Shermer on liberal antiscience

Michael Shermer (whose column I used to fact check at Scientific American, thus making me as I liked to say a "skeptic's skeptic") has a Sciam piece now on "The Liberals' War on Science." The persuasiveness of Shermer's piece is not, to me, bolstered by his praise for Science Left Behind, a book I reviewed negatively here, but I think he's right to raise the oft-neglected topic of left-wing antiscience. Shermer is a self-described libertarian, and it reflects well on Sciam that it publishes his politically tinged columns (given that expressed political opinion on the Sciam staff is virtually uniformly liberal).

As usual, discussing the political antiscience subject provokes heated debates about who's worse, left or right. (See the comments at Shermer's piece, as well as at Justin Green's gloss on it.) My own view, about which more here, here and here, among other places) is that there are significant problems of science denial and disparagement on both left and right--and that the right overall is even worse than the left at the moment (given widespread conservative denialism on climate science)--and that these things have changed over time and will change again, pace claims about the "Republican Brain."

Antiscience identity politics

There was a time, aka the 1990s, when the postmodern left and science were notably at odds. I've long cherished this anecdote:

When social psychologist Phoebe Ellsworth took the podium at a recent interdisciplinary seminar on emotions, she was already feeling rattled. Colleagues who'd presented earlier had warned her that the crowd was tough and had little patience for the reduction of human experience to numbers or bold generalizations about emotions across cultures. Ellsworth had a plan: She would pre-empt criticism by playing the critic, offering a social history of psychological approaches to the topic. But no sooner had the word "experiment" passed her lips than the hands shot up. Audience members pointed out that the experimental method is the brainchild of white Victorian males. Ellsworth agreed that white Victorian males had done their share of damage in the world but noted that, nonetheless, their efforts had led to the discovery of DNA. This short-lived dialogue between paradigms ground to a halt with the retort: "You believe in DNA?"

Then a lot happened. Postmodernism faded as an academic force. Tensions between conservatives and scientists increased, most saliently on climate and evolution. Left-wing antiscience turned into a relatively obscure issue, albeit one that this blog, with its affinity for obscurity, occasionally visited.

However, if anyone thinks that science is going to be untouched by the current inflammation of PC leftism on campuses and beyond, let's just say "You believe in DNA?" has spawned more questions in febrile young minds:

This is where unthinking adherence to identity politics gets us. (From an NY student, name cropped for obv reasons). pic.twitter.com/CHdIRZVP6Z

— Juliet (@Jsoosty) November 12, 2015

I've written in the past about a possible switcheroo of pro- and anti-science positions in the political spectrum. I was thinking of a decades-long timeframe, but it may not be such a long wait.

Binder full of antiscience

More background for my Nov. 17 "Science vs. Politics" talk at the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking (PhACT): "Antiscience Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy," by Shawn Lawrence Otto at Scientific American.

'Scientifically untrue things'

Over at Reason, Ronald Bailey has a piece, "Why Do People Believe Scientifically Untrue Things?," that points to various antiscience tendencies on left and right. I think he's too kind to the GOP on guns (pressure to have the CDC refrain from studying gun violence has been a GOP cause, sadly), and I question whether nuclear power boils down to a science/antiscience or left/right issue as easily as he suggests (consider some libertarian thinking on the subject). But it's a worth-reading piece nonetheless.

Antiscience update

The debate about who's more antiscience has flared up again. See these two pieces:

"The Republican Party Isn't Really the Anti-Science Party," by Mischa Fisher, The Atlantic.

"GOP is an anti-science party of nuts (sorry, Atlantic!)" by Sean McElwee, Salon.

I've written and spoken about this subject fairly extensively, and don't want to repeat myself. (Interestingly, the overall debate tends to repeat itself quite a bit, with the same statistics.) To make a long story short, my conclusion is there are problems of hostility and stupidity vis-a-vis science on both sides of the political aisle, and currently they're worse on the right. For more, start here and here.

GOP antievolution regression

I guess I'm not all that strict about not blogging before 2014. Here's some somber news about the state of antiscience in America today. The political divide over evolution has gotten worse.

I drew on the 2009 figures in my PhACT presentation on science and politics over a year ago. Those figures were bad enough, with 39% of Republicans saying humans had not evolved but rather existed in their present form since the beginning of time (presumably a few thousand years ago). For that number now to go up to 48% should dampen those arguments that left and right are equally bad when it comes to science. At the present phase in the evolution of the political parties, it just isn't true.

Some time ago, I gave a not-very-positive review to Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left. In retrospect, I could've taken a less snarky tone toward the book, as it has some legitimate points to make about left-wing antiscience. (In saying this, I am influenced both by subsequent Twitter dialogue with one of the authors, Alex Berezow, who seems like a nice guy, and by Megan McArdle's valid point that aggressive negativism in book reviews is too common these days; though I don't forswear it entirely.) But still, the data in the Pew poll rather forcefully make the point that something's changed, and for the worse, in the Republican Party in the last few years.

A couple of additional points: First, the poll also asked people (who accepted evolution) whether they thought it was "guided by a supreme being" or "due to natural processes." I have no quarrel with either answer to that question, which is a philosophical and not a scientific one; I would have given the latter answer to a pollster but I am not sure that the sharp dichotomy between the two answers would stand up to close scrutiny (why not a supreme being who is compatible with, perhaps the ultimate author of, or another way of describing, the natural processes?).

Second, I am not so naive as to think that the 67% of Democrats who think humans evolved over time are all knowledgeable about biology and have weighed the various lines of evidence carefully. Surely, much of their stance has to do with cultural affinity--feeling good about being on the side of smart, progressive people, or such. Whatever the limits of that, it's a lot better than proudly embracing ignorance, which is what many Republicans have done on this subject, and not only on this subject.

Post-denialist politics

In my recent talk on "Science vs., Politics" at the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking (PhACT), I argued, among other things, that science denialism in the GOP has probably peaked, such that we'll likely see an effort by Republican politicians to shed the political liability of being seen as the antiscience party. Today I am pleased to see Marco Rubio doing just that (and it is to his credit, as there's no honor in denying scientific facts).

PhACT talk

Many thanks to the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking (PhACT) for having me lecture yesterday on antiscience tendencies on right and left. Possibly one of the attendees will do a writeup on the lecture for PhACT's newsletter, in which case I'll share that here. Meanwhile, here's my cover slide.