{"id":36430,"date":"2016-11-26T02:00:01","date_gmt":"2016-11-26T07:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36430"},"modified":"2016-11-24T23:14:00","modified_gmt":"2016-11-25T04:14:00","slug":"the-war-on-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/11\/26\/the-war-on-science\/","title":{"rendered":"The war on science"},"content":{"rendered":"

In City Journal<\/em>, John Tierney<\/a> explains why the most serious threats to science come not from the right’s creationist bitter clingers, but from the left’s highly selective “pro (some) science” activism:<\/p>\n

I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the \u201cparty of science.\u201d But I\u2019ve done my homework. I\u2019ve read the Left\u2019s indictments, including Chris Mooney\u2019s bestseller, The Republican War on Science<\/em>. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties?<\/p>\n

Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced? Yes, the book reveals that Republican creationists exist, but they don\u2019t 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). Mooney rails at scientists and politicians who oppose government policies favored by progressives like himself, but if you\u2019re looking for serious damage to the enterprise of science, he offers only three examples.<\/p>\n

All three are in his first chapter, during Mooney\u2019s brief acknowledgment that leftists \u201chere and there\u201d have been guilty of \u201cscience abuse.\u201d First, there\u2019s the Left\u2019s opposition to genetically modified foods, which stifled research into what could have been a second Green Revolution to feed Africa. Second, there\u2019s the campaign by animal-rights activists against medical researchers, whose work has already been hampered and would be devastated if the activists succeeded in banning animal experimentation. Third, there\u2019s the resistance in academia to studying the genetic underpinnings of human behavior, which has cut off many social scientists from the recent revolutions in genetics and neuroscience. Each of these abuses is far more significant than anything done by conservatives, and there are plenty of others. The only successful war on science is the one waged by the Left.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In City Journal, John Tierney explains why the most serious threats to science come not from the right’s creationist bitter clingers, but from the left’s highly selective “pro (some) science” activism: I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the \u201cparty of science.\u201d But I\u2019ve done my homework. I\u2019ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,74,66,53,16,13],"tags":[183,827,513],"class_list":["post-36430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-food","category-health-science","category-politics","category-science","category-usa","tag-dna","tag-genetics","tag-research"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9tA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36430"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36431,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36430\/revisions\/36431"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}