The War on Science

Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

Shawn Otto

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781571319524
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica della scienza e della tecnologia

An "insightful" and in-depth look at anti-science politics and its deadly results (Maria Konnikova, New York Times– bestselling author of The Biggest Bluff ). Thomas Jefferson said, "Wherever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government." But what happens when they aren't? From climate change to vaccinations, transportation to technology, health care to defense, we are in the midst of an unprecedented expansion of scientific progress—and a simultaneous expansion of danger. At the very time we need them most, scientists and the very idea of objective knowledge are being bombarded by a vast, well-funded war on science, and the results are deadly. Whether it's driven by identity politics, ideology, or industry, the result is an unprecedented erosion of thought in Western democracies as voters, policymakers, and justices actively ignore scientific evidence, leaving major policy decisions to be based more on the demands of the most strident voices. This compelling book investigates the historical, social, philosophical, political, and emotional reasons why evidence-based politics are in decline and authoritarian politics are once again on the rise on both left and right—and provides some compelling solutions to bring us to our collective senses, before it's too late. "If you care about attacks on climate science and the rise of authoritarianism, if you care about biased media coverage and shake-your-head political tomfoolery, this book is for you."— The Guardian

PART I

Democracy’s Science Problem

Chapter 1

THE WAR ON SCIENCE

Wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.

—Thomas Jefferson, January 8, 1789

Houston, We Have a Problem

Thomas Jefferson’s trust in the well-informed voter lies at the heart of the modern democracy that has, over the course of two centuries, come to guide the world. Much like the “invisible hand” that guides Adam Smith’s economic marketplace, so too does the invisible hand of the people’s will guide the democratic process. Faith in this idea is so central to democracy that George Washington emphasized it in the nation’s first inaugural address. “No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States,” he told a joint session of Congress gathered in Federal Hall, which stood kitty-corner to today’s New York Stock Exchange.

But lately the invisible hand seems confused and indecisive. Democratic governments the world over are increasingly paralyzed, unable to act on many key issues that threaten the economic and environmental stability of their countries and the world. They often enact policies that seem to run against their own interests, quashing or directly contradicting well-known evidence. Ideology and rhetoric guide policy discussions, often with a brazenly willful denial of facts. Even elected officials seem willing to defy laws, often paying negligible prices. And the civil society we once knew now seems divided and angry, defiantly embracing unreason. Everyone, we are told, has his or her own experience of reality, and history is written by the victors. What could be happening?

At the same time, science and technology have come to affect every aspect of life on the planet. There is a phase change going on in the scientific revolution: a shifting from one state to another, as from a solid to a liquid. There is a sudden, quantitative expansion of the number of scientists and engineers around the globe, coupled with a sudden qualitative expansion of their ability to collaborate with each other over the Internet.

These two changes are dramatically speeding up the process of discovery and the convergence of knowledge across once-separate fields, a process Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson named consilience. We now have fields where economics merges with environmental science, electrical engineering with neuroscience and physics, computer science with biology and genetics, astronomy with biology, and many more. This consilience is shedding new light on long-held assumptions about the world we live in and the nature of life.

Over the course of the next forty years, science is poised to create more knowledge than humans have created in all of recorded history, completely redefining our concepts about—and power over—life and the physical and mental worlds as we assume editing control over the genetic code and mastery in our understanding of the brain. One only has to recall the political battles fought over past scientific advances to see that we are in for a rocky ride. How that rush of new knowledge will impact life, how it will be applied through technology and law, and whether our societies and governments will be able to withstand the immense social and economic upheavals it will bring depends upon whether we can update our political process to accommodate it. Can we manage the next phase of the scientific revolution to our advantage, or will we become its unwilling victims?

If that were not enough, the explosion of information technology is creating a power struggle between individual privacy and the public good, and between the organizations—businesses, criminal enterprises, terrorist groups, and governments—who seek to use this new technology for influence and control. Sensing technology and robotics are threatening to replace millions of truck drivers and taxi drivers over the next decade, and to mechanize warfare with tiny autonomous robots that carry enough charge and intelligence to hunt and kill humans. These advancements have prompted many of the world’s leading scientists and engineers to warn that we must get ahead of artificial intelligence before it gets ahead of us.

