sides,’ as if this were admirable,” he says.
And what I tell them is that “balance” doesn’t mean you present stories evenhandedly. It means you present them like a set of scales, and if the vast weight of the evidence is on one side of the argument, that’s the side that should get the vast weight of your reporting. You don’t push on the other side to falsely balance the scales. You tell the truth. That’s the “balance” we used to talk about in journalism. Today what we too often see is called “false balance,” because it presents both sides as if they have equal weight of the evidence, when that is objectively not true.
The first casualty of this “false balance” is journalism’s own credibility, and journalists’ ability to speak truth to or about power, which is one of the field’s main functions. (It is, incidentally, also one of the functions of the journalistic aspect of a scientist’s recounting of an experiment.) If one side’s account is based on the accumulated knowledge gained from tens of thousands of painstaking experiments done by thousands of scientists working over fifty years taking and reporting on billions of measurements reproducible by others, as in the case of climate science, and the other side is a persuasive opinion articulated by a passionate advocate who is intent on convincing viewers of the rightness of his or her perspective, by presenting them as a debate, journalism becomes an implicit advocate for extreme views, weighting them and presenting them to the public as if they had equal merit with tested knowledge. Journalism thus fuels the extreme partisanship we see in public dialogue today, and feeds into the hands of the very power journalists exist to challenge—vested interests who seek to circumvent evidence and undermine the democratic process to achieve a desired outcome.
It should be noted that many journalists argue that their job is not to establish truth, but simply to relay information fairly. This laissez-faire, hands-off view has come to dominate mainstream political journalism. David Gregory, NBC News’s chief White House correspondent during the George W. Bush administration, put it quite clearly in his defense of the White House press corps for not pushing President Bush on the lack of credible evidence of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” and the inconsistencies in Bush’s rationale for invasion before the United States entered Iraq. “I think there are a lot of critics who think that . . . if we did not stand up and say this is bogus, and you’re a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn’t do our job,” said Gregory. “I respectfully disagree. It’s not our role.”
But if it is not the press’s role, whose role is it? How are the people to make well-informed decisions about momentous policies without accurate, reasonably objective information and a questioning of the powerful, asking for evidence?
Similarly, the tendency of politicians to look for compromises on disputed questions of fact instead of basing decisions on an objective standard of knowledge is eroding the country’s ability to solve its problems, leaving it mired in policies that don’t work and political battles that go on forever. And by allowing the teaching of “alternative theories” on politically contentious topics like evolution or climate change or birth control in science classes, those same politicians damage children’s ability to learn critical thinking, to compete in a science-driven global economy, and to live in a world increasingly impacted by climate disruption.
This dumbing down of the people for ideological reasons is, of course, not new. It is an age-old authoritarian tactic. It happened in China during the Cultural Revolution. It happened in the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Renaissance Italy, twentieth-century Russia, and Nazi Germany—all of them societies whose leaders turned their backs on science, making it subordinate to an authoritarian ideology, and the societies collapsed.
The Great Dumbing Down
In trying to understand why mainstream journalists weren’t fairly covering the important science issues of the day, I continued probing editors and news directors, and I learned something else. There is a long-standing tradition in newsrooms for editors and news directors to forbid political reporters from covering science issues and to rarely place science stories in the politics pages. Science has been relegated to its own specialized section, and those sections are being eliminated.
This is a problem in a time when science is so central to our policy challenges. No other major human endeavor is so ghettoized. The religion and ethics beat has long since crossed over into the politics pages, as has the business and economics beat. Military affairs and foreign policy have been there all along.
Partly, this growing ghettoization is due to economics. Facing increased competition from cable TV and a largely free model of news on the Internet, commercial news media have been trimming costs. Among the first things to go were the most expensive: investigative and science reporters. A Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy report from 2005—early in the science-news crisis—showed that from 1989 to 2005, the number of major US newspapers with weekly science sections fell from ninety-five to thirty-four. By 2005, just 7 percent of the approximately 2,400 members of the US National Association of Science Writers had full-time positions at media outlets that reached the general public.
In May of 2008, the Washington Post killed its famed science section. In November, NBCUniversal fired the Weather Channel’s entire Forecast Earth staff—during the NBC network’s Green Week promotion—ending the station’s only environmental series that focused on global warming. In December, CNN fired its entire science, technology, and environment news unit. In March of 2009, the Boston Globe, located in a worldwide capital of scientific research, closed its renowned science and health section. Later that year, Columbia University announced that it was closing its Earth and Environmental Science Journalism program because of “current weakness in the job market for environmental journalists.” US newspapers had ninety-five weekly science sections in 1989, but just nineteen were left in 2012. The bloodshed continued. In early January 2013, the New York Times closed its environmental desk just two months after Hurricane Sandy (which scientists say was made worse by climate disruption) decimated the city. That same year, Johns Hopkins University retired its thirty-year-old science-writing program. The massacre left only about a dozen environmental reporters still standing throughout the five largest US newspapers—with the Los Angeles Times the only one to still have an environmental desk—at a time when the US and the world face the gravest environmental issues in human history.
