Politics and Science
cmooney | June 9, 2006Wow. The Yearly Kos science panel this morning was awesome, really a tour de force. Facing a full room, Wesley Clark got up there and riffed for at least twenty minutes, with impressive eloquence, about the importance of science to the American future. I wish I'd been taking notes. Here's a guy whose past--unbeknownst to me--had a lot of science in it; he's a kid of the Sputnik era, and really grasps how far we've fallen from the days when scientific innovation was at the center of America's image of itself. I was very, very impressed. (And I can't complain that at one point, Clark actually…
cmooney | June 3, 2006Well, the event yesterday at the Skeptics Society conference here in Pasadena went very well, I think. I'm not going to speculate on who "won" the debate between Ron Bailey and myself, but certainly a lot of people came up to me afterwards and thanked me for what I had to say.
I won't give you the full rundown here, but I will provide a written out version of roughly what I had to say in my opening remarks at the debate--comments directly inspired by the "controversy" on this blog over this conference and who the keynote speakers are (Michael Crichton and John Stossel). Here are my comments (…
cmooney | June 1, 2006Part of debating, of course, is knowing your opponent. In the case of Ron Bailey, I've appeared at three separate events with him in the past, so we do know each other's arguments fairly well. Still, I've done a little background research now that we're going to be going head-on (we've been more orthagonally aligned at the other events). And since I know there are some good brains out there, here's your chance to react to specific arguments by Bailey that I've dug up...
First, Bailey has a long record of criticizing 1970s environmnentalists (the old school types) for exaggerating potential…
cmooney | May 30, 2006Well, folks, my debate with Ron at the Skeptics Society conference is coming up this Saturday. We did a virtual coin toss today and I won, which means I go first. Whatever else this event will be, it will certainly be illuminating.
The question at the center of the debate, you will recall, is, "Distorting Science: Who's Worse, The Left or the Right?" Honestly, I'm not sure which way Ron will go on this. Given past comments from him I wouldn't be surprised if he says, "both" or "impossible to say." As for my own basic answer: You can probably guess, but the position will be suitably nuanced. (…
cmooney | May 30, 2006This morning, I'm just finishing up final edits on the paperback version of the book. Especially as these things go in the publishing industry, it contains quite a ton of new material: A lengthy new preface that covers recent developments, puts everything in a still broader context, and discusses what scientists themselves can do about the problem of political attacks on science; and seven chapter updates, bringing the storyline up to date on climate science, "data quality," obesity and mercury, endangered species protections, evolution, stem cells, and reproductive health. The paperback…
cmooney | May 27, 2006Does the Republican mayor of New York accept the Republican War on Science critique of his own party? Recent remarks delivered at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine--where he discussed global warming, stem cells, and the Terry Schiavo case--suggest that perhaps he does. It is of some interest to me how someone like Bloomberg, if he really thinks like this, can feel at all comfortable in today's GOP....
cmooney | May 4, 2006I spent a fair amount of time last week talking to Iris Kuo, author of this Knight-Ridder story about the meaning of the phrase "sound science." I urged Kuo to check out my book--which contains one of the most extensive analyses of the "sound science" movement that I'm aware of--so that she could actually see that the term has a specific meaning on the political right, and that there are specific "sound science" policies that have been endorsed by conservatives that clearly seek to raise the scientific burden of proof before regulatory action can be achieved.
Oh well. Instead, the frame of…
cmooney | April 18, 2006I just gave a speech at George Mason, to a much more scholarly and academically oriented crowd than I'm used to addressing. The event, after all, was entitled "Who Owns Knowledge" and was sponsored by the cultural studies Ph.D. program. There was a time when these sorts of scholars, who study science in its social context, were at absolute loggerheads with members of the scientific community over the extent to which scientific knowledge is a) socially constructed; and b) profitably deconstructed.
I want to argue that those days have at least begun to be eclipsed, thanks to a clear and present…
cmooney | April 17, 2006Global warming. Stem cells. Evolution. These are high profile scientific topics that are extremely politicized. They get a fair amount of press regularly. One or the other of them is pretty much always in the news in some way. It's almost like they take turns, or rotate.
