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By Paul Starobin, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, July 28, 2006

Back in 1752, when Benjamin Franklin fashioned his kite out of two strips of cedar and cast it toward the thunderclouds to "draw the electric fire from them," as he later wrote, he was investigating a theory about nature and did not know quite what to expect. He was concerned about failure and public ridicule -- which is why he told only his son about the first kite launch -- but he faced no ideologically or economically driven hostility. The candle makers, say, who stood to lose big from the future age of the lightbulb, did not seek to discredit his results. Rather, the political and cultural environment rewarded his spirit of adventure; he became the emerging nation's first science celebrity.

These days, by contrast, scientific experimentation -- whether the matter at hand is genetic mapping of the brain, exploring stem cells, or studying the melting of the polar ice caps -- seems to take place in a climate of almost unrelenting contention. The prospect of discovery appears not to thrill but to worry entrenched partisans. Popular democracy, circa 2006, sometimes seems not a boon to honest science but an obstacle.

The partisans are of two basic types. For shorthand, they can be called The Ideologues and The Big-Money Crowd.

The Ideologues traverse the political spectrum, from the Religious Right to the New Left. The former push for the teaching of a pseudo-science, intelligent design, in biology class; the latter refuse to countenance the idea, taken seriously by biologists, that males and females may have different aptitudes for such subjects as math and language. Each is vulnerable to the courtroom dressing-down that the Jack Nicholson character, Marine Col. Jessep, delivered in "A Few Good Men." "You want answers?" the grizzled Nicholson asked a young Tom Cruise, playing a military lawyer.

"I want the truth!"

"You can't handle the truth!"

As for The Big-Money Crowd, the striking example is the fossil fuel industry's willful reluctance to acknowledge "an inconvenient truth" -- global warming -- as science evangelist Al Gore asserts in his new movie by that name. Probably these cool cucumbers, unlike The Ideologues, can handle the truth -- it is their bottom-line businesses that seem invested in fable and distortion. The real loser, of course, could be planet Earth.

How did this sorry state of affairs come to pass? It's quite a saga. The trajectory starts with the time of the Founders -- an Age of Enlightenment. Science, for the most part, flourishes as American democracy matures, but then begins to suffer sustained assaults stemming from the post-1960s culture wars and the rising clout of industry interests in the money-driven arena of politics. But the modern professional research scientist is not, by any stretch, a blameless figure -- in this tale, that scientist emerges as an increasingly partisan and self-interested figure, dependent on government grants and largely an inhabitant of Blue America.

Although it is tempting to think that today's controversies are a passing phase, probably the opposite is true. For one thing, the biotechnology revolution, at the heart of many of today's battles, is itself in its infancy. And the idea, espoused by some politicians and judges, that money in politics deserves essentially the same constitutional protections as speech can continue to nourish efforts to discredit science by one imperiled business interest or another.

So we may be only at the start of an epoch of contentiousness. At stake is science's relationship to society -- and even more than that, what used to be known in America, without irony, as the liberal tradition, the tradition grounded in the Enlightenment itself of being open-minded. These days, it all sounds rather quaint.

Science And America's Liberal Tradition
"It is in the liberal intellectual tradition that American belief has characteristically expressed itself," social critic Max Lerner wrote in his 1957 book, "America as a Civilization." Warming to his theme, the Brandeis University professor invoked, as do virtually all chroniclers of this tradition, the grand figure of Thomas Jefferson -- a more accomplished Enlightenment man even than Franklin. Not only a president, Jefferson was also a scientist, an inventor, an architect, a musician, a lawyer, a linguist, a farmer, and a political philosopher. "'The earth belongs to the living,' said Jefferson, striking the grand theme," Lerner wrote, "that liberalism has since followed. Its credo has been progress, its mood optimist, its view of human nature rationalist and plastic."