As a result, we now live in a dangerous situation, when many major challenges revolve around science, and few reporters are covering them. That means they tend to get far less attention than they deserve. Some efforts have emerged to combat this. England’s Science Media Centre seeks to provide general-assignment reporters with the science angle on major policy stories, and similar centers have been set up in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. Nonprofit news outlets have begun to spring up, some focusing on the expensive professions of investigative or science reporting. And blogging is creating a new, intimate relationship between educated readers and scientists.
In continental Europe, science coverage has actually increased in the mainstream media. A 2008 analysis of prime-time news on selected European TV stations, for example, showed that there were 218 science-related stories (including science and technology, environment, and health) among the 2,676 news stories aired during the same week in the years 2003 and 2004, an elevenfold increase since 1989.
The European Union of Science Journalists’ Associations, under the leadership of Hanns-J. Neubert and Wolfgang Goede, also promoted a 2009 German parliamentary science debate patterned loosely on the US effort, and similar efforts have begun in Estonia, as well as Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland, and the EU as a whole. Goede considers it an essential component of modern democracy, an argument he and I have made together to journalists around the world. The group is also pushing a new initiative called NUCLEUS, along with some two dozen universities across Europe and in Beijing, to devise other ways that scientific institutions can work to counter the communication gap between science and the public.
In the developing world, science reporting is described, for the time being, as “flourishing,” but journalists there have reported that many of the same problems are beginning to emerge.
Congressional Antiscience
Of course, the war on science isn’t limited to presidential campaigns and the media. It is present in city councils, state legislatures, and congressional and parliamentary delegations the world over, particularly in several of the leading democracies with strong corporate economies and liberal interpretations of the right to freedom of expression.
In the US Congress, the war first began to widely emerge in the religious and patriotic fervor following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center by terrorists from the fundamentalist Islamist group al-Qaeda. In April of 2002, then–house majority whip Tom DeLay (R-TX) quoted the evangelical Christian authors of a 1999 book when he told a Texas church group, “Only Christianity offers a comprehensive worldview that covers all areas of life and thought, every aspect of creation.” DeLay, who would soon become House majority leader, said he wanted to promote “a biblical worldview” in American politics. “Our entire system is built on the Judeo-Christian ethic, but it fell apart when we started denying God,” he had said in 2001. After the 1999 Columbine school shootings, DeLay had given a speech on the House floor in which, his voice dripping with sarcasm, he suggested the tragedy “couldn’t have been because our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud by teaching evolution as fact.” Ironically, DeLay’s Bachelor of Science degree, from the University of Houston, was in biology.
DeLay’s views ran throughout his caucus, particularly among the increasingly powerful baby boomers in the House. In March of 2002, eventual house speaker John Boehner (R-OH) wrote to the Ohio State Board of Education to urge that the state’s science curriculum content standards require teaching creationism, saying,
It’s important that the implementation of these science standards not be used to censor debate on controversial issues in science, including Darwin’s theory of evolution. . . . Students should be allowed to hear the scientific arguments on more than one side of a controversial topic. Censorship of opposing points of view retards true scholarship and prevents students from developing their critical thinking skills.
This language was coded to boost creationists, who were promoting their “scientific” argument for “intelligent design” in the latest attack on the teaching of evolution. There is no scientific controversy about the theory of evolution. Boehner’s letter was antiscience doublespeak.
Antiscience grew politically stronger as evangelicals were swept into public office in the years immediately following 9/11. Their early battles were over the teaching of evolution in public schools and the anticipated arrival of gay marriage, but they were also upset about scientific characterizations of origins, from the big bang to the scientific definition of when a woman can be said to be pregnant, all of which they saw as an assault on Christian values. The willingness to reject science by these candidates and the vast numbers of motivated foot soldiers they had drawn into the ranks of the GOP provided a unique opportunity for vested corporate interests increasingly vulnerable to political action on climate change.