But as I and others have pointed out, a lot of the science games in the Bush administration are occurring much more below the radar. George Washington's David Michaels flags one that has gotten almost zero press:
...the White House is making a run around Congress to change the way the agencies conduct risk assessments, the…
cmooney | April 17, 2006You may not have ever heard of it, but one of the right's more interesting think tanks dealing in matters of science is the so-called Annapolis Center, or the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy. The group does the typical global warming and mercury type stuff, but it also does one thing that's unique: Each year it presents a science award to a politician. And each year, seemingly without fail, the chosen recipient of this award--which recognizes an individual who promotes "rational, science-based thinking and policy-making"--has been a leader when it comes to political attacks…
cmooney | April 14, 2006Taking over for Henry Waxman (not that the bulldog has gone to sleep or anything), Rep. Brad Miller is starting to cause some serious trouble for the Bush admin over politics and science. See here for an interview with Miller at DailyKos--which, thanks to DarkSyde, is once again doing a great job of bringing integrity of science issues to the political blogosphere. Anyway, what I like about the interview is that Miller gives credit where credit is due, including to Republicans like Sherwood Boehlert who are not pretending this problem doesn't exist (although they could have been on the ball a…
cmooney | March 20, 2006The Dem from North Carolina is asking for more evidence of scientific suppression in the Bush administration, in the interest of getting Sherry Boehlert of the House Committee on Science to hold hearings. Go Brad! If you're a government scientist and you've got a story to tell Rep. Miller, now's the time to stand up and be counted....
cmooney | March 15, 2006Hmm, sounds like a reference to the gang here at ScienceBlogs, no?
Seriously, though: It's a quotation from Edmund Burke. You see, I'm in the process of revising RWoS, and it turns out I had used this quotation from "Reflections on the Revolution in France" to point out how conservatives like Burke were uncomfortable with the Enlightenment. This got me taken to task by Adam Keiper in National Review, who said I'd taken Burke out of context:
First, the quotation from Burke is not at all a denunciation of the Enlightenment. In context, Burke is lamenting the decline of chivalry and condemning…
cmooney | March 14, 2006This is a heady day. For the first time, perhaps, we can actually say that the Bush administration, charged with some type of interference with science, has responded by cleaning up its act, rather than by denying or ignoring that the problem exists. Alas, it's really only a small sliver of the administration that is behaving in such a constructive manner. Nevertheless, it's a start.
The agency to be commended appears to be NASA, which is going to let its scientists speak freely (as long as they don't claim to represent the agency) and which is being praised by said scientists for doing so.…
cmooney | March 1, 2006My last post was about whistleblower Susan Wood, and her apparent reluctance to explain why access to Plan B emergency contraception is being held up within the administrative bowels of the Food and Drug Administration. Wood seemed hesitant to offer a political explanation for what is, unmistakably, a political phenomenon.
Now I'd like to move on to a related case: David Baltimore, distinguished scientist, Nobel laureate, and president of CalTech. If Susan Wood seemed to shy away from explaining the root causes of the war on science, Baltimore has offered a causal explanation that, to put it…
cmooney | March 1, 2006FDA whistleblower Susan Wood, with whom I've appeared publicly in the past, has a nice op-ed in the Post today about her former agency's continuing intransigence on the issue of Plan B contraception. I was a tad disappointed, though, by Wood's agnosticism about what's causing the continual delays in approving a safe, effective drug that would actually reduce the number of abortions if made widely available. Wood concludes her piece as follows:
It's been nearly three years since the first application came in to make Plan B emergency contraception available over the counter, so that women,…
cmooney | March 1, 2006Yesterday Tim did a very nice blog post in which he took apart a Michael Fumento column attacking scientific journals. I contributed a smidgeon to the debunking in the comments section. I was very proud of myself.
But little did I know (mainly because I didn't read to the end of Tim's post) that Fumento's rant had been picked up by the influential right wing bloggers at Powerline, who use it to declare that "in recent years, the politicization of science by the left has become a serious problem" (ha!). Powerline then goes on to show that, in fact, the right is the real problem with a sweeping…
cmooney | February 28, 2006Without holding anything back, I've tried to be respectful in my criticisms of Bush science adviser John Marburger. He's a well regarded scientist, after all. And I doubt he's responsible for any of the troublesome behavior of the administration.
But Marburger's defenses of the administration are getting more and more indefensible. His latest interview with NPR is a case in point. The interviewer let Marburger off far too easily, but anyone familiar with recent news about politics and science can read between the lines. So, let's parse this interview, based upon a transcript provided by Nexis…
cmooney | February 24, 2006I often get asked my opinion about who's "worse" when it comes to manipulating and undermining scientific information: corporate America, or the Christian right. My usual answer is the Christian right, because its attacks on science are far more sweeping in their implications, and have the potential to undermine the very nature of scientific knowledge itself. Industry, by contrast, doesn't want to change the definition of science to include the supernatural. It merely wants to conveniently attack and undermine certain isolated bits of scientifc information that have big potential economic…
cmooney | February 24, 2006It wasn't much publicized, but the American Association for the Advancement of Science recently adopted a statement in reaction to the latest allegations of scientific censorship in our government. You can read it here. According to AAAS:
...censorship, intimidation, or other restriction on the freedom of scientists employed or funded by governmental organizations to communicate their unclassified scientific findings and assessments not only to each other but also to policymakers and to the public is inimical to the advance of science and its appropriate application in the policy domain;
BE…