The liberal tradition was not coincidentally based on a belief in science, on the use of "tools of reason" to address human problems, Lerner explained. Although America was in key respects a departure from the Old World, from Europe, in this case the liberal tradition represented America's successful adaptation of perhaps its greatest gift, its greatest inheritance from Europe -- the Enlightenment, which was born in the 17th century on the European continent and British Isles.

The Enlightenment was about the spirit of untrammeled inquiry, not only in science but also in politics, economics, and culture. The giants of this age -- Locke, Newton, and Voltaire -- all understood themselves to be part of the same great endeavor. "He saw, and made people see; but he didn't put his fancies in place of truth," Voltaire said of Newton, whose funeral he attended in 1727.

The golden age for American science actually arrived toward the end of the 19th century, when the country was rapidly industrializing and thus becoming more modern.

It was also welcoming to its shores hard-striving immigrants who on more than a few occasions bore America brilliant progeny. A paradigmatic figure in this regard was the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, born in 1904 to a family of German-Jewish immigrants.

"Around the globe, scientists were soon to be celebrated as a new kind of hero, promising to usher in a renaissance of rationality, prosperity, and social meritocracy," the writers Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin note at the outset of their recent biography on Oppenheimer, "American Prometheus." "In America, reform movements were challenging the old order. Theodore Roosevelt was using the bully pulpit of the White House to argue that good government in alliance with science and applied technology could forge an enlightened new Progressive Era."

Oppenheimer attended Harvard University, studied in Europe, taught at the University of California (Berkeley), and then took charge of the Manhattan Project, which sired the atomic bomb. He lovingly embraced the classical liberal tradition as his own creed. In 1950, he gave a speech in Washington to high school winners of the annual Westinghouse Science Talent Search. It was published five years later as part of his book "The Open Mind." Titled "The Encouragement of Science," Oppenheimer's talk dwelt at length on a letter that Jefferson wrote in 1799 to a young man who had asked about the usefulness of science studies.

Jefferson's letter began with a brief on behalf of mastering algebra and then moved to his main points: Science is a tool against despotism and "feudal barbarisms," and "thank heaven the American mind is already too much opened" to retreat from its commitment to science.

Picking up on Jefferson's theme, Oppenheimer told the students that "there is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any error.... Our own political life is predicated on openness."

But lights were already starting to dim. Oppenheimer would become a tragic figure -- as a result of a McCarthy-like witch-hunt, his government security clearance would be revoked. And the classical liberal spirit he embraced, in the tradition of the Founders, was to come under siege.

Assault From The Cultural Left
In 1978, at a meeting in Washington of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a protester poured a jug of water over the head of Edward O. Wilson, a world-renowned Harvard entomologist whose specialty was the study of ants. The miscreant's compatriots verbally denounced Wilson for giving sustenance to sexism, racism, and genocide through his research.

Wilson's sin was his founding of "sociobiology," which he defined as the extension of "neo-Darwinism into the study of social behavior and animal societies." Humans were part of this analysis -- their activities treated not as outside of biological principles but as obedient to them. The result was a politically incorrect litany of examples that were presented in a nuanced fashion but infuriated the Left nevertheless. In the chapter on "Sex" in his book "On Human Nature," Wilson wrote, concerning humans and "most" animal species, that "it pays males to be aggressive, hasty, fickle, and undiscriminating," while "in theory it is more profitable for females to be coy, to hold back until they can identify males with the best genes."

On the question of whether human beings are "innately aggressive," and for this reason prone to warfare, "the answer," he wrote, "is yes." In The New York Review of Books, Wilson was attacked for reviving theories that were the basis for "the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany."

The Left's hysterical assault on sociobiology -- mass gas chambers, you may have noticed, have yet to appear in America -- was the opening salvo in a campaign that on occasion recedes but then seems to return with even greater fury. Just last year, the Left flexed its muscles at the supposed Enlightenment citadel of Harvard -- its motto is "Veritas" -- when aggrieved faculty members chased Lawrence Summers from the presidency in part for his impolitic suggestion that math proficiency could be a sex-linked trait.