Outvoting Galileo
The amount of money those vested interests—particularly those aligned with the energy and extraction industries (oil, gas, coal, and minerals)—were willing to spend to battle science, and the power of their public-relations efforts to do so, became the overriding force in American politics for the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
In February 2009, President Obama asked Congress to send him legislation that placed a market-based cap on carbon emissions. The House passed the bill later that summer, with eight Republican votes. Throughout 2009 and 2010, raging battles were fought in GOP primaries throughout the country as energy-industry-funded groups recruited and promoted Tea Party candidates to run against Republicans who had voted for the cap-and-trade bill, utilizing evangelical Republican foot soldiers, and knocking the offenders out with relatively small investments. Climate science became equated with Obama and socialism in Republican talking points, and the technique of bashing science or promoting brazenly antiscientific positions became a political identity statement. By late 2010, fully ninety-four of one hundred newly elected Republican members of Congress either denied that global warming was happening (it was all a vast hoax by scientists, they said) or signed pledges to oppose mitigation.
By the 2012 elections, when Republican presidential hopefuls hit the campaign trail, they were propelled by a strong antiscientific wind. It became a predictable pattern: when a conservative candidate was sinking in the polls, he or she would make an antiscience statement in an effort to get a bounce. Texas Governor Rick Perry compared himself to Galileo when denying in a Florida primary debate that climate science is settled. “The idea that we would put Americans’ economy at—at—at jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet, to me, is just—is nonsense. I mean, it—I mean—and I tell somebody, I said, just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said here is the fact, Galileo got outvoted for a spell.”
It seemed lost on Perry that the people who “outvoted” Galileo were the members of the Roman Catholic Inquisition, who, like Perry, chose ideology over science. The US National Academy of Sciences had in 2010 stated that man-made climate change was supported by so many independent lines of data that its existence and causes should be “regarded as settled facts.”
Other candidates made similar antiscientific assertions. Herman Cain, who was previously well-respected in business circles, said that “man-made global warming is poppycock.” Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, a former IRS tax attorney and an ardent evangelical campaigner against gay marriage, talked of how the human papillomavirus vaccine had caused “mental retardation,” while Congressman Ron Paul, a medical doctor, agreed that it was “not good medicine.” Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, also an attorney, said “absolutely not, I don’t believe in” evolution. Even Newt Gingrich, an academic historian who once told me, “I’m very interested in doing anything I can to support science” and signed on as a supporter of ScienceDebate.org, felt compelled to announce that he was “opposed to killing children in order to get research material.” He was talking about stem-cell research, and characterizing a frozen blastocyst of about 150 cells that would otherwise be discarded by law as “killing children in order to get research material.” He experienced a slight bump in the polls.
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former Utah governor Jon Hunstman Jr., both successful Mormon businessmen, were alone in not kowtowing to the new antiscience fervor spreading among evangelical Republican Party activists. “Listen,” Huntsman said in a September GOP primary debate in California, “when you make comments that fly in the face of what ninety-eight out of one hundred climate scientists have said, when you call into question evolution, all I’m saying is that in order for the Republican Party to win, we can’t run from science.” Huntsman plummeted in the polls.
Appeasing Republican primary voters while not sounding so absurdly antiscience that one alienated mainstream voters was clearly a delicate balancing act. The activists were being propelled into a sort of anticlimate frenzy by right-wing media organizations and radio that amplified ideas from organizations like the Heartland Institute, Americans for Prosperity, and the George C. Marshall Institute. Romney was forced to retreat from the affirmative stance regarding anthropogenic global warming that he had previously taken, eventually saying that “we don’t know what’s causing climate change.” At the Republican National Convention, he turned President Obama’s efforts to address climate change into a laugh line.
Lies Straight from the Pit of Hell
By late 2012, antiscientific rhetoric had become normalized in US politics. Public statements that once would have been considered ludicrous and career-ending were accepted by media and voters without challenge, mostly on the Republican side of the aisle, and mostly on issues surrounding climate change, contraception, and evolution. That’s not to say that Democrats didn’t have their own issues with accepting science they didn’t agree with politically—they did—but they weren’t running loudly against science the way Republicans were.
Congressman John Shimkus (R-IL), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy, waved his gilded Bible in a congressional hearing on climate change, declaring that “the earth will end only when God says it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy this Earth, this Earth will not end in a flood.” He added that “there is a theological argument that this is a carbon-starved planet.”
Congressman Todd Akin (R-MO), who sat on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, was asked whether he opposed abortion even in the case of rape. He replied that “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” He could not explain what a “legitimate rape” was, and what little science there is shows that pregnancies from rape seem to run at around 8 percent, about twice the pregnancy rate from consensual sex.