As we are being overwhelmed by new scientific and technological developments, we also are facing a host of legacy challenges caused by commercialization of the incomplete scientific knowledge of the past. Thanks to early science, humans have prospered, but at a cost: significant climate disruption, unprecedented environmental degradation, massive extinction of other species, vast economic and power inequities, and a world armed to the teeth with the products of a military-industrial complex, including weapons that could destroy nearly all life on the planet.

Without a better way of incorporating science into our policymaking, democracy may ultimately fail its promise. We now have a population that we cannot support without destroying our environment—and the developing world is advancing by using the same model of unsustainable development. We are 100 percent dependent on science and technology to find a solution.

The Whipsaw of Science

Between these two areas—the wild future that is rapidly emerging and the unsustainable present whose repercussions we can no longer ignore—science and technology are poised to whipsaw us in the coming decades like never before. This has the potential to produce even more intense social upheaval and political paralysis at the very time we can least afford them.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the problem is the dearth of conversation about the issues in the policymaking process. Imagine for a moment the potential science-themed questions one could ask a candidate for president, for example, or Parliament, or Congress, in a debate, forum, or news interview. There are multitudes of them, each with profound relevance to both today’s problems and those of the near future. Because of this, they are political, but they are rarely asked or answered in the political process. A small sampling could include:

What is your vision for maintaining a competitive edge as other countries work toward becoming global forces in science and technology? Will you support tripling our investment in mental-health research? Will you support using science to study the underlying causes of gun violence? What are your thoughts on balancing energy and the environment? How should we manage biosecurity in an age of rapid international travel while preserving civil liberties? What should we do about the world’s aging nuclear weapons? How will you tackle climate disruption? Do you support embryonic stem-cell research? What steps will you take to stop the collapse of pollinator colonies and promote pollinator health? What can we do to stimulate and incentivize the transition to a low-carbon economy? How should we handle immigration of highly skilled workers? In an era of intense droughts, what steps will you take to better manage our freshwater resources? What should we do to prevent ocean fisheries collapses? Will you support federal funding to make public broadband Internet universally available? Is Internet access a universal human right? How can we better protect the health of the world’s oceans? How can we improve science education? What steps can we take to better incorporate science information into our policymaking process? What will you do to slow the sixth mass extinction? Should we require children to be vaccinated against human papillomavirus, the leading cause of cervical cancer? Should only evolution be taught in science classes, or should intelligent design also be taught? When is it acceptable for a president or prime minister to implement policies that are contradicted by science? Should pharmaceutical companies be allowed to advertise on public airwaves? What will you do to incentivize the production of generic pharmaceuticals to prevent shortages and extreme price increases? Should foods made from genetically modified crops be labeled? Should we regulate the use of nanoparticles in the environment? Do you support federal renewable energy tax credits? What would you do to end the war on drugs and transition to treating drugs as a public-health problem? Will you support increased funding for curiosity-driven basic research? What steps would you take to repair the postdoctoral employment pipeline so that highly trained workers can get jobs in their fields? Will you support federal funding to study science denial and the threat it poses to democracy? Do you support banning the use of antibiotics in animal feed? What other steps should we take to stop the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria? Should pharmacists be allowed to deny prescriptions on the basis of their religion? Should public officials be allowed to deny services on the basis of their religion? Should the federal government regulate hydraulic fracturing? Should parents be required to vaccinate their children? Under what circumstances should there be an exemption? Do vaccines cause autism? Will you support adoption of new, cleaner nuclear reactors for power generation? Do you support water fluoridation? Will you prioritize an Apollo Project for clean energy innovation to stimulate the economy? Should we initiate a manned mission to Mars? What steps would you take to transition to a sustainable or circular economy? Do you oppose or support plans to mine copper and other nonferrous minerals in or near water-rich areas? How should we balance privacy with freedom and security on the Internet? Do you support reinstating the Fairness Doctrine in broadcast journalism? What steps would you take to control the global population? Do you support or oppose efforts to prosecute energy companies for funding denial of climate science? How can we stop antiscience disinformation campaigns from stalling public policy while protecting freedom of expression? Would you use foreign and economic policy to demand trading partners adopt uniform environmental standards? What will you do about anticipated economic disruptions posed by driverless vehicles and other robotic outsourcing of jobs? What is your position on deploying autonomous, artificially intelligent killer robots in the battlefield? Will you support restoring funding for the US Congress’s nonpartisan science advisory body, the Office of Technology Assessment? Should the morning-after pill be available off the shelf in pharmacies?