"I don't think Summers was really saying anything that most of the people in the biology department of Harvard don't believe anyway," Michael Ruse, a professor of philosophy at Florida State University and the founder of the journal Biology & Philosophy, said in an interview. "We have just as much of a police-state [mentality] coming from the Left as from the Right," he noted.

Observing that biology "doesn't reach concluding points" and "is going to keep pushing on the brain," Ruse tossed out some possibilities for future controversies that could add tinder to the fire. For example, science's attempt to answer the question, "Are the Chinese innately brighter than the rest of us?" That certainly does sound provocative -- but as scientists delve deeper into the human brain, does it really make sense for them to steer clear of research that could yield findings that could become fodder for racists? For the committed racist, almost anything gleaned from science can be fodder. The classical liberal tradition can't survive if popular sensibilities are so easily agitated.

Despite the Left's anxieties, cutting-edge biology is not, in fact, uniformly giving credence to what many people would regard as a retrograde picture of humankind. The trend in scientific research on sexual orientation is tending to show, as gay-rights advocates have long argued, that homosexuality has a biological basis and cannot be rightly understood as a cultural choice or preference. And the same research that suggests that math geniuses are more likely to be male may also find that females have a higher proficiency for language.

Science does not dictate a formula for how society should be constructed. But it can offer insights into which kinds of approaches might work better than others. Thus, while the Left may not want to hear this, an enlightened approach to elementary-school education may be forced to recognize that girls generally have an easier time sitting still than boys. More recess time, anyone?

Assault From The Cultural Right
It is, of course, not just the Left that has taken on modern biology and on occasion put Darwin and his contemporaries in the docket. For the Right, and particularly the Religious Right, this is old business indeed, going back at least as far as the Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925, when a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was prosecuted for violating a Tennessee law barring the teaching of evolution.

Although Scopes was convicted in that case, evolution did become a mainstay of the science curriculum in America, because countless experiments by scientists confirmed Darwin's central insight that life on Earth, human life included, was shaped by a competitive process, to some degree trial-and-error, of gene selection. And so it may have seemed, for a time, that the Scopes furor represented nothing more than a last gasp of America's anti-modern Bible Belters. But that has turned out not to be the case. The culture wars that the secular-oriented Left brought on in the 1960s mobilized the religiously oriented Right for battle against a feared tide of decadence presumed to stem from a coming age of godlessness.

This time, religious ideologues took a different tack, seeking to have public schools teach intelligent design in science classes as an alternative to evolution. The problem is that "ID is not science," as a George W. Bush-appointed federal judge, John E. Jones III, ruled decisively [PDF] in Harrisburg, Pa., last December. "ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation," Jones wrote in his explanation of why the Dover Area School Board was guilty of "breathtaking inanity" in its requirement that students be told about intelligent design in ninth-grade biology class.

Jones tossed out the Dover school board's requirement on the grounds that intelligent design, as "creationism relabeled," breached the constitutional wall separating church from state because it was the product of a religious viewpoint. He might have ruled narrowly; instead he provided a tutorial on the origins of the modern scientific method in the time of Newton. His ruling made clear that advocates of ID were not simply displaying hostility toward evolution -- they were, in effect, rejecting the workings of science and the evidence compiled by scientists since Darwin offered his theory in "The Origin of Species" in 1859. In attempting to package intelligent design as science, the ID advocates were rejecting science itself. In a way, this was intellectual hubris of the highest order.

For his troubles, Jones was accused by Phyllis Schlafly, a longtime activist on behalf of conservative religious causes, of being in league with "atheist evolutionists" and, more than that, of betraying "millions of evangelical Christians" who voted for Bush in 2000 and thus made possible Jones's appointment to the bench. In his ruling, Jones "stuck the knife in the backs of those who brought him to the dance," Schlafly thundered in a Copley News Service column.