Congressman Paul Broun (R-GA), a medical doctor who served on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, told a luncheon crowd that
All that stuff that I was taught about evolution and embryology, big bang theory, all that, is lies straight from the pit of hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says. And what I’ve come to learn is that it’s the manufacturer’s handbook, is what I call it. It teaches us how to run our lives, individual. How to run our families. How to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all of public policy and everything in society. And that’s the reason as your congressman, I hold the Holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I’ll continue to do that.
That is the opposite of the idea Thomas Jefferson originally had in mind for the United States.
The Death of Evidence
“We are sliding back into a dark era, and there seems little we can do about it,” AAAS president Nina Fedoroff lamented on a cool, cloudy February day in 2012. Fedoroff was attending the world’s most prestigious scientific organization’s annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, and she confessed that she was “scared to death” by the vast war on science that was spreading through the Western world.
As she spoke, the revolution was in full swing across the rest of Canada. Beginning shortly after taking power in 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper had imitated George W. Bush in his efforts to muzzle scientists. He and several other conservative members of Parliament had ties with top US Republican activists and elected officials, ranging from climate denier Senator James Inhofe to anti-tax activist Grover Norquist. In 2007, the Harper government established rules that required Environment Canada scientists to obtain permission before speaking with reporters, reducing their engagement on climate change by 80 percent. In 2008, Harper abolished the position of the National Science Advisor, and his administration soon began closing research libraries. The public didn’t seem to notice at first. Canadian scientists were the only ones really feeling the thumb or watching the destruction of knowledge, and eventually they decided they needed to do more to raise public awareness.
On July 10, 2012, five months after Fedoroff’s lament, thousands of scientists marched on Parliament Hill in downtown Ottawa to demonstrate against policies that cut science funding and prevented government scientists from speaking to the press, attending conferences, or even speaking to groups of high-school students without permission.
Wearing white lab coats or dressed all in black, they marched through Ottawa, chanting, “No science, no evidence, no truth, no democracy.” On Parliament Hill, they held a mock funeral for evidence, with speakers delivering eulogies and describing how science was being threatened by the conservative, pro-extraction-industry government, whose members seemed only interested in research that served business.
“If you are fed up with the closure of federal scientific programs and muzzling of scientists, if you think that decisions should be based on evidence and facts instead of ideology, then please come out and show your support,” the scientists’ announcement said. Katie Gibbs, then a PhD student in biology, organized the rally and would subsequently set her career in science aside to lead the advocacy group Evidence for Democracy. “You can’t have a functioning democracy if you don’t have informed citizens, if you don’t have the facts,” Gibbs told me.
But the Harper government’s attack on science continued unabated. Fully 90 percent of federal Canadian scientists said they could no longer speak freely. Eighty-six percent said that when faced with a departmental decision or action that could harm public health, safety, or the environment, they did not believe they could share their concerns with the public or media without censure or retaliation. Research libraries were closed, and much of their contents—thousand and thousands of volumes—were discarded in Dumpsters. In 2013, there were eleven Department of Fisheries and Oceans research libraries across the country. By 2015, there were four, and scientists complained that the information they contained—critical historical data records—was no longer available, making it impossible to track how ecological measurements such as ocean temperatures and fish populations were changing over time.
But the antiscience wasn’t limited to conservative politicians seeking to quash opposition over environmental issues. Canadian scientists were also banding together to battle left-leaning antiscience from alternative-medicine providers who were giving doses of “Influenzinum,” a homeopathic alternative to the flu vaccine that has no scientific basis. Other community activists across Canada were worried about microwave radiation and so-called “electromagnetic hypersensitivity,” which has no scientific basis, and had begun actively lobbying local governments to ban Wi-Fi. The beleaguered scientists formed an organization called Bad Science Watch to monitor Influenzinum, Wi-Fi bans, and other issues, saying that “the media has been all too willing to fan the flames of controversy and has contributed to a growing false uncertainty over the safety of Wi-Fi. As a result many school boards, libraries, and town councils across Canada have been called on by concerned citizens to limit or remove Wi-Fi networks.”
Worldwide Antiscience
By November of 2013 the antiscience cancer had spread to several other countries, most of them places like the United States and Canada that had heavy deposits of fossil fuels or minerals, often driven by PR efforts against policies regulating mining and emissions, sometimes with direct involvement from US Republican Party operatives. Within days of taking office in September of 2013, for example, Australian prime minister Tony Abbott—who had, in 2010, said, “The climate-change argument is absolute crap. However, the politics are tough for us because 80 percent of people believe climate change is a real and present danger”—followed Harper’s lead and abolished the position of minister for science, a post that had existed since 1931.
