Why Are So Few Scientists Republicans?

A question that answers itself:

Marginal Utility: We'll Do It For You In Six Minutes: Via Pandagon and Pharyngula, Fearless Leader steps into the evolution "debate":

WASHINGTON - President Bush waded into the debate over evolution and "intelligent design" Monday, saying schools should teach both theories on the creation and complexity of life. In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session with a small group of reporters, Bush essentially endorsed efforts by Christian conservatives to give intelligent design equal standing with the theory of evolution in the nation's schools...

I believe I can now safely say without fear of contradiction that any scientist or academic (outside of fundamentalist seminaries, of course) who is a Republican is in serious need of help: professional help.

Comments

[alan]

Oh, come on. You know the answer to that.

Republicans are Republicans because they believe in authority and doctrine. What the Bible says is "right," What Bush says is "right," and it is not to be questioned.

Scientists are trained to question. Every theory must be tested, and must modified or discarded if new data disproves the theory. Although there are scientific authorites, they derive their authority from what can be best determined to be objective truth by scientific method.

For much better clarity than I can provide on this topic see George Lakoff's excellent little bestseller [i]Don't Think Of an Elephant[/i]. (amazon link below) I'm surprised Prof. De Long has never posted on this. (Perhaps I missed it.) I think Lakoff is also at Berkeley.

If you have ever wondered why so many Republicans (particularly poor people) consistently vote against their own self interest, this explains it. And it explains why a scientist (a true one, not a political hack) is not likely to be a Republican. Or, for that matter, not that likely to be a Democrat.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1931498717/qid=1123008184/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_sbs_1/002-1707681-9708048?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

[Roger Albin]

There is a serious answer to this question and its not fair to tar all Republicans with the Bush brush. Granted, Bush is not an attractive figure for scientists and there are serious reasons for scientists to dislike Bush and his administration. Much more important than these superficial anti-intellectual statements are the Bush administration's deplorable and well documented record of playing fast and loose with scientific facts on a variety of issues. There is also this administration's ostrich-like attempts to treat the well established consensus on global warming as something uncertain. Finally, this administration's fiscal policies and skewed budgetary priorities have the potential to do lasting damage to American science.
But, it is unfair to treat lump all Republicans with Bush on matters related to science and science policy.

[Why is it unfair? Is he not the leader of the Republican Party?]

[anon]

In response to save_the_rustbelt, I believe he's saying that people who think intelligent design should be taught in science classes as an alternative theory to evolution are too stupid to be scientists or academics.

There are many Christian scientists who may or may not believe in intelligent design, but realize that it has no place in a science classroom.

If a major plank of the the Republican party platform is advocating intelligent design in science classrooms, then there's not much space for scientists in that party.

[larry ellison]

Even the evolutionists concede there's more to life on earth than a quasi-mathematical string theory. If evolution was taught in schools at a level even slightly above the
basic redux of Darwin, it would be a lot more intelligent, and a lot better designed.
Alas, education is an oil change, like the guy who stuffs filling in Hostess DingDongs.
Maybe this is why everyone hates Democrats.
Maybe that's why Americans are functionally illiterate in math and science theory. Dewey and Darwin were current two *centuries* ago.

[dope]

i've met many extremely intelligent christians....many of whom even happened to be in the sciences. unfortunately, (and granted this is anecdotal evidence) every single one of them let religious dogma over-ride their own sense of logic and curiosity when it came to particular "hot-button" issues. i don't know what it is about the brain chemistry of religious zealots, but whatever it is, it leaves them far too comfortable with having their irreducible postulates about the nature of reality at far too high a level....a level literally high enough to drive trucks (and ride dinosaurs) beneath.

since i can't remotely understand the motivations of certain groups of people, i can only hypothesize (ungenerously) that they are weak in some way and simply require this tether to an inpenetrable comfort zone where their "inner child" or what-not can feel safe and free of guilt for all the wrongs of their conscience.

[David W.]

It is quite fair to condemn all Republicans who march in lockstep with Bush and his most recent pandering to his ignorant base on the subject of so-called intelligent design.

Marburger out of professional principle, if not pride, should resign his post as science advisor to President Bush. Now.

[liberal]

Roger Albin wrote, "The large increase in support for biomedical research at the end of the Clinton period and into the early Bush years probably owed more to Congressional leadership, particularly Republican leadership, than it did to the explicit policies of the Clinton administration."

Yeah, everyone loves funding the NIH, because we all want to live forever, and lots of Congresscritters like the NIH because big pharma likes the NIH (because NIH does most of the basic research). So what? What's the Republican record on funding the NSF?

[liberal]

larry ellison wrote, "If evolution was taught in schools at a level even slightly above the basic redux of Darwin, it would be a lot more intelligent, and a lot better designed."

Just what's that supposed to mean?

"Alas, education is an oil change, like the guy who stuffs filling in Hostess DingDongs. Maybe this is why everyone hates Democrats."

The connection between factory-like education and Democrats is...?

"Maybe that's why Americans are functionally illiterate in math and science theory. Dewey and Darwin were current two *centuries* ago."

Balogne. By the same token, you could say that Newton was current only as of a century ago, when he was eclipsed by Einstein. Furthermore, Darwin isn't taught as Darwin saw things; Darwin has been updated to include the discovery of the gene and DNA.

You might as well say something as ridiculous as "Shakespeare was current as of four centuries ago."

[liberal]

David W. wrote, "Marburger out of professional principle, if not pride, should resign his post as science advisor to President Bush. Now."

Exactly.

