A Conservative Embrace of the Fringe

There's a fascinating overview of a book over at Salon. The book is entitled "The Republican War on Science" and it's about, well, the Republican War on Science. It's such a well written article that I don't have much more to say on the subject, so I'm just going to quote bits of it. If you're interested I really recommend you red the whole piece:

"The Republican War on Science" is nothing short of a landmark in contemporary political reporting. Mooney compiles and presents an extraordinary mountain of evidence, from several different fields, to demonstrate that the conservative wing of the Republican Party has launched an unprecedented and highly successful campaign to sow widespread confusion about the conclusions of science and its usefulness in political decision making. Using methods and strategies pioneered under the Reagan administration by the tobacco industry and anti-environmental forces, an alliance of social conservatives and corporate advocates has paralyzed or obfuscated public discussion of science on a whole range of issues. Not just climate change but also stem cell research, evolutionary biology, endangered-species protection, diet and obesity, abortion and contraception, and the effects of environmental toxins have all become arenas of systematic and deliberate bewilderment.
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Perhaps most effectively of all, the right's war on science has exploited the mainstream media's fetish for journalistic "balance," regardless of its relevance to reality. Despite the overwhelming consensus of mainstream science on global warming, newspaper articles and TV reports still dutifully call upon the shrinking universe of contrarians like Michaels. (Like most climate change skeptics, Michaels has slowly retreated, along with the polar icecaps. He used to claim that global warming either wasn't happening or wasn't caused by human activity; now he admits to both, but argues that it can't be stopped and that its potential effects have been exaggerated.)
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Perhaps most effectively of all, the right's war on science has exploited the mainstream media's fetish for journalistic "balance," regardless of its relevance to reality. Despite the overwhelming consensus of mainstream science on global warming, newspaper articles and TV reports still dutifully call upon the shrinking universe of contrarians like Michaels. (Like most climate change skeptics, Michaels has slowly retreated, along with the polar icecaps. He used to claim that global warming either wasn't happening or wasn't caused by human activity; now he admits to both, but argues that it can't be stopped and that its potential effects have been exaggerated.)

Similarly, the media has passed along reports emanating from the right-wing fringe suggesting a link between abortion and breast cancer, although virtually no mainstream scientists see any evidence to support such a connection. News accounts about the herbicide atrazine, which is widely used by American corn growers and may be connected to the worldwide decline of frogs and other amphibians, have suggested that the issue is muddled and controversial. If that's true, it's only because the chemical industry and its supporters have made it so: Research suggesting that atrazine interferes with the endocrine systems of amphibians has been published in major peer-reviewed scientific journals, while virtually all the conflicting studies have been funded by Syngenta, the company that manufactures atrazine.
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Tozzi's bill, known as the Data Quality Act, has done what Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Republican Revolution" was unable to do: It has reformed the regulatory process such that big money almost always has the upper hand. As Mooney puts it, the Bush administration has interpreted the act as "an unprecedented and cumbersome process by which government agencies must field complaints over the data, studies and reports they release to the public. It is a science abuser's dream come true." Essentially, business interests are now empowered not merely to challenge government regulations (they could already do that) but to challenge the value of "scientific information that could potentially lead to regulation somewhere down the road."

Any time a scientific study emerges that industry doesn't like -- on the effects of secondhand smoke, the link between atrazine and frog deaths, the near extinction of an endangered fish in a dammed river -- lawyers and lobbyists can now tie the science in knots for years to come, requesting reviews and re-reviews and even challenging the findings in court. Aided by friends like Fox News online columnist Steven Milloy -- who seems to view all claims of dangerous pollution or species endangerment as "junk science" -- corporate advocates can effectively swamp any potential regulation in a mixture of public confusion and "paralysis by analysis."
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In the words of Rep. George Brown, a California Democrat who has been a leading science watchdog on Capitol Hill, congressional Republicans with little or no scientific background seem to have convinced themselves that "scientific truth is more likely to be found at the fringes of science than at the center."

The author puts the blame for this trend at least partially on the post-modern philosophy of science field, which I'd agree with. The ultra-pomo lecturer I referred to in an earlier post was a major subscriber to those ideas, going so far as to declare "germ theory" (ie that germs make disease) a western construct. Anyway, an article well worth reading.

Oh, and my guess for the answer to this implied question...

We can't know right now which current scientific belief will look stupid in the 22nd century, but we can be pretty sure something will.

Dark matter and dark energy. I don't know anything more about it than what I read in New Scientist, but the whole idea sounds as thoroughly implausible to me as the idea of an "ether" and I'm just waiting for the moment when cosmologists and physisicst collectively slap their forehad and realise what they've been missing all along. But I'm probably wrong :)