In 2010, his predecessor, Labor (political left) prime minister Julia Gillard, had said, “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.” Australia is a major producer of coal, worth about $60 billion annually, and Australians emit more carbon dioxide (CO2) per capita—at the time, about 18 tons annually—than anyone except Saudi Arabians.
To form a minority government, however, Gillard cut a deal with the Greens in Parliament and agreed to a “carbon price.” She immediately found herself the focus of a public-relations attack that coordinated right-wing talk-radio personalities, Rupert Murdoch–owned newspapers (whose articles ran 82 percent negative), the conservative coalition parties, and mining companies.
The tax-by-another-name went into effect in 2011 and was held up by the International Atomic Energy Agency as a model for other nations. But it drew more climate-denial public-relations efforts as the global environmental battle briefly shifted to Australia, ultimately costing Gillard her position as prime minister. Abbott, who at the time was the Liberal (political right) opposition leader and was running for prime minister, made a “pledge in blood” to repeal the tax. After being elected, he succeeded.
Send in the Clowns
In 2012, in an effort to retain power and court Christian conservative swing voters, Gillard had also pushed through a program funding chaplains in secular public schools nationally, something that had already been in practice in the state of Queensland. Australia’s high court struck the program down as unconstitutional, but in 2014 Abbott used a legal technicality to provide $244 million to restore the program, sending 2,339 religious workers into schools across Australia. Trained Humanist chaplains and secular mental-health workers were excluded. Prominent astronomer and atheist Lawrence Krauss suggested that the idea that the chaplains would not be preaching in school was ridiculous: “It’s like sending in clowns and telling them not to be funny.”
Antiscience, now legitimized and empowered by top Australian government officials, began spreading. In early 2013, Merilyn Haines, an activist for the innocuous-sounding Queenslanders for Safe Water, began traveling across the state, urging city councils to stop water fluoridation. Fluoride, a naturally occurring nutrient, helps prevent tooth decay and promotes healthy bone growth. It has been used in public water supplies for seventy years, and health officials have identified it as “one of 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century.” In fact, since fluoride occurs naturally in well water to varying degrees, the correct term for what cities do is really “fluoride regulation,” i.e., adding it or removing it as necessary to achieve the optimum health benefit at .7 to 1.2 mg per litre.
In Queensland, however, the government made its use optional. “I look forward to listening to all views this evening,” said a Charters Towers city councilor, and Haines told the council of how fluoride is “used as a schedule six poison” and “as an insecticide, particularly for roaches and ants,” as well as for “electroplating.”
“Please take it out,” another woman told the Fraser Coast Regional Council. “It’s killing Earth and the rest of us.” A man testified, “It’s a toxic by-product that cost manufactures a lot of money to dispose of so instead we want to have it our water for to us drink it.”
Within weeks, nine cities encompassing almost a half a million residents abandoned the public-health measure. Moreton Bay Regional Councilor James Houghton, who believes fluoridation is mass medication without consent, explained why he was pushing for removal:
I’m not wrong. Galileo was proven right even though they said he was wrong. Columbus was proven right when others said he was wrong. When I was younger they used to spray us with DDT. Spray us! That’s been proven wrong. So science is—makes themselves, provided there’s proper research done—they will come up and prove previous reports wrong, so I’ve adopted an old adage, when in doubt, anyway, leave out. When in doubt, leave out.
Lawrence Springborg, health minister for Queensland, defended the new optional policy with classic Tea Party–like rhetoric. “We understand people want to make different decisions to central government agencies and not be dictated to and we respect that as well,” Springborg told Matt Wordsworth of ABC News. “We just ask them to have a debate on all the information, if upon that they feel they’re uncomfortable to proceed with fluoridation, we do respect that.”
Astounded, Wordsworth asked him, “Even if it’s to their own detriment?”
“That’s a very subjective thing,” Springborg replied.
With repeal of the carbon price, religious chaplains in secular public schools, fluoridation elimination, and other issues, Australian antiscience was in full swing. In 2015, on the day after Pope Francis urged world leaders to cut back on fossil-fuel emissions, the Abbott government appointed a “wind czar” to crack down on wind farms, and to research whether they might damage people’s health. Australians have “concerns over the localized impacts of wind energy and they deserve a right to be heard,” said Environment Minister Greg Hunt.