The intelligent-design movement may or may not be dead as a result of Jones's ruling. But efforts to deny the scientific validity of evolution most certainly are not -- the forces behind intelligent design are merely regrouping. Of course, no one is under any compulsion to accept evolution -- or to accept, for that matter, the proposition that water boils at 100 degrees centigrade under normal pressure. But should popular democracy, as Schlafly implies in her column, get to decide what is and what is not credible science?

Assault From Industry
When Big Tobacco was confronted with reams of scientific data confirming medical warnings of the dangers of smoking, the Brown and Williamson Co. set out to muddy the waters by creating the false appearance of scientific controversy. "Doubt is our product," an internal company memo in the 1960s famously declared.

That memo is getting a lot of play these days, courtesy of the critics of the fossil fuel industry's stall-game tactics on the matter of climate change. As one such critic, the science writer Chris Mooney, has noted, the American Petroleum Institute in the late 1990s prepared a memo on global warming saying, "Victory will be achieved [when] recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the 'conventional wisdom.'"

Such lobbying efforts may one day look every bit as ridiculous -- or pernicious -- as the tobacco industry's exertions to deny links between smoking and cancer. For a long time, the science on climate change has been going in a worrisome direction. "That the climate is warming now seems certain," The Economist, which is certainly not an alarmist publication, summed up late last year. "And though the magnitude of any future warming remains unclear, human activity seems the most likely cause."

A National Academy of Sciences panel of climate scientists is even more conclusive, reporting recently that "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming" of the Earth. Score at least one point for Gore, whose much-mocked 1992 book, "Earth in the Balance," now looks a decade ahead of its time. A longtime astronomy enthusiast, Gore became interested in climate change as a college student back in the 1960s when he took a Harvard class taught by Roger Revelle, a pioneering scientist in the field.

Big Tobacco's cause was, in the main, a provincial one, advanced by lawmakers from tobacco-growing regions. By contrast, in today's supercharged partisan environment, the debate over the science on climate change is one of the most polarizing issues between the two political parties. In an April National Journal Congressional Insiders Poll of 111 members of the House and Senate, 98 percent of Democrats answered yes to the question, "Do you think it's been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made pollution?" But only 23 percent of Republicans said yes, with the remaining 77 percent answering no. Are the two sides reading different textbooks?

Climate change is a centerpiece example in science writer Mooney's recent best-seller, "The Republican War on Science." The book is misleading in its implication that the assault on science comes from only one quarter, when in fact it comes from a motley crew, including the Left. Nevertheless, the GOP has certainly tried to develop a position on global warming, and that position itself seems somewhat unscientific.

Before the 2002 congressional elections, Frank Luntz, the public opinion guru, encouraged Republican candidates to use phrases like, "Scientists can extrapolate all kinds of things from today's data, but that doesn't tell us anything about tomorrow's world." Meanwhile, Washington think tanks, funded by fossil fuel interests and ideologically connected to the Republican conservative movement, help spread uncertainty on global warming.

This might make for clever or effective politics in the short run. But as signs of global warming accumulate, if lakes continue to dry up and summers grow ever longer, then the Earth itself may mock Republicans for their closed ears and eyes, for their efforts to spin science like so many pages out of Bill Clinton's draft file. In the long run, as the smoking-causes-cancer "debate" proved, science cannot be cheated. And its punishment is merciless.

The New Lab-Coat Liberal
It is tempting, in this tale, to take pity on the scientist. Assailed from all sides, he -- yes, most top scientists are still men -- may appear to be just as much a casualty as the Enlightenment mind-set itself.

Alas, it is not that simple. Inevitably the scientist has been dragged, or has catapulted himself, into the values and political combat that surround science and has emerged, in certain respects, as just another (diminished) partisan.

