Both sides cherry-pick research and misrepresent evidence to support their agendas. Some surveys show that Republicans, particularly libertarians, are more scientifically literate than Democrats, but there’s plenty of ignorance all around. The danger from the Left does not arise from stupidity or dishonesty those failings are bipartisan. The only successful war on science is the one waged by the Left. Each of these abuses is far more significant than anything done by conservatives, and there are plenty of others. Third, there’s the resistance in academia to studying the genetic underpinnings of human behavior, which has cut off many social scientists from the recent revolutions in genetics and neuroscience. Second, there’s the campaign by animal-rights activists against medical researchers, whose work has already been hampered and would be devastated if the activists succeeded in banning animal experimentation. Mooney rails at scientists and politicians who oppose government policies favored by progressives like himself, but if you’re looking for serious damage to the enterprise of science, he offers only three examples.Īll three are in his first chapter, during Mooney’s brief acknowledgment that leftists “here and there” have been guilty of “science abuse.” First, there’s the Left’s opposition to genetically modified foods, which stifled research into what could have been a second Green Revolution to feed Africa. Bush refused federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but that hardly put a stop to it (and not much changed after Barack Obama reversed the policy). Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced? Yes, the book reveals that Republican creationists exist, but they don’t affect the biologists or anthropologists studying evolution. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties? I’ve read the Left’s indictments, including Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science.
I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the “party of science.” But I’ve done my homework. Conservatives just don’t have that much impact on science. It’s fine to expose pseudoscience on the left, they say, but why aren’t you an equal-opportunity debunker? Why not write about conservatives’ threat to science? My friends don’t like my answer: because there isn’t much to write about. My liberal friends sometimes ask me why I don’t devote more of my science journalism to the sins of the Right.
0 kommentar(er)