Banning fluoride wasn’t just an Aussie problem—it was happening worldwide. On the other side of the Pacific, the left-leaning US city of Portland, Oregon, voted in May of that year to ban fluoridation. Ban supporters called the mineral a “toxin” and pointed to a discredited propaganda piece that linked fluoride to IQ problems, despite the fact that no such problems have been observed in seventy years of use in the United States. The piece was most likely the spur that drove a worldwide wave of antifluoridation campaigns. Other North American cities banned fluoride as well, including the conservative cities of Calgary, Alberta, and Wichita, Kansas, where the Kansas Republican Assembly campaigned for the ban, and dozens of other, smaller cities. Across the Atlantic, the city council in Dublin, Ireland, voted to oppose it, while the entire country of Israel banned fluoride after Health Minister Yael German, a history major and former mayor, ruled it must be removed from public water supplies over the criticisms of medical associations. Previously she had raised health concerns over cell-phone towers.
Eugenics
In Western Europe, many more countries decided against fluoridation, including Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Scotland, and Sweden. In the EU, however, the antiscience purity quest was mostly focused not on what we drink but on what we eat, with conservatives complaining that liberals were panicking over genetically modified food.
“There is a danger, almost unintentionally, that we become antiscience,” British prime minister Tony Blair had warned in 2000, speaking of increasing attacks by Green Party members and progressives against government scientists who worked with genetically modified crops. Genetic engineering is, in Europe, still politically tied to the Nazi practice of eugenics, and therefore still causes strong political reactions. Additionally, in Northern Europe especially, the left-wing focus on alternative medicine, holistic health, and bodily purity are major concerns that, when taken to an extreme, drive widespread opposition to fluoride, vaccinations, and genetically modified foods, all antiscience problems that are common in the EU.
While GM crops pose some legitimate economic-justice concerns, science does not support the contention of many anti-GM activists that they are unhealthy to eat. To the contrary, genetic engineering is safer than previous plant-breeding methods because it is more precise, altering just one or a few genes under controlled circumstances instead of blindly altering many through hybridization, or exposing plants to radiation, carcinogenic chemicals, or both in order to cause mutations, a process called mutagenesis (plants modified using mutagenesis can, however, be labeled as “organic”). “Our conviction about what is natural or right should not inhibit the role of science in discovering the truth,” Blair said. “Rather, it should inform our judgment about the implications and consequences of the truth science uncovers.”
By 2014, the food fight had become even more pronounced, with the United Kingdom threatening to split from European Union authority over science funding, claiming that policies promulgated in Brussels risked “condemning Europe to a new Dark Age.”
Tainted
GM opposition wasn’t limited to Europe. In China—a far-left country whose politburo is now dominated by engineers but that was once famous for antiscience under Chairman Mao Zedong—anti-GMO sentiment is becoming widespread, with activists describing their cause as “patriotic.” The government seems unsure just how to manage the situation. At one 2013 protest, a group chanted slogans calling for the eradication of “traitors” who support GM food, recalling images of scientists and intellectuals being “struggled against” during the Cultural Revolution. Even though the government has prioritized GM research, it is treading cautiously when it comes to actual implementation. Only two GM crops—cotton and papaya—have been approved for production in China. “We must be bold in studying it, [but] be cautious in promoting it,” Chinese president Xi Jinping said in a December 2013 speech. Rumors abound that American seed companies are seeking to control the people of China, and that Americans want to weaken or poison China with “dodgy GM food.” These factors lead many people—including government officials—to oppose GM crops that could lead to higher yields and, in the case of golden rice, prevent blindness due to vitamin A deficiency.
A 2014 study of public attitudes on environmental issues in twenty leading countries found China at the top, with 91 percent of Chinese agreeing that “we are heading for an environmental disaster unless we change our ways quickly.” The United States, in contrast, was at the bottom, with only 57 percent agreeing. Reacting to decades of lax or nonexistent health and environmental regulations, unbreathable air, and undrinkable water, China is seeing the birth of a growing, and potentially massive, environmental movement. When it comes to trusting scientists, 75 percent agreed that “even the scientists don’t really know what they are talking about on environmental issues.” Ninety-three percent felt that “companies don’t pay enough attention to the environment,” but individuals felt that they were trying to help the situation, with 88 percent saying, “I try to recycle as much as I can.” Chinese were also at the top of international rankings when it came to climate change, with 93 percent saying that “the climate change we are currently seeing is largely the result of human activity.” Here, too, the United States brought up the rear of all countries measured, with only 54 percent agreeing.
The distrust of scientists when it comes to environmental issues appears to be a factor in other areas as well. One of the most common worries in today’s China is over food safety, a concern that dates back to the great famine under Mao’s agricultural policies, when corrupt local officials inflated food production figures to curry political favor, giving the party more than its share as millions of people starved. Even today, local officials are frequently exposed as corrupt, and are often found to be in league with shoddy businesses that cut corners in food safety and production.