This is plainly the case in the matter of the Religious Right's mugging of evolution. Darwin, anticipating just such a beating, had a ready response in the true spirit of science, which was that there was nothing in his scientific observations, nor could there be in any scientific gathering of evidence, that proved or disproved the existence of God. But that sort of agnostic caution seems to have lapsed as an example for today's scientists.

Among neo-Darwinian biologists on both sides of the Atlantic, a kind of counter-militancy has gathered force. Prominent evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins of Britain are proudly proclaiming their atheistic beliefs -- even suggesting that anyone who believes in God is a fool. "Of course it's satisfying, if you can believe it," Dawkins has said about faith in God. "But who wants to believe a lie?"

But it is Dawkins who looks dim for seeking to claim more from science than science can, by definition, provide. "He is an evangelical atheist" and "he is killing us," Alan I. Leshner, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said in an interview.

If modern scientists were the classical liberals that they like to say they still are, then they presumably would not be clustered on one side of the partisan divide. In fact, they display a deep-blue orientation. A Pew Research Center survey last year found that 87 percent of "scientists/engineers" (representing a random sampling of members of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering) disapproved of the way Bush was handling his job as president. In the fall of 1997, by contrast, 78 percent of scientists/engineers approved of Bill Clinton's performance.

What gives? The answer, in part, is that scientists have a long-standing tendency to believe that some societal problems -- global warming is a current example -- demand collective solutions of the sort that laissez-faire Republicans tend to be reluctant to support. In the 1930s, scientists widely embraced FDR's New Deal, and a number of researchers, blind to Stalin's crimes, were in fact Communist sympathizers or party members.

Today's Lab-Coat Liberal, as opposed to a Jefferson-style classical liberal, is also a product of the 1960s. Leading research scientists, as National Academy members generally are, inhabit an academic environment that was radicalized by the Vietnam War protest movement and civil-rights struggles. Although most scientists balk at the New Left's fixation on identity politics, science academia, even as it subsists on government grants, tends to take an anti-establishment posture that embraces a false view of science's own purity.

"Through its actions in Vietnam our government has shaken our confidence in its ability to make wise and humane decisions," the Cambridge, Mass.-based Union of Concerned Scientists declared in its founding document in 1968. Never mind that elite research scientists -- members of a secretive government-connected team dubbed "The Jasons" -- advised the Pentagon on certain Vietnam war-fighting strategies.

This mind-set, pitting the purportedly apolitical concerns of scientists against the connivers who wield political power in Washington, endures. In a recent Web posting on the prospect of a confrontation between the U.S. and Iran, the Union of Concerned Scientists declared that Iran "does not represent a direct or imminent threat to the United States." That is a policy judgment, not a scientific conclusion, and it is a dubious one at that, given the clear signs that Iran, a backer of Shiite militias in neighboring Iraq and of Hezbollah in Lebanon, is complicating the mission of U.S. forces in the Middle East.

The Bush administration as a whole, not just its military policies, is in the Cambridge outfit's gun sights. Citing climate change, childhood lead poisoning, reproductive health, drug abuse, and other issues, the group declared in 2004: "When scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process through which science enters into its decisions." Signatories included Edward Wilson, the Harvard entomologist once taken to task by the New Left.

In an interview, Cornell physicist Kurt Gottfried, chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists and a drafter of that founding declaration, denied that the group, or scientists generally, had a pronounced partisan disposition. "I do not believe that 77 percent or 87 percent of scientists vote Democratic normally," he said. But the available data, as scientists like to say, suggest otherwise. In 15 years of polling, scientists "have always stood out as among the most Democratic of the elites," Michael Dimock, associate director of the Pew Research Center, said in an interview.

Thus the science community, even if at times a reluctant warrior, is itself contributing to the polarization that afflicts America's political culture. Viewed by the Founders as part of the glue that binds American democracy, the scientist is in danger of becoming a force for its increasing fragmentation.

Science And Democracy
These may sound like abstract concerns: American democracy is often said to be imperiled by one threat or another and yet has always proved resilient. Still, today's anxieties about how well science can operate in the political culture emerge from deep within the American establishment itself.

