Does Science Matter in this Election?

Welcome to Seed's latest blog, Vote for Science. Seed set this blog up to cover science, science policy, and science politics relevant to the November election. The current plan is that the blog will run only until the election. Maybe it will continue. We shall see. I have been told I am a "guest blogger," which means, I think, that I will disappear when the blog disappears. I am a chemist/physicist by training and have worked in science and R&D policy. I am now heading up the Strategic Security Program at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), but my views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of FAS. (I have an FAS blog where my views do express those of FAS.)

I want to start with a very broad, general question for my first entry: does science matter in this election? Should it? Who cares what candidates for president and Congress think about science?

There are at least three ways in which our leaders' attitudes toward science affect each of us individually and collectively as a nation. The first is that attitudes toward science affect government funding in science. The Federal Government is a major, in some areas dominant, funder for scientific research. When the government funds science, as with anything, whether a highway project or education, it has to set priorities. Setting science (and funding) priorities is not the rational process that scientists might hope for. Within disciplines, the scientists themselves do a decent job of setting priorities. But how the government sets relative priorities between, say, radio astronomy and botany is a bit mysterious. And spending tax money is always going to be political. Be sure that the funding for the Hubble Space Telescope depends, in part, on spectacular images that wow the public. Spending on cell biology is personal if the taxpayer thinks you are going to prevent cancer. So who you vote for, and what you tell your member of Congress, affects what research gets done. If politicians favor solid state physics over geology because they judge that the former will give a better return on investment, then I don't see any problem with that. But if they favor solid state physics over geology because they think the world is only six thousand years old, we might need to worry.

More important is how our politicians, the people we vote for to make policy decisions on our behalf, use science to inform the public policy debate. This is where most of us think the action is. Whether we are deciding on approving a drug or building a nuclear power plant, we should want to make a comparison of costs and benefits. But if I have decided one way or the other from the beginning, then it is tempting to fiddle the data to make the inputs to the cost/benefit equation look better. Politicians are rarely scientists and many don't see the larger dangers of playing the game of skewing the inputs to get the desired outputs or they can be easily taken in by those that do. Mathematicians agree on what a convincing demonstration is but in Washington the definition is empirical: a "convincing demonstration" is one that convinces enough people to win the vote. We should want politicians who make decisions based on the best information available.

Finally, the most important reason we should pay attention to our political leaders' attitudes toward science is that they affect the nation's attitude toward science. When the government of the United States does not like the political and economic implications of climate change, it could just say that it prefers Hummers to polar bears and we could vote on that. But rather than being honest about the choices that have to be made, it wants to pretend that we don't have to choose, we can have it all and be happy. It does that by misrepresenting the process of science, it muddies science by, for example, willfully misconstruing words like "uncertainty." When the president of the country says he believes children should be taught the "controversy" between evolution and creationism, he is profoundly misleading the public about what science is, how it works, and what it can and cannot say. Scientists know that a good scientist should always be skeptical but, while skepticism within science is powerful and healthy, skepticism about science will destroy, not just the technological machinery of our economy, but the rational tradition of modern society. It will discourage intelligent students from pursuing science, it will misinform a generation of voters about what science is, it addles our brains and makes us stupid. This is the most important reason to consider a politician's attitudes toward science when you pull the lever.