The scandals have touched shores around the world with stories of poisoned food. In 2008, it was milk powder tainted with the industrial chemical melamine, which is used in producing plastics and can make milk appear to have more protein, thus increasing its value. The milk powder killed six infants and sickened more than three hundred thousand. Chinese officials tried to cover up the story, fearing public unrest. Similar melamine poisoning occurred in pet food shipped from China to the United States. Then there was the lead paint on wooden baby toys, and the frequent toxic-bean-sprout scandals, the result of growers treating bean sprouts with sodium nitrite, urea, antibiotics, and a plant hormone called 6-benzyladenine in order to make the sprouts grow faster and look “shinier.” Then there was the admission by officials in Guangdong Province that 44 percent of local rice tested was laced with dangerous levels of cadmium. After those reports, Shenzhen authorities tested foods made with flour, including dumplings and steamed buns, and found that 28 percent had levels of aluminum above national standards. The contamination was blamed on excessive use of baking powder that contained the metal.
So the Chinese public’s reticence about accepting genetically modified foods, given the track record of the agricultural and food sectors in China, is perhaps a reasonable reaction. The difference is that genetic modification is not an ingredient or chemical that can be added to food to fool consumers or slip one by regulators in order to make more money. It is a method of plant breeding—one that could help China feed its burgeoning population at a time when yields are no longer increasing from the use of nitrogen and pesticides, and when climate disruption is placing new stresses on agricultural crops.
Supreme Antiscience
By March 2014, the antiscience cancer had spread full circle, arriving back in America and the thinking of US Supreme Court justices in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores. The owners of the Oklahoma-based Hobby Lobby retail chain argued they should not be forced by the government to provide employees with insurance that covers forms of contraception such as the morning-after pill and three similar pills. They believed those types of birth control cause abortions, and therefore had religious objections to them. The future of the Affordable Care Act (the US health care law) hung in the balance.
Several scientific studies have shown that the pills work by keeping a woman’s ovary from releasing an egg, not by causing an implanted egg to abort. In rare cases there is also a possibility that a fertilized egg may be prevented from implanting. Some religious conservatives define pregnancy as occurring when an egg is fertilized, but US federal law follows the scientific definition that says a woman can only be considered pregnant when a fertilized egg implants in the uterine wall. Many fertilized eggs are flushed naturally. And yet the justices repeatedly referred to the pills as “abortifacients” during oral arguments—a term adopted from fundamentalists and often used by journalists to describe the pills—even though that is scientifically false, seemingly tilting the scales of justice toward the plaintiff’s argument.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that the pills “may have the effect of preventing an already fertilized egg from developing any further by inhibiting its attachment to the uterus.” In a footnote, he conceded that Hobby Lobby’s religious-based assertions were in fact contradicted by the science-based federal regulations of the Food and Drug Administration, which had studied the issue for over a decade: “The owners of the companies involved in these cases and others who believe that life begins at conception regard these four methods as causing abortions, but federal regulations, which define pregnancy as beginning at implantation, do not so classify them.” It is only at implantation that a woman can be considered pregnant, because it is only at this point that her body begins to undergo the chemical and biological changes of hosting a fertilized egg. However, the court accepted the argument for a religious objection even though it was contraindicated by the scientific definition of pregnancy and federal regulations elsewhere. The administration of the Affordable Care Act, the legal definition of pregnancy in the United States (at least in some cases), and the right of corporations to be considered “religious persons” is now based on political views rather than evidence.
That this is a problem becomes clear when we strip away politics. Consider a science issue in which ideology was not a significant factor in a Supreme Court decision. In June 2013, the court ruled on gene patents in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics. At issue was whether Myriad Genetics, which had isolated two naturally occurring genes implicated in breast cancer, could patent the genes to protect their diagnostic procedures. US patent law limits patents to “any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof.” Clearly, the genes are naturally occurring and so should not have been granted patents, and the High Court got this right. But its opinion incorrectly defined key scientific terms that are material to the case and showed little grasp of the underlying scientific issues being debated. “It’s troubling that the highest court in the land can’t get even the basic facts of molecular biology right when writing a decision that has such fundamental importance to genetic testing, the biotechnology industry, and health care,” wrote Johns Hopkins biomedical engineering professor Steven Salzberg in Forbes magazine. “I cannot pretend to know who they got to do their biology background research, but any genetics graduate student could have done far better.”