[Julian Elson]

I support teaching intelligent design in classrooms, in a special 1/2 week long section of biology called "crank doctrines." Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields, ESP, intelligent design, etc, would all be covered. Physics could similarly have a section of cranks, debunking things like Brownian-motion powered ratchet generators, faster-than-light travel, etc. I think it's a good idea to cover not only the truth, but the falsehoods people will encounter in their everyday lives.

[rilkefan]

The conservative John Cole is furious: http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=5130

[liberal]

save_the_rustbelt wrote, "So anyone who disagrees with liberal orthodoxy is mentally ill?

"Every time Bush says something dumb, the left gets hysterical and says something dumber. Good strategy."

Please provide antecedents for
* "...anyone who disagrees with liberal orthodoxy...", and
* "...says something dumber..."

[Barry]

Ooooooooohhh, he said 'Billary'. That means that he wins, donit?

[Roger Albin]

Whats the Democratic record on NSF funding? Not much better.

[Considerably better. My cousin Tom Kalil was point person at the Clinton NEC on NSF funding...]

[Chris]

Why is everyone so panicked by the thought of "Intelligent Design" being taught alongside the theory of evolution? The reason for the success of evolution is that it is an excellent example of the scientific method. Evolution makes predictions that are verifiable, and more importantly, HAVE been verified again and again. In a proper scientific atmosphere Intelligent Design doesn't stand a chance against evolution, and not because it is "religious", but because it fails exactly where Evolution succeeds.

Don't worry about alternatives to evolution being taught in class, worry instead about an educational system that treats "Science" as a collection of facts handed down by an intellectual elite. It is precisely the tendency of many academics to assert that theories like Evolution are "obvious" that leads some people to claim that Science is just as faith-based as any religion.

When I was in college we would often joke about being forced to prove something "from first principles". The joke, of course, was that doing so is usually so tedious and pointless that only a truly sadistic professor would ask for it. But the fact that such a task is even possible is what distinguishes Science from Religion (unless one gives basic mathematical Axioms religious status). A challenge to a hypothesis, ESPECIALLY a successful one (like evolution), is not an excuse to respond with insults, but instead is a perfect opportunity to explain why it is valid.

So don't look upon "Intelligent Design" as something scary, but instead see it for what it is: a major strategic blunder by Creationists. They believe that by dressing up their religious beliefs in scientific costume they can gain credibility. But instead of pointing and screaming about the party crasher, we should instead welcome the impostor into the Scientific Ball. For, instead of providing protection, Intelligent Design's embrace of science will instead bring about its rejection when it is shown how it pales against the competition.

[Tom Cecere]

The most effective answer to the assertion that ID should be taught alongside evolution is to ask, "What experiments can we do, or teach, that will prove or disprove Intelligent Design?" When the obvious answer comes back, "None", we then ask, "So, what class do we teach this in? Social Science? English? Comparitive religion?"

[Adam]

Alan wrote:

"Republicans are Republicans because they believe in authority and doctrine. What the Bible says is "right," What Bush says is "right," and it is not to be questioned."

You have a point with your Bible comment. Many (though certainly not all) Republicans do believe that what the Bible says is "right." You are on shakier ground with the Bush comment, though. I live in the rural South - a town as red as they come - and plenty of people think Bush is wrong about plenty of things (e.g. immigration, bringing our guys back from Iraq, taxes on the rich, etc.).

Also, taking the bible literally is more of a regional difference than a partisan difference. That is, most Democrats in the rural South (mostly African-Americans and older whites) are as likely to be bible-thumpers as Republicans.

[meno]

larry,

Your claim that "Dewey and Darwin were current two centuries ago" certainly backs up your view that the US education system is not doing well.

Because you're quite wrong.

Dewey died in the 1950s: while he was quite old then it's a bit of a stretch to describe his work as current "two centuries ago".

And it's about a hundred years ago that Darwins theory (which was then over a generation old) met gene theory (had also languished unappreciated for decades) and biology suddenly had both a theory of evolution and a theory about the mechanism by which evolution would work.

[donna]

Julian I *love* that idea! Indeed we ought to teach science and history in conjunction, so we can say, "Well, people used to believe this, and many people still do, but now science has shown us that...." There are so many subjects that need to be taught in this way. People don't understand the history of ideas, where they come from, how they have changed, And they don't know how to separate something they have heard or read from scientific proof and evidence.

The things we need to teach in school are Critical Thinking Skills and How to Do Research. The facts taught and the subjects matter even less than those things. My son was 5 when he asked a cashier how a cash register works. When the cashier tried to tell him there were little fairies inside, he stomped his foot and declared, "That is a machine, it is not magical, and I want to know how it *works*!

Our real problems in this society are not who is in power or what people believe, but that there are so few people who really have the ability to think clearly and reason things out for themselves. And yes, this does go back to parenting and even to the nature of the individual, but everyone can be taught to clarify their thinking. Even 5 year olds.

Religion is emtional, and stems from the amygdala. It makes us feel good, eases our fears, and gives a sense of order to what can be a chaotic-seeming world. Those are all good things. But to take religion beyond that and try to make it into something it is not, and force it into fields where it has no business being, is as ridiculous as teaching a science class in church and expecting it to make everyone feel spiritual. It simply dumbs down our society.

We won;t survive economically if we can't forge ahead in scientific fields. Our technology will fall behind, and that is what makes the crucial differences in power. All these attempts to hold us back scientifically and technically for the sake of religion, to make people into sheep following an ancient belief trussed up as some new theory, will backfire on us as we are bypassed by China and other countries who are busy training their scientists and engineers.

[liberal]

Chris wrote, "For, instead of providing protection, Intelligent Design's embrace of science will instead bring about its rejection when it is shown how it pales against the competition."

