There's an article up at OpenDemocracy.net that's attempting to be contrary and counterintuitive about the Bush administration's "war on science." I must say, I found it fairly feeble.
The author's first maneuver is to significantly understate the causes of concern. Thus, the vast scope of science abuses by the administration are culled down to two narrow categories, and some of the most prominent issues (like evolution and stem cells, where the president himself, rather than some sub-lackey, has made scientifically indefensible statements) are ignored entirely.
Once this feat is accomplished, the author, Ehsan Masood, attacks what I can only call a strawman:
I often wonder what kind of person would be so shocked to discover that political interference is alive and well inside science. Any Iraqi college-student will tell you that an administration at ease with regime change in a country almost 10,000 kilometres from the American homeland is hardly likely to think twice about poking its spaner in the workings of a scientific advisory committee.
Actually, no one's shocked to discover that "political interference is alive and well inside science." What's shocking is the extent of interference, its crassness, and its audacity under the Bush administration. At some point, utter disregard for evidence and the scientific process become more than a tad alarming. The Bush administration is well past that threshold, and it refuses to apologize or even admit the existence of a problem.
But Masood has another strawman to present and then demolish:
Second, even if it is accepted that scientists are less politically savvy than people in other walks of life, there is an assumption underpinning the Union of Concerned Scientists campaign that many scientists themselves must surely find bewildering. This is the idea that a scientist's individual beliefs, behaviour or politics do not influence their decisions in areas where science meets public policy.
I seriously doubt there is any such assumption underpinning the Union of Concerned Scientists' scientific integrity campaign. There is certainly no such assumption underlying my own writing.
Many scientists, and especially sociologists of science, know very well that "individual beliefs, behaviour or politics" influence scientific decisions "in areas where science meets public policy." Tell us something we don't know. The question is, is the Bush administration's response to this well known fact--repressing government scientists, appointing lackeys to force-edit their reports, and politically slanting scientific advice in the other direction--either appropriate or proportionate to the problem?
Of course not. The constructive response to science's imperfect objectivity would be to set up a scientific advisory process with integrity and checks and balances in the form of peer review and other mechanisms to ensure a careful vetting of ideas. That's the best we can do, but that's not the Bush strategy. The administration shows little or no respect for the results of precisely such careful assessments, including from the National Academy of Sciences.
From this point, Masood's article digresses into a seemingly irrelevant discussion of the degree of scientific certainty needed to make a political decision, and I couldn't follow it any more. There's little else in it that I disagree with, but I must wonder, what is the point of this little exercise, if not to undermine concern about the Bush administration and science?
If I've been overly critical, it's because I can't see the usefulness of such an activity. Furthermore, I'm sick and tired of slapdash "counterintuitive," contrarian writing by people who ought to know better (and, in fact, probably do). Firmly established opinion is not always wrong, and not necessarily worth attacking, simply because it is firmly established opinion.
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Chris,
Based on my reading of the title of this blog entry, I think you might have missed a more interesting point of Masood's article. Your criticism is understandable given his labelling of 'The Republican War on Science' as a "vigorous polemic". That was an unfortunate choice of words on his part.
It could be made more palatable by altering one character to label your book as a rigorous polemic. The claims presented in your book are more than just vigorous, they are accurate and well-substantiated. It is a shame that Masood fails to recognize the unprecedented scale of the Bush Administration's abuses
Also, I think it is important to point out that scientists' "individual beliefs, behaviour or politics" are impertinent when it comes to their particular area of expertise. The petition organized by Frederick Seitz at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine is a case in point. Nearly all of those scientists have no expertise or background in climate science but for various reasons chose to sign a petition proclaiming their objection to the consensus view of climate change and the Kyoto protocol.
With that said, I did find some merit in Masood's concluding paragraph that "there is too little developing-country scientific input in the work of the IPCC". His ideas are not very well fleshed out in this essay and he does throw some strawmen around as you pointed out, but he is clawing at an idea that has been well articulated by Steven Bocking in Nature's Experts.
Sorry to drag this back to yesterday's discussion, but I have trouble with putting this article and Shulevitz's in the same bin.
Yes, Shulevitz should have made it clear that she believes in the obvious elements of evolution: prehistory, adaptation, our descent from primates, etc. This would have made her article much more straightforward.
But she gets to the heart of her argument when she says "Spencerian pronuciamentos [sic] have certainly become less acceptable, but the notion that evolution equals progress still runs through many evolutionary theorists' works and public statements, giving them, at times, a curiously spiritual feel."
This goes back to Darwin's finding inspiration in Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population. As Darwin writes in his Autobiography:
"I happened to read for amusement [!] Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from longcontinued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work ..."
This focus on life and death competition as the driving force in nature is not neutral one. We know that Malthus's Essay on Population is not neutral, anyway. Malthus's essay looks to us now like an apologia for the Victorians' treatment of the poor. To put it bluntly, this kind of thinking says that if a certain population dies off due to poor adaptation, that's a good outcome. It's the "natural order of things."
The idea that life and death competition is an ineluctable part of everything in nature has consequences. Suddenly, in Victorian times we had all sorts of new picture of nature, for example, the Victorian poet Tennyson declared that "Nature is red in tooth and claw", and the Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer coined the phrase "survival of the fittest". I don't think I need to go into the 20th century's appropriations of these notions. Their impact is enormous.
To quote Isaiah Berlin, we ignore ideas at our peril. So when Shulevitz proposes examining "the cosmologies that float unexamined through our lives", I don't think it's bad at all. You can argue that scientists themselves don't conflate methodological naturalism with philosophical naturalims, but a close reading of Darwin's work shows that even Darwin did just that.
One more thing. I'm not a scientist. But these things are important. I'm not comfortable with just leaving them to scientists only, thank you very much. It's just like going to my doctor. He claims to be an expert, but I'd prefer to get other opinions before I trust him with an invasive procedure...
Hey Chris,
Just FYI your website's front-page link to your blog still goes back to your old page, which is now blank since everything is archived. Folks won't know where to find you! -m
Have you seen this:
http://firedoglake.blogspot.com/2006_01_22_firedoglake_archive.html#113…