The War on Science

     Yes, Republican creationists exist, but they don’t affect the biologists or anthropologists studying evolution. Yes, George W. Bush refused federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but that hardly put a stop to it (and not much changed after Barack Obama reversed the policy). Many Liberals rail at scientists and politicians who oppose government policies favored by progressives, but if you’re looking for serious damage to the enterprise of science, they come from the Left.  The only successful war on science is the one waged by the Left. The danger from the Left does not arise from stupidity or dishonesty; those failings are bipartisan.  Two huge threats to science are peculiar to the Left—and they’re getting worse.

     The first threat is confirmation bias, the well-documented tendency of people to seek out and accept information that confirms their beliefs and prejudices. In a classic study of peer review, 75 psychologists were asked to referee a paper about the mental health of left-wing student activists. Some referees saw a version of the paper showing that the student activists’ mental health was above normal; others saw different data, showing it to be below normal. Sure enough, the more liberal referees were more likely to recommend publishing the paper favorable to the left-wing activists. When the conclusion went the other way, they quickly found problems with its methodology.
     Scientists try to avoid confirmation bias by exposing their work to peer review by critics with different views, but it’s increasingly difficult for liberals to find such critics. Academics have traditionally leaned left politically, and many fields have essentially become monocultures, especially in the social sciences, where Democrats now outnumber Republicans by at least 8 to 1. (In sociology, where the ratio is 44 to 1, a student is much likelier to be taught by a Marxist than by a Republican.) The lopsided ratio has led to another well-documented phenomenon: people’s beliefs become more extreme when they’re surrounded by like-minded colleagues. They come to assume that their opinions are not only the norm but also the truth.





      Groupthink has become so routine that many scientists aren’t even aware of it. Social psychologists, who have extensively studied conscious and unconscious biases against out-groups, are quick to blame these biases for the underrepresentation of women or minorities in the business world and other institutions. But they’ve been mostly oblivious to their own diversity problem, which is vastly larger. Democrats outnumber Republicans at least 12 to 1 (perhaps 40 to 1) in social psychology.  Having common values makes a group cohesive, which can be quite useful, but it’s the last thing that should happen to a scientific field. Progressivism, especially anti-racism, has become a fundamentalist religion, complete with anti-blasphemy laws.
      The second great threat from the Left is its long tradition of mixing science and politics. To conservatives, the fundamental problem with the Left is the delusion that experts are wise enough to redesign society. Conservatives distrust central planners, preferring to rely on traditional institutions that protect individuals’ “natural rights” against the power of the state. Leftists have much more confidence in experts and the state. The Left calls for “scientific socialism,” a redesign of society supposedly based on the scientific method.  Progressives yearned for a society guided by impartial agencies unconstrained by old-fashioned politics and religion.  The Left sees scientists as the new high priests, offering them prestige, money, and power. The power too often corrupted. Over and over, scientists yielded to the temptation to exaggerate their expertise and moral authority, sometimes for horrendous purposes.





      Thomas Jefferson would be appalled. To him,  Science was the great equalizer. “Wherever the people are well-informed,” Jefferson wrote, “they can be trusted with their own government.” To secure this, he championed a free press and public education. This places an ever-increasing burden on the voter, and in an age when science has grown mind-bogglingly complex, public education and the press are unduly influenced by corporations focused on financial outcomes, religious extremists intent on forcing biblical literalist policies, and postmodernist academics who’ve laid the foundation for all this by teaching that science is but one of many equally valid “ways of knowing” and that all truth is relative. In particular, Otto argues that journalists are taught there is no such thing as objectivity. This has created an over-emphasis on balance, which these days often pits scientists relaying objective knowledge on the one hand, against impassioned advocates seeking to persuade on the other. This false balance skews public dialogue toward extreme views by presenting opinions as if they had the weight of knowledge, weakening the press’s role as democracy’s tiller.
      Eventually even false balance can be countered with ensuring scientists appearing are taught how to be more confrontational as opposed to aiming to be reasoned educators. The "I am not a scientist" is normally used to mean "I am not scientifically literate" and then the question has to be "so why do you think your opinion matters over textbook science?"

      Mark Twain said :

If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.

     At the beginning of the 21st century you can substitute "the Internet" for "the newspaper" and Twain's remark is still valid.

Interesting Thanksgiving Facts

 

    


     Every year, on the fourth Thursday of November, millions of Americans celebrate a federal holiday to watch football and parades and stuff themselves at the dinner table. Here are some facts:
     -Everything we know about the three-day Plymouth gathering comes from a description in a letter written by Edward Winslow, leader of the Plymouth Colony, in 1621, Monac said. The letter had been lost for 200 years and was rediscovered in the 1800s. In 1841, Boston publisher Alexander Young printed Winslow’s brief account of the feast and added his own twist, dubbing the 1621 feast the “First Thanksgiving.”
     -The first Thanksgiving was held in the autumn of 1621 and included 50 Pilgrims and 90 Wampanoag Indians and lasted three days. Many historians believe that only five women were present at that first Thanksgiving, as many women settlers didn’t survive that difficult first year in the U.S.
     -Thanksgiving didn’t become a national holiday until over 200 years later! Sarah Josepha Hale, the woman who actually wrote the classic song “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” convinced President Lincoln in 1863 to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, after writing letters for 17 years campaigning for this to happen.

     -The Pilgrims were a minority of those aboard the “Mayflower” as they traveled to the New World. There were many “strangers” among them, notably the sailors who were providing the skill to sail the ship across the Atlantic. These men, who did not share the religious zeal of their passengers, looked down upon the Pilgrims with contempt.
     -When the pilgrims arrived aboard the Mayflower in 1620, they found the Wampanoag population had been decimated by disease – probably smallpox. Ten years earlier, settlers had sailed up the East Coast of America and found it well populated – making it harder for them to settle and farm successfully. When they arrived, the Wampanoag saw them as potential trade partners and allies against a rival tribe – the Narragansett.

     -The Pilgrims did not stumble upon an unknown frontier when they landed in New England in 1620. The waters off what would later be referred to as Massachusetts had been fished by the English for at least 100 years before the Pilgrims arrived.
     -The first Thanksgiving celebration in the fall of 1621 went on for three days and included 91 Native Americans and 56 settlers. The menu consisted of ducks, geese, lobsters, clams, bass, corn, green vegetables and dried fruit. Also included on the table were venison, watercress, leeks, wild cranberries and boiled pumpkin. “Popped corn” was also eaten at the first Thanksgiving. What did not appear at the first Thanksgiving includes pumpkin pie, bread (as we know it), apple cider, and no milk, butter or cheese since cows had not been brought with them from Europe.
 

     -The Pilgrims did not use forks. They used a knife, spoon, large napkin and their fingers to eat. They would also share both plates and drinking vessels. This provided a means for diseases to spread quickly. Many died or became ill because of this practice which we see, today, as unsafe and unsanitary. Germ theory was at least two centuries in the future.
     -The Pilgrims did not live in log cabins. If there is a picture of them in your textbook living in buildings made of logs, it is wrong. The Pilgrims made their buildings out of hand hewn planks. They had no glass for their windows, and simply covered them with wooden shutters.