Someone wrote an op-ed in a major national daily (probably WP or NYT) to this effect.

In response, many people made countering points, and I think they got the better of the argument.

[wcw]

'Credo quia absurdum' explains substantially
all of what is going on among current GOP
leadership, as well as a couple commenters.

[Me So Clever]

I know many Dems who believe in Christianity and ID. This means you are fool for being a Democrat. And I know this without at PhD and state-subsidized tenure.

[liberal]

Roger Albin wrote, "Whats the Democratic record on NSF funding? Not much better."

Please provide data for this assertion.

My impression is that Republicans---as a whole---don't like the NSF and think it smacks of "national industrial policy."

"Also, the big increase in NIH funding spilled over into a lot of unexpected areas, like plant genetics, because NIH study sections support the best science."

I already knew that, because someone in my family is an NIH-funded scientist (extramural). It says nothing about non-biological science, and furthermore it's not clear how much good basic biological science gets funded with explicit Republican support, as opposed to being a happy byproduct of (1) the way science is funded and (2) general ignorance of how much fairly "pure" research is funded that really has no immediate application whatsoever.

[liberal]

Here's an interesting quote from
http://www.vpaa.uillinois.edu/reports_retreats/retreat_1997_material/FOR-KnottRemarks.htm
Obviously one cannot make any judgements based on this alone; maybe if I have time I'll look up the article.

"Science-Watch Institute, Inc., is another lobbying organization. In 1996, they released a legislative 'scorecard' which caused a great deal of controversy. The upshot of their scorecard was that, based on roll 30 call votes taken in the 104th Congress, Democrats were significantly higher in support of science than Republicans. (Science, 9/27/96)."

[cynic]

I think it would be great to discuss intellegent design in a science class if the real scientists were allowed to criticize it in a scientific way and to explain why it is a crock. If the Sunday school teachers would expose the idea outside the church they would lose rather than gain. For example, ID people like to talk about the eye. If the eye were designed intellegently why does it deteriorate in elderly people. Evolution can explain that a good eye has no survival value past reprodution age. How do the ID people explain? Is it faulty design?

[meno]

Chris,

You can't teach it all in one go.

Consider running a syllabus about evolution that showed (for example) that evolution is key to understanding fossils that are used by geologists to understand sedimentary layers: and that this understanding is used by geological surveys used by engineers to make sure that they're building bridges that won't fall down by footing them securely on rocks they can trust to be solid.

You can't teach it all in one go.

To encompass the myriad ways evolution theory pays off and makes accurate predictions and makes science possible you have to teach a LOT of science.

You can't teach it all in one go.

No one of those predictions is enough to *prove* a theory. And some predictions fail to pan out: almost every interesting theory will make many, many successful predictions and afew false predictions. Look at how gravitational theory (both Newtonian and general relativity) fails to account accurate for the length of Mercury's orbit, for example. That doesn't mean we should stop believing in the theory of gravity!

You can't teach it all in one go.

Scientific proof, about the big theories, is a matter of a vast number of corroborations, supports and predictions. You can't teach it all in one go. When teaching the very basic bits you need to say "just trust us on this part: gravity works - we can go into proofs about orbits in a later course when you've done more maths".

You can't teach it all in one go.

And when you're told "oh, but this basic bedrock theory, you must justify it from day one" - what a pointless waste of time!

[PaulC]

"For example, ID people like to talk about the eye."

I never understood the fixation with the eye more than other organs. The most remarkable part of human vision is actually the part that starts at the retina and continues into the visual cortex, but I don't think this is what the ID people mean. The rest is merely a camera, a device you can make without even a lens, just a pinhole. Not that lenses are especially rare in nature; anyone looked at a dew drop?

I don't mean to knock the optical part, but it's just not at all difficult to imagine the intermediate stages from a simple light receptor, to one with a semi-transparent membrane that partially resolves a fuzzy image, and over time a selective pressure for membranes that more transparent and focus the image marginally more coherently than the the previous generation's. And, of course, the good lenses overwhelm the bad lenses in the fossil record, because they're the ones that proliferate. No big mystery there.

Trilobites did it long before we did--with calcite crystals! I would argue that any naturally-formed refractive object is more likely to be somewhat lens-like than not, since a convex surface is formed more easily than a flat or concave one--again, dewdrops.

Is it actually any easier to grasp the evolution of the pancreas or the kidneys, both of which are highly specialized organs. I suspect that to the non-scientist, these organs are intuitively amorphous lumps, and therefore seem less well-engineered that the eye. This says more about human prejudice than the existence of a designer.

[bakho]

They forgot to ask him the follow-up question. Does Bush understand intelligent design? I suspect that Bush would do no better at explaining ID than he did at Debate 1 in 2004 or in explaining how he could cut taxes, yadayada and balance the budget in 2000 debates. The problem is that too many people take what the man says to have serious thought behind it. It doesn't.

[Jason]

I haven't heard anything about the Physical Sciences here. Many physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and engineers of all stripes are Republican, even those that are in more liberal academic environs. The difference is that many of these people are economic conservatives and/or social libertarians, as opposed to the national party, which is socially conservative, but economically--erm--"challenged".

[liberal]

Jason wrote, "Many physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and engineers of all stripes are Republican, even those that are in more liberal academic environs."

Not true. Pure mathematicians are definitely not Republican.

Though engineers are definitely Republican.

Physicists and chemists, hard to say.

[liberal]

PaulC wrote, "I don't mean to knock the optical part..."

Actually, you should. IIRC the vertebrate eye is a**backwards, resulting in the so-called blind-spot. Don't see why a clever designer would do it that way.

