It Isn't Just The Right Taking A Big Poop On Science
To borrow from Tolstoy, it turns out that each side is anti-science in its own special way.
At Skeptic.com, Kenneth W. Krause reviews Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left, by Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell:
The authors contend that American media have long bestowed a "free pass" on the political Left (primarily progressives), who are just as likely [as the Republicans] to "misinterpret, misrepresent, and abuse" science to advance their ideological agendas. In fact, the authors say, progressives are currently waging an "undeclared war on scientific excellence itself."They accuse progressives of propagating a number of socially destructive myths, among them the assumptions that everything "natural" is good and everything "unnatural" is bad. Accordingly, homeopathy is just as good as or better than traditional medicine, vaccines actually harm children, and nuclear energy promises unprecedented sickness and loss of life.
...Unsurprisingly, progressives have corrupted the social sciences too, perhaps to the point of permanent reputational taint among both the general public and the scientific community. Recall, for example, the oppressive and unscholarly manner in which Harvard president Lawrence Summers was vilified in 2005 for merely suggesting that, one, men and women might have distinguishable natural abilities related to math and science, and, two, that personal preference rather than discrimination might account for female "underrepresentation" in high-end STEM careers.
"Summers learned the hard way," the authors say, "that the feel-good fallacies of progressive thought are stronger than the values of free inquiry and the primacy of the scientific method." Indeed, where was the intellectual debate before Summers' resignation in 2006? Is it really so improbable that different genders evolved or learned different talents? Or is it more likely, perhaps, that academics have been bullied into the "gender equality" camp with threats of being branded as sexist?
...Cornell University researchers Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams recently published a hard-hitting and no doubt divisive paper addressing this very issue. After reviewing 20 years of data, Ceci and Williams--married with three daughters of their own--decided that the evidence of discrimination against women in math-intensive fields is "aberrant, of small magnitude" and "superseded by larger, more sophisticated analyses showing no bias, or occasionally, bias in favor of women."
In agreement with their previous analyses, Ceci and Williams surmised instead that the gender gap results primarily from women's career preferences and fertility and lifestyle choices. In other words, adolescent girls tend to gravitate toward careers focusing on people as opposed to things, and female Ph.D.s interested in childrearing are less likely to apply for or maintain tenure track positions. Incidentally, as a secondary explanation, the duo pointed to evidence for upper tail disparities in cognitive ability.
As for who is worse on science:
The fact is that all ideologues are impediments to science, whether libertarians, religious zealots, and free-market fundamentalists on the one hand, or environmentalists, feminists, and social engineers on the other. Science--indeed, truth generally--is served mostly by those who conceive of themselves as individuals first and group members second (if at all). But seldom if ever are its ends advanced by committed disciples to any idea or cause.
It's because science is unsavory for the left and the right, the up and the down, the male and the female, the good men and the bad men and especially all those in between.
It says there isn't a God that gives two shits about the individual and that our impulses are predictable, hard wired, and frankly not that admirable (for the most part).
If you think rape is a social construct to keep women down vs the reality that it is a natural expression a certain type of male sexuality then science becomes distasteful.
Women have their own nasty little impulses, which mostly have to do with child bearing. When women in today's easily accessible birth control world can not be counted on having children until they are capable, it must be explained as a biological impulse.
Ppen at March 13, 2013 6:37 AM
When you have 31,487 American scientists saying that the science on Global Warming is wrong, but the government, politicians, and industry continue to push it as fact I have to question it.
The theory of evolution uses the term "theory" in the sense that they have not found every link from the planaria to how it it links to the platypus and how it links to homo sapiens. There are holes but they are reasonable holes. The logic is there. That does not lend any credence to the ideas that man and dinosaurs were contemporaries at some point, as proposed by creation theory.
When politics come into the scientific arena and try to use them to advance "facts" such as autism and inoculations it makes both look bad.
Jim P. at March 13, 2013 7:56 PM
Science and reason are the natural enemies of all stripes of authoritarianism. To gain power, authoritarians always have to lie about something, whether it's climate patterns or the genetic properies of a scapegoat class. Science will always come along and burst their bubble.
Cousin Dave at March 14, 2013 7:05 AM
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