Science swirling down the drain

Lots of stuff about the intersection of science and politics in the US today—here are three things to read over breakfast.

  • Bruce Sterling suggests that American science is experiencing creeping Lysenkoism, and reports that “the Bush administration has systematically manipulated scientific inquiry into climate change, forest management, lead and mercury contamination, and a host of other issues.” He predicts a rather grim end for our science and science policy.

    Before long, the damage will spread beyond our borders. International scientific bodies will treat American scientists as pariahs. This process has already begun in bioethics, meteorology, agriculture, nuclear science, and medicine, but doubts will spread to “American science” generally.

    It’s not a happy piece. Read it anyway.

  • Chris Mooney is surprised at the longevity of the critiques of Republican “science”: he says that “a similar pattern–ignore experts, favor ideologues–has been followed by the administration on any number of other science issues, ranging from global warming to the morning after pill,” and seems most impressed by the fact that these problems are being pointed out, over and over again. Where Sterling sees looming disaster, though, Mooney sees some hope: not everyone is blind to what the Bushites are doing, and science policy is becoming an important issue.

    But now I realize something more: These questions are proof positive that those who are worried about the politics of science nurture their concern within a much broader context. These Americans are thinking: As science goes, so goes the nation. On some level, the science community has always known that. What’s new is that now, we have a heck of a lot of company.

    Now we just have to get all that company motivated to campaign and vote.

  • Darksyde discusses an bill to protect scientific whistleblowers, people who come forward to politicized, ideological tampering with the science coming out of our premier federal research institutions, like NOAA. As he says, “Once again, the GOP preferred to ignore reality and opt for wishful thinking”: it was killed by the Republicans. The author of the bill, Rep. Brad Miller, (D-North Carolina), was online responding to comments, if you’d like to hear straight from the source.

    I think Mooney is right, that the public can see the damage being done to our reputation and the erosion of America’s science and engineering skill set, but there’s the obstacle—as long as the Republicans are in power, we’re not going to be able to slow the destruction.

It’s a boob-tube night

Leading in to the Carlin-Coulter cage match on Leno tonight, we’ve also got Phil Plait on the SciFi Channel. It should be a cheerful evening, since he’s discussing the end of the world.

I’m watching it now, and I will say that Phil is adorable…but the show is awfully cheesy, sprinkled with clips from science fiction movies and treating nuclear terrorism with the same seriousness as the possibility that the robots might revolt and enslave us, or aliens might land and start disintegrating people. And, as an indicator of their concern for detail, they keep spelling Paul Ehrlich’s name as “Paul Ehlrich.”

Evolution and homosexuality

Seed has an interview with Joan Roughgarden, somewhat controversial evolutionary biologist and author of Evolution’s Rainbow : Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Here’s the short summary of her basic thesis:

Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a terrible mistake. Not about natural selection–she’s no bible-toting creationist—but about his other great theory of evolution: sexual selection. According to Roughgarden, sexual selection can’t explain the homosexuality that’s been documented in over 450 different vertebrate species. This means that same-sex sexuality—long disparaged as a quirk of human culture—is a normal, and probably necessary, fact of life. By neglecting all those gay animals, she says, Darwin misunderstood the basic nature of heterosexuality.

Roughgarden is an awkward case that provokes a difficult split in people’s opinions. She is 100% right that homosexuality is common and that its prevalence ought to be regarded more seriously as an indication of an interesting and enlightening phenomenon in evolution. However, she’s completely wrong in rejecting sexual selection: in rejecting a simplistically heterosexual view of nature she swings too far the other way, adopting a simplistically homosexual view instead of a messy, complex, and almost certainly more correct mixed view. She’s rather superficial in her treatment of Darwin. And most annoyingly, she has a bad habit of playing the transgender card and accusing her critics of disagreeing with her because of some LGBT bias.

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Remember George Deutsch?

The young partisan hack appointed to NASA, who took it upon himself to filter the science a little bit to suit right-wing biases? It seems he was a demonstrably bad boy.

I wonder what ever happened that unqualified creep? I know he resigned from NASA, I’m just wondering if he has now fallen upward to a Republican think-tank or something, the usual wingnut reward for incompetence.

That revolting article about earwax and smegma

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Not all the email I get is from cranks and creationist loons. Sometimes I get sincere questions. In today’s edition of “Ask Mr Science Guy!”, Hank Fox asks,

I was thinking recently about the fact that wax collects in one’s ears, and suddenly thought to be amazed that some part of the HUMAN body produces actual WAX. Weird. Like having something like honeybee cells in your ear.

And then I started to think about what sorts of other … exudates the human exterior produces. Mucus, possibly several different types (does the nose itself produce more than one type?). Oils, possibly several different types. That something-or-other that hardens into your fingernails. Saliva, if you wanted to count our frequently-open mouth as sort-of exterior. What else?

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Clausen, Keck, Hiesey

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To continue a bit of theme, I mentioned that there were some different ways to approach biology, and that old-school systematists with their breadth of knowledge about the diversity of life are getting harder and harder to find. This is something I also bring up in my introductory biology course, where we discuss how biologists do their work, and I mention that one distinction you can find (which is really a continuum and frequently breached) is that there are bench scientists and field scientists, and they differ in multiple ways. Bench scientists tend to be strongly reductionist, tend to focus on one or very few species, and may study just one specific, highly inbred lab strain of a species, and try to minimize environmental variables. Variation is noise that interferes with getting at basic mechanisms. Field scientists, on the other hand, argue that the simplicity of the lab is unrealistic, that the proper study of organisms has to be done in the messy complexity of the real world, and think that variation, rather than being uninteresting noise, is fascinating stuff, the meat and potatoes of evolution. Both points of view have their place, and speaking for all biologists, I think we appreciate the power and necessity of both approaches. The money seems to mostly go to the bench guys, though, which does unfortunately skew the field as a whole.

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I think I despise anti-environmentalists as much as I do anti-evolutionists

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Ah, the libertarian extremists have found my site and are making comments. It’s a peculiar pathology that thinks environmentalism is an evil plot, that planning is communism/socialism, and that Jesus was a good capitalist. It is particularly irksome to try and deal with people who are so far gone that they deny science warning them of environmental dangers and impending problems.

How irksome? Imagine that a scientist and one of these deranged libertarian right-wing anti-environmentalist science deniers go out for a drive one day…

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