[PaulC]

"Actually, you should. IIRC the vertebrate eye is a**backwards, resulting in the so-called blind-spot."

I think the blindspot is not a result of the optics, but the place where the nerve attaches.

[anon]

The eye is actually much more complex than the description above. Even the lense can warp slightly depending on the situation to bring things into focus. In addition there are orders of magnitude more photorecptors in the eye than neurons leaving the optic tract. A large amount of image compression goes on in the retina including edge detection and some motion detection.

The biggest problem of ID is not whether it is true or not, but whether it is science. For the Christian form of ID, saying that a system was created by superior being who can't be seen or measured is not a provable hypothesis and has no place in science classes. If you want to advocate the alien species theory of ID and say we need to look for remnants of alien culture, then that is a provable hypothesis, but I don't think that's the goal of evangelical Christians. It's pointless to teach ID in science classes even as a non-theory, because there are so many better things to teach and much more can be learned from actual scientific theories that were proven wrong than non-theories that are unprovable.

[PaulC]

"Not true. Pure mathematicians are definitely not Republican. Though engineers are definitely Republican."

I agree with the general perception, but does anyone have stats to back this up. The "engineers" comment also doesn't apply to software engineers in my experience.

Gallup polls suggest that scientists are a rare sector of the US population with a naturalistic rather than theistic worldview http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_publi.htm and I imagine this is reflected in politics.

[jerry]

"What experiments can we do, or teach, that will prove or disprove Intelligent Design?"

Seriously, I would like to see this answered for Macro-economics. Apart from experiments that border on cognitive psychology probing one individual or a group's behavior, can macro-economists perform experiments in the classical, control group, experimental group sense? Is economics more a branch of mathematics than even a social science?

Is "comparative advantage" a hypothesis or an axiom? How does a free trader's version of comparative advantage differ from a fair trader's, and can that difference be tested?

That said, it goes without saying that the Chimp is a douchebag, and teaching ID is a great way to make sure all children are left behind.

[PaulC]

"The eye is actually much more complex than the description above."

Yes definitely, but so is the pancreas. Once you accept the notion that some kind of functioning eye can occur and confer an advantage, all of the other refinements fall very nicely into the model of natural selection.

I just don't understand why the eye in particular is supposed to be this big conundrum. Why do ID proponents (Grover Norquist recently among them) act as if it is qualitatively harder to explain than anything else. For that matter, the machinery at the cellular level dwarfs current human inventions in its intricacy. It's all very remarkable, and it does take a leap of imagination to try to understand it in an evolutionary framework, but that just happens to be the only one that even begins to yield answers.

The reason I'm adamant here is that the "What about the eye?" canard betrays the deep sloppiness and lack of scientific appreciation behind the ID agenda. The point isn't that their is anything particular about the eye, but "What about the eye?" is considered a more compelling talking point for a layperson who is less impressed by organs whose structure is less apparent.

[jerry]

One of the most interesting courses I have ever taken was a junior level course at UCLA, Methods of Experimental Cell Biology, which was a course whose lectures were devoted to discussing how classical experiments were thought of, and then carried how, and how the measuring apparatus worked.

This course was the opposite of dry, though in the lab, I must admit, we discovered the joys of REM.

(The band, not the eye movement.)

[Steve]

I think Professor Delong raises an important issue.

However, I think its only true insofar as we consider Republicanism to be the evangelicals dream. There are many Republicans, corporate Republicans, who dont want to see their future CEOs coming out of school thinking the Earth is the center of the Universe.

So there are at LEAST two kinds of republicans (if not more), evangelicals, and business-minded ones.

I think you can be the latter without arguing with evolution!

[Alex Tolley]

I would concur that a better strategy would be to teach ID to show why it fails. However, that approach has been tried in some states and it doesn't appear to be a slam dunk for evolution.

I only have anecdotal evidence for this failure but there seems to be:

1. Cognitive dissonance between the church teaching and the school teaching which often results in the the simpler church teaching being accepted.

2. Teachers under pressure to give ID a pass, rather than rigorously dissecting.

3. Just plain miserable levels of public school teaching.

The simple fact is that science is not easy. In reality, schools are teaching biology/evolution (and other sciences) to teenagers who have little desire to learn it, and who live in a society that doesn't put much value on it, or is so PC that every idea musn't be criticized.

As Donna said earlier, what is needed is the teaching of Critical Thinking in schools. And it wouldn't hurt educating adults either...

[anon]

""Not true. Pure mathematicians are definitely not Republican. Though engineers are definitely Republican."

I agree with the general perception, but does anyone have stats to back this up. The "engineers" comment also doesn't apply to software engineers in my experience."

It's true (in my own experience, of course) that those who study pure science tend to almost never be republican. engineers are a more varied lot. the engineers that are percieved to be the most creative (a lot of the more vocal software engineers lie here) tend to not be republican, whereas engineers that focus more on process and detail rather than creativity tend to be republican....again as someone noted before, they tend to be "libertarian republican". i've seen some in the later group begin to acknowledge that they no longer think bush has any clue as to what the hell he's doing....yet they maintain their cognitive dissonance as a form (i suppose) of self preservation. these guys in general think of most things being straight forward, and they've grown over many decades to truly despise the democratic party not for what it stands for, but for the image it makes of itself (using touchy-feely language to manipulate heart strings and what-not). these guys don't have those particular heart strings and they see it as exploitation of those that do (at their percieved expense). at the same time, ironically, they don't see themselves getting exploited by the jingoistic language used by this administration to project the image of strong "leadership" in the face of obvious failures in policy and ability.

in an incredibly condescending way...i think of some of these guys as "almost smart". they can track first order consequences along a linear path to solve a problem, but they often seem to entirely lack the ability or will to really parse complex problems and really characterize all the relevant interactions (in such a way as to find novel solutions...or what some may call "creativity").