The length of the above sample is part of the point—the list is of course much longer—and it is growing as science advances. Yet almost none of these issues are discussed on the campaign trail. All of them evoke strong reactions, and, in each of these cases, policy has become stuck because of our broken way of incorporating evidence from science into the policymaking and political processes. Something’s got to change.

The Battle for the Future

Science and engineering are providing us with increasingly clear pictures of how to solve many of our challenges, but policymakers are increasingly unwilling to pursue the remedies that scientific evidence suggests. Instead, they take one of two routes: deny the science, or pretend the problems don’t exist. Vast areas of scientific knowledge and the people who work in them are under daily attack in a fierce worldwide war on science. Scientific advances in public health, biology and the environment are being resisted or rolled back. Political and religious institutions are pushing back against science and reason in a way that is threatening social and economic stability.

This pullback is affecting leading and emerging economies alike. The name of the radical pan-national Islamist group Boko Haram roughly translates as “Western education is forbidden.” The Islamic drive for al-asala, or authenticity, leads some fundamentalist Muslims to reject Western science in favor of Quranic instructions, says Islamic scholar Bassam Tibi. But radical Islam is not alone in this rejection. The vanguard of the retreat is in the Western democracies, where Christian fundamentalists; postmodernist academics, teachers, and journalists; liberal new age purists; and industry front groups all attack science for their own reasons.

Politically, the war on science is coming from both left and right. But the antiscience of those on the right—a coalition of fundamentalist churches and corporations largely in the resource extraction, petrochemical and agrochemical industries—has far more dangerous public-policy implications because it’s about forestalling policy based on evidence to protect destructive business models. As well, the right generally has far more money with which to spread disinformation and attack science on a host of issues.

Those on the political left often unwittingly abet the right’s antiscience efforts by arguing that truth is relative, harboring suspicions about hidden dangers to health and the environment that are not supported by evidence, and selectively rejecting science that doesn’t affirm their health-food and back-to-Eden value system. While they are right that there are serious environmental and health threats afoot from poorly regulated industries, they undermine their credibility when they extend these suspicions to scientifically unsupported ideas like vaccines cause autism, cell phones cause brain cancer, or genetically modified crops are unsafe to eat. By seeking arguments that support preexisting beliefs (however laudable the concerns that motivate them) instead of looking to scientific evidence, these progressives give up the very critical-thinking and argumentation tools liberals once used to defend modern society against its authoritarian attackers.

The split is happening not just in science, but across the engineering world as well. Unlike a generation ago, when a radio could be made sitting at one’s kitchen table, a smartphone cannot be made in the same way. This lack of plain accessibility is making complex science and technology less a matter of knowhow and more magical. Smartphones and flying brooms are both made by people cloistered away wearing long robes and uttering strange incantations. This inaccessibility makes science and technology more into a matter of belief than know-how, making people more vulnerable to disinformation campaigns. It is also increasingly difficult for the non-science-literate to accurately perceive the threats, challenges, and opportunities of this complex new world so dominated by inaccessible and magical science and technology (something that, for the reader, will hopefully change by the end of this book).

This is having effects across society from education to law enforcement. Consider the case of Xiaoxing Xi, the chair of Temple University’s physics department. Xi was arrested by the FBI in 2015 for leaking top-secret technology information to China. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Part I: Democracy’s Science Problem
• Part II: The History of Modern Science Politics
• Part III: The Three-Front War on Science
• Part IV: Winning the War
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author