In a world in which advanced molecular biology will increasingly present legal challenges as we parse out what it means to have the power to analyze, edit and design life, this raises serious questions about whether our judicial system is up to the task. The High Court’s willingness to redefine medical or scientific terms to accommodate ideological concerns, and its poor grasp of the science underlying major decisions, raises doubts about its ability to deliver justice in an age of advanced science where exact definitions matter even more than they do in the law.
Climate of Denial
By the 2016 US presidential election, the trend had grown worse, with neurosurgeon Ben Carson telling audiences he didn’t believe in evolution or the big bang, and Donald Trump telling audiences that vaccines can cause autism and saying he didn’t believe in climate change. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz denied climate change, while Chris Christie said the climate has always been changing and was not a crisis. Bernie Sanders tweeted, regarding climate change, “For those of us who believe in science, you simply cannot ignore what the scientific community is saying almost unanimously”—but he kicked an even greater scientific consensus aside (that GM foods are safe to eat) in favor of requiring labels warning consumers of “what’s in the food that they eat.” (GM is, again, a process for plant breeding, not an ingredient. GM crops have the same nutritional profile as their non-GM parents.)
Meanwhile, Neil Chatterjee, a top aide to US Republican senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, spent time visiting representatives from foreign embassies to make it clear that Republicans intended to fight any international agreement on climate change. McConnell himself worked to spread the anti-climate agenda internationally, warning foreign governments that “our international partners should proceed with caution before entering into a binding, unattainable deal.” New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait registered the disbelief and frustration of many: “The speed at which Republicans have changed from insisting other countries would never reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions to warning other countries not to do so—without a peep of protest from within the party or the conservative movement—says everything you need to know about the party’s stance on climate change.”
Leading up to the 2015 climate summit in Paris, Texas Republican Lamar Smith, chair of the House Science Committee, conducted a months-long probe of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers. Beginning in July, Smith sent NOAA letters and subpoenas asking the agency to provide “all documents and communications” related to a study published in Science that refuted the so-called global-warming “hiatus”—a favored theory of climate deniers that the planet had not warmed since 1998. NOAA refused to comply with Smith’s requests for e-mails, citing the importance of confidentiality among scientists. The American Association for the Advancement of Science and several other scientific societies publicly deplored the science committee’s move. “In one fell swoop, you have accused a host of different individuals of wrongdoing,” fellow Texas representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, the ranking Democrat, wrote Smith.
You have accused NOAA’s top research scientists of scientific misconduct. By extension, you have also accused the peer-reviewers at one of our nation’s most prestigious academic journals, Science, of participating in this misconduct (or at least being too incompetent to notice what was going on). If that weren’t enough, you are intimating a grand conspiracy between NOAA and the White House to doctor climate science to advance administration policy. Presumably this accusation extends to [NOAA] Administrator [Kathryn] Sullivan herself. And all of these indictments are conjured out of thin air, without you presenting any factual basis for these sweeping accusations—exposing this so-called “investigation” for what it truly is: a witch hunt designed to smear the reputations of eminent scientists for partisan gain.
The NOAA investigation wasn’t the first ideologically motivated attack on science and individual scientists that Smith’s committee had conducted. It had previously investigated the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency over conclusions Smith didn’t agree with. In October 2015, Smith used the committee to begin investigating Jagadish Shukla, a climate scientist at George Mason University who led a group of scientists calling for a Department of Justice investigation into whether the fossil-fuel industry orchestrated a cover-up of dangers from climate change.
In December 2015, during the Paris climate talks, Texas Republican and presidential candidate Ted Cruz, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, held a similarly combative hearing “on the ongoing debate over climate science, the impact of federal funding on the objectivity of climate research, and the ways in which political pressure can suppress opposing viewpoints in the field of climate science.” The hearing featured prominent climate deniers repeating discredited talking points designed to cast doubt on the science.
In the end, the Paris climate accord was non-binding, as McConnell had hoped.
Through the Looking Glass, Darkly
How could we have gotten here? How could science, our greatest global source of health, wealth, and power, have somehow become a partisan political football? How did it come to be dismissed out of hand, denied, debated, even reviled by politicians, by large swaths of the voting public, and by judges—even by Supreme Court justices—with no consequences from the media, the law, the government, or the public?
And what will it mean for democracy, in an age dominated by increasingly complex science, that our political and governance structures seem to have so little regard for the role of scientific evidence in democratic decision making?
In short, are the people still sufficiently well-informed to be trusted with their own government?
To understand what is happening—and we must, if we are to have hope of winning the war—we must first understand science’s complex and fraught relationship with political power.