[jlcg]

There is an inversion of thought among those that publish against ID. They claim that we are what we have become through chance but these very people believe they can be the intelligent designers of the future for the legion of ignorant stupid people that vote against "their own interest" On the other hand those that rest their explanation upon a mind that knows everything will deposit the future of their own people on th blind of the "market" Don't you find that puzzling

[Rob]

Well this ie the President who still believes that Palmerio never used steroids, so his feel for reality isn't the best.

[Barkley Rosser]

Bush may get the last laugh. Over 50% of Americans
do not believe in the theory of evolution. What all
this says about the future of the US in world science
and the world economy is another matter entirely.

[liberal]

PaulC wrote, "I think the blindspot is not a result of the optics, but the place where the nerve attaches."

Exactly---the nerve attaches in front, in a way, creating the blindspot.

I used these terms in a google search:
"vertebrate eye" backwards "blind spot"
and got lots of good hits.

[ken melvin]

What a difference a few days make. If the earth is six thousand years old, then I beleive in ID. If it is four billion, then I'm going with evolution.

[liberal]

PaulC wrote, "I agree with the general perception, but does anyone have stats to back this up. The 'engineers' comment also doesn't apply to software engineers in my experience."

The math part is my own personal experience while I was a pure mathematician. Engineers, just my own anecdotal observations.

Software engineers---don't know about percentages, but they do seem to often be libertarian types.

[liberal]

anon wrote, "yet they maintain their cognitive dissonance as a form (i suppose) of self preservation."

Nah...they just want their tax cuts.

[just pete]

You guys either need to watch more episodes of "Jaywalking" on the tonite show or have a family full of fundies like me. There is no explaining, theorems, concepts or any other of that science jazz.

ID was probably explained to Bush the same way as the rest - nothing more than a simple statement that life is too complex to have evolved. The scientific jazz shows a lack of faith and therefore those folks are faithless. About then you'll hear how faithless people are commies.

If you really want to go cross-eyed (flawed design?), click through the religious channels now and then and catch one of the regular science lectures on the truth of creationism, how a flood created the Grand Canyon or how the earth really is only 7 thousand years old.

Hey, I guess this all agrees with professor D in a way.

[sm]

Libertarian can mean almost anything today, including, "I don't vote, leave me alone."

[MTC]

I would have to agree with bakho: it is unlikely that Mr. Bush understands any of the concepts he regurgitates. He terrifies not because the ideas he expresses are false but because he has no clue how any of his purported beliefs fit together. Lacking comprehension, he relies on mnemonic tricks--slogans, unnecessary rephrasings of ideas he has already expressed, sing-song intonations, memorized blocks of text--to keep himself on message.

One also suspects that he affects bonhomie until his social intelligence senses the feelings and thoughts of those around him. Were the White House filled with sober-minded biology Ph.Ds rather than yahoos on the make, one suspects Mr. Bush would soon be acting and talking like a stoned and punch-drunk Jeremy Rifkin.

A dispiriting, empty presence occupies the Oval Office, a Napoleonic resentment trapped in an infertile mind.

[centerlink]

It seems to me the scientific community should divide evolution into two components:

1.) The Theory of Evolutionary Origin
2.) The Process of Evolution through Natural Selection

That way, the "Process of Evolution" can be treated like the "process of photosynthesis" or the "process of nuclear fusion". There is nothing theoretical about evolution and it is critical to get the word "theory" out of the mind of an ignorant public.

People can then argue till their blue in the face over the very origin of life itself: pitting the "Theory of Evolutionary Origin" against the "Theory of Intelligent Design". The "Theory of Evolutionary Origin" would suggest life first started by an evolutionary process of recombinant proteins. As this is a question we can never answer (not knowing if Earth was seeded by microbes from Mars, from some alien civilization, by the chance of lightning striking the gasses of the ancient Earth, or by God, Brahma, Wakantanka, Pan Gu, Gaia, or who knows – who was there?) we can relegate this to the other religious questions that seek to somehow definitively answer all the great unknowns our minds are simply not capable of understanding in the first place. That would separate the fact of evolution from the religious debate that basically pits the entirety of the observable natural world against a few sentences in the bible, and free everyone to get on with a more focused and reasonable debate.

[VKW]

Centerlink: Contrary to what you may have heard from sources hostile to evolutionary theory:
1. The biological theory of evolution has nothing to do with theories of the origin of the universe;
2. The biological theory of evolution has nothing to do with theories of the formation of the Earth;
3. The biological theory of evolution has nothing to do with theories of the origins of life.

The biological theory of evolution explains the diversity of living forms, the 'origin of species' as Darwin phrased it.

[Jonathan W. King]

liberal writes:
>
> Actually, you should. IIRC the vertebrate eye is a**backwards,
> resulting in the so-called blind-spot. Don't see why a clever designer
> would do it that way.

OK, so listen up: there are two leading designs for image-forming eyes out there, and both have advantages and disadvantages.

Vertebrate eyes do have the weird feature that not only the output neurons from the retina but the blood vessels that are required are in front of the photoreceptors in the retina. For that matter, the photoreceptors themselves actually point backwards. And, since the output neurons all exit the eyeball in a single place, there is an inevitable blind spot. This doesn't sound too nice, but it's surprisingly irrelevant in practice. First off, photopigments are quite sensitive (especially in rods) so you don't need a very large number of photons to fall on the receptors. Second, it seems to be the case that the only way to design an eye that is capable of *moving* independently is to have the blindspot there. Third, with a few rather dazzingly special exceptions, the eyes in the animal kingdom that have the highest acuity belong to vertebrates; so much for it being a poor design. (Yes, so we owe a lot of this to processing in the brain, but since what we should be discussing is the visual system rather than the eye itself, I dont find this retort impressive.) Fourth the presence of a blindspot is not that much of a problem since that spot a) is in a lower acuity region of vision anyway, b) moves around as the eyes do, so nothing in the visual world is in the blind spot very long under normal situations, and c) is subject to the interesting phenomenon of "fill-in".

