Posted on 11/20/2008 3:03:02 PM PST by Sherman Logan
This letter arrived in response to my bloggingheads dialogue with Brink Lindsey. Name and affiliation posted with permission of the author:
I find it astonishing that conservatives can discuss the election results and their path back to power without addressing the right wing's increasing estrangement from science. Religious conservatives have refused to acknowledge that evolution is the cornerstone of biological sciences and that the earth and universe are billions of years old, Free market enthusiasts have denied the efficacy and necessity of the Clean Air Act’s protections of the environment and human health. They have also refused to acknowledge Reagan’s leadership role in protecting the stratospheric ozone layer and the successes of the Montreal Protocol in addressing this global problem. It is genuinely difficult to find an adult discussion of climate change on any conservative web site. Conservatives find themselves arrayed against the National Academy of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society and the Academies of Science of many countries.
Science was transformed into a partisan affair by Gingrich et al.. Prior to that time, many Republicans could be counted upon as realists concerning nature. Lincoln signed the legislation founding the National Academy of Science. T. Roosevelt established rule-making agencies that valued scientific expertise above political influence. Nixon founded the EPA and was important in passing the Clear Air Act, Clean Water Act and National Environmental Policy Act. He appointed Ruckelshaus as EPA’s initial director. The major steps to protect the stratospheric ozone layer were made with the conscious leadership of Reagan and Bush I. Now Republican candidates are required to nod in the direction of creationism and the young earth. McCain’s brave stand acknowledging the reality of climate change cost him dearly among the most partisan Republicans. They stayed home.
Your own conversation is market obsessed. You acknowledge that markets have won the most important arguments and that even Democrats understand this. The Wall fell and the planned economies blew away with the dust. Even bleeding-heart liberals support micro- credit as a most effective form of foreign aid. But the “Market Alone Explains Progress” narrative overlooks the contribution of technology. Malthus was wrong in each generation because scientists made him wrong. The Markets First crowd has no understanding or appreciation of how science and technology produced the practices that permitted the astonishing growth of the last three centuries. So, when the findings of science are found to be inconvenient by the advocates of utterly free markets, they kneecap the scientists.
I was trained by conservative scientists who worked under a Republican administered EPA to establish the scientific foundations for the Clean Air Act regulations that have saved thousands of lives. I studied ozone depletion under Reagan. Now, practitioners who follow the data are slandered by Conservatives. 200 countries have ratified the Montreal Protocol. The world’s turn away from the release of CFCs has clearly resulted in arresting the decreases in ozone that triggered the Protocol. Poor Rush and his minions are unable to acknowledge this fundamental fact. They use Montreal Protocol as a slur. The Right Wing is estranged from both science and reality. Educated Americans are increasingly seeing a Republican Party that will lie about science to satisfy dogmatists and ideologues. Increasingly science and technology are defining the environment within which the market and policy must succeed. You are losing those who understand this century. How can Republicans rebuild their winning coalition when they insist that its members deny physical reality?
James Charles Wilson John Evans Professor Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering University of Denver
I think the author confuses policies favored by (some or many) scientists with science itself.
The late Michael Crichton had a lot to say about the topic of scientists becoming proponents of specific policies while continuing to claim credibility as unbiased experts. It doesn't work. True science actually requires double-blind studies so that those analyzing the data aren't influenced by what they believe themselves.
We conservatives cover the whole range of science and religious views. In fact I think that makes us far more credible when speaking on those subjects because we do discuss the whole range of viewpoints rather than one narrow minded band.
Why should David Frum have a seat at the Opinion table?
He revealed what he was made of in the last election, and it is not Conservatism.
Interesting letter.
I wonder if the same scientist acknowledges the humanity of the unborn. Science has proven that as well.
No, we are right to stand up for the truth—even if it is uncomfortable for the Gore Crowd.
I’ve even had liberal Democrats speak to me recently about how Al Gore is a scam artist.
The truth is getting out there, we may have to wander in the wilderness like the children of Israel for a long time, though.
No need to read that cr@p magazine, the “National Review.” after the comments from their authors this past election.
It used to be a decent rag at one time.
Anyone who studies the history of science will find that western science and technology were the products of a Christian civilization.
There are numerous books that make the case, but I’d suggest Alfred North Whitehead and Lynn Thorndike, for starters.
The Greeks, Romans, and Chinese all made scientific discoveries, but tended not to do anything further with them. The Greeks invented natural philosophy, but lost sight of it fairly rapidly. It was Christians who kept philosophy alive for 2000 years. It was Christians who firmly believed that God created the universe as rational, and gave man the freedom to understand it.
As the political correct idiots have begun to take over the sciences in academia, or to take over the various institutions that fund scientists, science has tended to grow more politicized and less reliable. Global warming is one instance of this. Without the moral compass and the basic rationality that goes with being Christian, it’s only too likely that the sciences would decay rather than grown stronger. It is delusory to think that pure secularization would actually strengthen the sciences.
Yes! and they just won’t ackowledge global warming and the melting of the polar ice caps and drowning polar bears.
Not the whole Magazine or NRO, but Frum is more then content to attach himself and his opinions to Obama and the Democrats, and he has no more place at the table, he made his choice, he is leaving NR, he should depart and be heard from no more.
Science is awesome
There’s no dialectic between evolution and religion. The dialectic is between evolution and modern mathematics and probability theory. A dialectic between evolution and religion would require a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolutionism (so that you’d have an apples/apples comparison) and the only plausible candidates would be rastafari and voodoo.
Eh, it's a livin', I s'pose.
Care to add Rich Lowery to that, too?
Among the more amusing and risible conceits of this professor is the notion that free market theory is defective in failing to account for technology.
As if the progress of technology had no relationship to free markets.
I mean, how dumb can you get?
Poor Rush and his minions are unable to acknowledge this fundamental fact.
Minions, huh? I guess he's not bitter about the criticism leveled at the Government-Science Complex?
I don’t have a problem with the idea of global warming. Let the scientists debate that issue. I do have a problem when they step into matters of economics and pretend that they can solve it (if there is, in fact, a problem) with taxes, regulations and cap ‘n trade.
As for other other issues, I think we should only be concerned with the science that deals with repeatable, observable events that take place in the present day.
Rich Lowery is the Republican version of John Edwards...
All smile, little else.
Our society is becoming more and more secular. At the same time, science literacy in the general population is going down and down from where it was a few decades ago. I won’t say that correlation equals causation but it does make one wonder.
1. Many times in the past the Earth has been much warmer and much cooler than it is today. What is the appropriate or normal temperature of the Earth and how do you know?
2. There have been dozens of times in the past few hundred thousand years when there has been as much as a mile of ice over what is now Central Park in New York. Was the global warming that melted that ice a good thing or a bad thing and why?
3. Mars, Venus and the moon and other solar system bodies for which we have baseline information are also warming. Doesn’t it make sense that whatever is warming them is what is warming the Earth instead of human activity?
4 out of 5 doctors agree, Chesterfields are the smoothest smoke around. Or something like that.
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