That said, there are a lot of good things that can be said about the design of the eyes you see in cephalapods, jumping spiders, and your more intelligent insects like bees. Octopuses, for example, can detect the direction of polarization of incoming light, which neans that some objects which would be completely invisible to us are visible to them. The visual system (and cognitive ability) of a honeybee is also fairly impressive.

To me, the long and short of the story is that species by and large have visual systems that are exceptionally well-adapted to their needs and niches. Personally, I'm really happy that humans have excellent acuity, thrichromatic color vision, and a cortical visual system that encompasses almost half of the cortex. But you would want a very different design overall if you were the size of a fruitfly, and needed your vision to control stable flight. Bears don't really need impressive eyesight, which is a very good thing since they sure don't have it. One could go on and on. None of this, however, requires intelligent design or creationistic thinking in any form. Alas, you wouldn't be able to figure this out given what most people learn about biology in high school or college.

[centerlink]

RE: "The biological theory of evolution explains the diversity of living forms, the 'origin of species' as Darwin phrased it."

I'm well aware that evolution describes the diversity and form of species and not the formation of the universe. The point is to stop calling it a theory and start calling it a process. Reframe the debate over the origin of life itself. If the fundamentalist religious hardliners want to keep arguing that evolution is a theory, shift the debate to something that is actually theoretical. Enough already with the "theory." We don't argue whether photosynthesis, plate tectonics, erosion, oxidation, or electromagnetism are theories, or whether microorganisms cause diseases, or radiation causes cancer. Besides, intelligent design in it's purest interpretation is inherently about the origin of life and not the diversity of life. The whole crux is that what we see as the current form of life is in fact the initial form - i.e. a continuing and unchanging snapshot of the beginning of when life first appeared. And I'll bet most of the fundamentalists wouldn't call intelligent design a theory among themselves.

Having no regard for genetics, I wonder if a religious nut would worry when his kid looked absolutely nothing like him. Could be intelligent denial.

[astrid]

I don't know about scientists, but I know all the worst *educated* Bush supporters I've encountered came out of business school. Conversely, economists I've encountered may be very conservative (not a few espouse the gold standard) but none of them approve of Bush's policies.

Makes me wonder what they teach people in B-school.

[astrid]

Whatever it is, it can't be critical thinking skills.

[liberal]

Jonathan W. King wrote, "This doesn't sound too nice, but it's surprisingly irrelevant in practice. ..."

Of course. But that's not relevant to the point, which is that it's hard to argue that an intelligent designer would *want* to construct the vertebrate eye in that fashion. (Of course, arguing as I am is somewhat awkward, which stems from ID being unscientific because it's unfalsifiable.)

"To me, the long and short of the story is that species by and large have visual systems that are exceptionally well-adapted to their needs and niches. ... None of this, however, requires intelligent design or creationistic thinking in any form."

Exactly my point---complex biological structures do show evidence of design through gradual adaptation, rather than being the product of an omniscient designer.

[Chris]

Meno,
My point is not that evolution (or anything) should only be taught by starting at the lowest level and building up. In fact, I think I explained that doing so is usually tedious and pointless. My point, though, is that teaching science should involve the scientific process. And part of that is giving examples of why a theory works while perhaps another doesn't.

The success of science education shouldn't be graded by how many facts or numbers students are exposed to. That is not science! Instead, a successful science education should allow students to analyze data, propose hypotheses that explain the data, and then devise tests to verify those hypotheses. That is, a science education should actually *teach* science.

What specifically is taught is irrelevant. In fact, I don't care if someone thinks that species on earth develop via evolution, ID, or by buying them at Walmart, as long as they understand the process of determining the relative validity of competing theories. Because really, for most people it makes no difference in their daily lives if they do or don't believe in Evolution, Quantum Mechanics, or even the Copernican Universe. But it matters for *everyone* if they are able to think critically about the problems they do face.

[Pancho Villa]

'Oh, come on. You know the answer to that.

Republicans are Republicans because they believe in authority and doctrine. What the Bible says is "right," What Bush says is "right," and it is not to be questioned.'

Right!

'Though engineers are definitely Republican.

Don't think so!

Norman Mailer is definitely not a republican...

[liberal]

Chris wrote, "My point, though, is that teaching science should involve the scientific process. And part of that is giving examples of why a theory works while perhaps another doesn't."

That's not at all unreasonable.

OTOH, I seriously doubt this is what's usualy going to happen in classrooms when ID and natural selection are brought up.

[liberal]

Marburger is an a**hole:
(Clippings from
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/08/03/MNGFOE1VHN1.DTL
)

"On Tuesday, the president's conservative Christian supporters and the leading institute advancing intelligent design embraced Bush's comments, while scientists and advocates of the separation of church and state disparaged them. At the White House, where intelligent design has been discussed in a weekly Bible study group, Bush's science adviser, John Marburger III, sought to play down the president's remarks as common sense and old news.

"Marburger said in a telephone interview that 'evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology' and 'intelligent design is not a scientific concept.' Marburger also said that Bush's remarks should be interpreted to mean that the president believes that intelligent design should be discussed as part of the 'social context' in science classes.

...

"Marburger said that it would be 'overinterpreting' Bush's remarks to say that the president believes that intelligent design and evolution should be given equal treatment in schools."

[Roger Albin]

[Why is it unfair? Is he not the leader of the Republican Party?]

Because there are a significant number of Republican politicians who have been firm and clear sighted supporters of American science.

It appears that my post, #2 on this list, was edited overnight. The paragraphs following the part that is still there, which were present yesterday and are quoted by some subsequent posts, are now missing. Disagreement is expected, censorship is not.

[liberal]

Roger Albin wrote, "Because there are a significant number of Republican politicians who have been firm and clear sighted supporters of American science."

Every single such politician in the House votes for Tom DeLay as the (de facto) Speaker. There's more to "supporting science" than backing increases in federal spending on science.

[liberal]

...for example, how'd the House leadership---who, again, these ostensible "supporters of science" helped put in power---do on the Schiavo affair?

[Jason]

I still stand by my initial claim: there are quite a few scientists that are voting Republicans. I'm not saying all, or even most, but people here are assuming there are NONE, which is a dangerous assumption. These people are not voting with the "WWJD" set due to religious conviction in most cases (exception: anti-abortion voters, of which there are many). They vote Republican for purely economic reasons. Hence I said they are economic conservatives (gov't stays out of my wallet), but social Libertarians (gov't stays out of my bedroom, classroom, etc.). The scientists are at exactly the income level where they perceive benefit in voting GOP. Whether they get all those benefits is a matter of debate, but these guys LOVE tax-cuts, and the GOP speaks in that language.

I will give liberal the nod that a helluva lot of pure mathematicians are NOT Repubs, but I have met enough that are to state that they are out there (and curiously enough, more rabidly Libertarian than their peers...). Physics and (non-bio) chemistry are probably split around 50:50 from anecdotal evidence: industry, DOD, and DOE funds most of the science in these areas, so it pays to be a little conservative and pro-mmilitary. Engineers are more solidly conservative than the others, hence more Repub. This is mainly due to a combination of economic conservatism, anti-labor sentiment, and a sort of Libertarian "self-empowerment" mythology. Anyway, my two cents, and perhaps your experiences differ.

[liberal]

Jason,

I don't precisely agree with everything you wrote, but your contentions are overall reasonable.

Of course, re pure mathematicians, I'm only making a statistical claim---pure mathematicians are (a) by and large left-of-center, (b) farther left (on average) than applied mathematicians.

The fact that so many "thinking types" are right-libertarians is, however, disconcerting, given that (most, not all straints of) right-libertarianism has been convincing shown to be a morally bankrupt ideology; see "Are you a Real Libertarian, or a ROYAL Libertarian?"
URL http://geolib.pair.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html
for an essay by a non-bankrupt libertarian.

[RSA]

"Seriously, I would like to see this answered for Macro-economics. Apart from experiments that border on cognitive psychology probing one individual or a group's behavior, can macro-economists perform experiments in the classical, control group, experimental group sense? Is economics more a branch of mathematics than even a social science?"

If it's experimental evaluation you're focusing on as a criterion for being science, you might end up leaving out astronomy as well. The ability to make testable predictions is a much more flexible criterion.

[John Emerson]

If that was THE Larry Ellison -- Oracle sucks. I've been waiting for over a decade to say that.

[John Emerson]

Regarding the vertebrate eye, the implied comparison is with the cephalopod eye. For whatever reason the Designer gave the squid and the octopus a better eye than ours (no blind spot).

The trouble with teaching ID "alongside" evolution is that many students and teachers will automatically accept ID. HS science teachers often have little interest in science and only minimal knowledge of it, and more so most students.

Second, every good teacher I have ever had ran out of time to teach the stuff he wanted to teach, and any attention at all to ID would make that worse.

[Steve LaBonne]

How do you "teach ID" when there is literally nothing to teach? It's merely a scam, a politco-legal strategy for evading the Establishment Clause (the last attempt was "Creation Science", remember that?) which is completely devoid of testable, criticizable (is that a word?)scientific content. The embarrassing lack of content has been publicly revealed over and over again, most recently at those ridiculous Kansas hearings. These people have been repeatedly asked to say something, anything, about the actual empirically accessible content of their "theory" and have never succeeded in even beginning to do so.

[PaulC]

I find it disturbing that in a discussion about the political inclinations of scientists, mathematicians, and engineers, all the evidence offered so far has been anecdotal.

At the same time, I really can't find anything like a survey to back up one view or another. There's a survey showing that scientists are far more likely than the general population to believe in the origin of humans without any divine intervention (http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_publi.htm). In the interest of fairness, there was a poll reportedly done by Hart Research showing that college science majors somewhat preferred Bush in the last election--but the only source is a column by Brit Hume http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,122700,00.html and it's not clear what they were lumping with science and math, and it's not obvious that students who may still switch majors are great proxies for those who do science as a profession.

One confounding factor in doing a google search is the keywords "science" and "scientist" in a political context inevitably cause the results to be swamped with results for "political science" and "political scientist".

I'm going to resist giving my anecdotal impression, but one observation backed up by data is that an awful lot of scientists are foreign born (*) and therefore don't get shoehorned easily into the American political spectrum. Another is their unusual tendency (by US standards) to embrace a naturalistic rather than theistic worldview (see above), which could put them at odds with the kind of magical thinking that you find in many political types, which actually can work in a political context by projecting confidence (oops... that last part was unsupported impression).

If you look at the editorial tendencies of a publication like Scientific American or New Scientist (which I realize is British) as a proxy, the scientific worldview is clearly liberal in some ways--e.g. tendency towards a disease theory of social disorders rather than a moral interpretation--but it's not really mainstream liberalism. It's empiricism. This may even have been compatible with moderate Republican politics at one time (I'm a life-long Democrat and can only guess), but it is not compatible with the Bush/Delay/Rove approach. However, not everyone may have come to terms with this fact yet.

(*) "The foreign-born account for 51 percent of engineers with a doctorate degree, and 45 percent of life scientists, physical scientists and mathematical and computer scientists with a doctorate." http://www.visalaw.com/04sep1/11sep104.html

[meno]

Chris,

The problem is that by trying to teach empiricism as the scientific method we instead teach naive empiricism. And naive empiricism is just wrong.

I don't think the scientific process is the over-simplified "we create a theory, create an experiment which proves/disproves it, then do it again, look we'll do all that in class today" that is usually taught. Disprovability is important: but too much emphasis on a single experiment or single example is a mistake.

The problem is that science is an interconnected web of data and theories: hypotheses don't appear in a vacuum they appear because they match a bunch of other ideas and principles. So normally you've a good reason to think something might be true before you test it: and then if your experiment fails to proves your hypothesis the normal response is not to dump the hypothesis but to look closely at the experiment and see if it was flawed. Single examples of proof and disproof don't make and break theories unless the theory was already set up in a position to vulnerable by other theories and experiments.

Often in science it is the piling up of mountains of evidence that swings the debate, if my mountain 'for' is twenty times bigger than your mountain 'against' (eg the debates in the first of the C20 about the theory of mountain-formation via plate tectonics). This is why so many key scientists in history have died heartbroken or ignored, like Mendel. Being ahead of your time in science is as sure a route to being ignored or frustrated as being behind the times.

By attempting to teach an oversimplified scientific process we set up the poor view of science that we see today, whereby the public wants to see "the" single experiment that proves anthropic global warming (and are frustrated by the lack of it), or they worry because they read a book that shows that there is some evidence that evolutionary theory can't explain.

[Matt McIrvin]

PaulC, the reason they're so fixated on the eye is an old misleading citation of Charles Darwin. At some point he specifically mentioned the eye as an example of a system that seemed like it couldn't possibly evolve through natural selection, but actually could. Taking the beginning of the passage out of context makes it seem as if Darwin is admitting natural selection can't explain the eye. Naturally, creationists have been doing this over and over for ages. See

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/ce/3/part8.html

[Matt McIrvin]

...by the way, this is yet another example of the tendency of science crackpots to attack a whole discipline by focusing on the founder, as if it all stands or falls on the basis of the earliest work and nothing has happened since then. It's not just the creationists; the Einstein-refuters love to do it this way too.

[Bob Dobalina]

"Makes me wonder what they teach people in B-school."

CAPM, Miller-Modigliani, Derivatives pricing, and the like. If you'd rather, "How to make money while wankers like you piss and moan on Delong's website."

And, "liberal," IMO 90% of minarchists would happily live in a Georgist society. You've plastered that link about a million times now. You must be a bot.

[liberal]

Bob Dobalina wrote, "And, 'liberal,' IMO 90% of minarchists would happily live in a Georgist society. You've plastered that link about a million times now. You must be a bot."

Got a survey showing that?

From my own (anecdotal) experience on USENET, the number is far lower than 50%. David Friedman, for example, a high-guru of minarchism as far as I can tell, is dead set against it. (For an example involving DF, see http://tinyurl.com/9swsy )

I'd put the number at < 30%. Probably < 15%. Just as it's true that a lot of left-of-center types are "jealous" of entrepreneurs who make lots of money, a lot of right-libertarian types think it's fine that some people make money doing nothing but collecting economic rents.

As for being a "bot," just trying to educate people. Aside from most people's blindness to the injustice of allowing private interests to capture Ricardian land rents for doing absolutely nothing, many folks don't even understand the difference between capital and land. For example, in this comment section on this blog,
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/05/limitations_of_.html
one commenter, who claims to know a lot of economics, actually thinks that site value is capital.

[liberal]

Addendum. I wrote "Aside from most people's blindness to the injustice of allowing private interests to capture Ricardian land rents ... "

I should add that this phenomenon is hardly limited to those on the right side of the spectrum. Leftists types of a Marxist stripe don't like it, because they don't believe in competitive markets, and they don't like the fact that George showed that Marx's idea about labor and capital being in opposition were misplaced.

[Bob Dobalina]

Liberal,

Friedman also wrote that:
"It is far from clear even in principle how unowned resources such as land can become private property. Even if one accepts an account, such as that of Locke, of how initial acquisition might justly have occurred, that account provides little justification for the existing pattern of property rights, given the high probability that any piece of property has been unjustly seized at least once since it was first cleared. Yet billions of people, now and in the past, base much of their behavior on respect for property claims that seem either morally arbitrary or clearly unjust."

I don't have a poll or a survey, hence the "IMO" in my comment. I know plenty of minarchists IRL, and only one or two of them is as batshit as your typical usenet flame warrior.

And the dude who claims that land isn't a seperate factor of production is simply a jackass.

[liberal]

Bob Dobalina,

I should say, in closing, that if you're a libertarian that understands and agrees with the core of George's argument, then good for you and more power to you.

Cheers.

[Arnold Williams]

I'd just point out that belief in creationism or ID is the majority point of view in both the Democratic and Republican parties. To the extent that the Democratic party leadership ignores the thoughts of its members, it may be a better home for those who disagree with this. But disagreeing with the majority of its members is not a solid Republican position.

http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=2357

[Ashish]

See my blog for post titled, "Darwinism, anyone?"