The worries are voiced by the likes of Louis M. Branscomb. About to turn 80 years old, he obtained a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard and became the chief scientist of IBM. He was a member of Mobil's board for more than 20 years, and he was director of the National Bureau of Standards in the Nixon administration. He's a former director of the Kennedy School of Government's Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at Harvard.

In a recent interview, Branscomb summed up the perils facing the researcher in the pursuit of scientific truth -- the ideologues of all stripes, a government "oriented toward power and money" on issues like, yes, the former oil-company director acknowledged, climate change, all of which is "getting us away from independent, rational thought," with Democrats "just as guilty as Republicans."

It doesn't yet amount to an Age of Anti-Science, Branscomb said, but "it is a move away from whatever remains of the rational philosophy of the Enlightenment, which was the basis for the people who designed the Constitution of the United States."

Branscomb helped to organize that Union of Concerned Scientists' broadside criticism of the Bush administration's handling of science, but as his remarks suggest, he is nobody's idea of a Democratic partisan. A fellow physicist, Vernon Ehlers, the Republican House member representing Grand Rapids, Mich., calls him "a pretty level-headed guy."

No doubt there are palliatives for science's jeopardized status. Many in the science establishment, and some in Washington, are calling for more money to be spent on teaching schoolchildren about the modern scientific method. Ehlers, a former college professor, said that a way needs to be found to re-acquaint ordinary Americans with what true science is all about, "the thrill of learning." As things stand, "they are only concerned about whether we [scientists] can develop a better cellphone for them," Ehlers lamented. It's possible, he speculated, that 19th-century Americans had a better appreciation of science because so many worked on the farm and had to grapple with nature's mysteries on their own.

A public constituency for good science, and for the kind of critical thinking that all good science requires, conceivably could be strengthened by the wider participation of first-rank scientists in the arena of electoral politics. But don't bet on that happening. Ehlers is the rare hard scientist in Congress -- the first-ever research physicist. And no scientist by vocation, Jefferson aside, has ever been president. For the typical Ph.D. scientist, Ehlers acknowledged, a shift to a career in politics is generally seen as a step down. That's not the case for the lawyer types who dominate politics these days.

The problem in any case may lie beyond the shortcomings of the educational system or the dearth of charismatic scientists to explain science's job in society. Today's science controversies, by and large, are "not a matter of public ignorance," said Leshner, the Advancement of Science CEO and a neuroscientist by training. Rather, he observed, we are living "in an age of great complexity where some people in American society feel free to ignore or distort science at their peril."

In a democracy, "only scientists are compelled to live by science," Leshner added. Or, to put that thought another way, freedom includes the right to be anti-science -- the right, that is, to reject the liberal tradition of open-mindedness, of submitting theories to the test of evidence. Freedom can be illiberal.

Americans have not, by any stretch, turned against the idea that science can better their own lives and improve the welfare of all. Since the 1970s, approximately 70 percent of the U.S. public has consistently said yes to the question, asked by the National Science Board, "Have the benefits of scientific research outweighed the harmful results?" And yet, as Leshner pointed out, the surveys also demonstrate that many people will ignore science when science is viewed as conflicting with their values. Thus, 47 percent of Americans say that they do not agree that "human beings developed from earlier species of animals."

A fascinating, if somewhat frightening, societal experiment is under way. The question is whether democracy naturally advances science, or whether modern progress in science actually has less to do with heralded forms of government than with the fruit born of a special moment in historical time, the modern European Enlightenment, from which America, courtesy of the Founders, greatly benefited.

Jefferson, the ultimate optimist about progress in science and democracy going hand in hand, died in 1826, at the dawn of what became known as Jacksonian America, a raucous new era of muddy-boots rule by "the people." Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who toured this America in 1831 and was its most perceptive chronicler, worried about the prospect for science in the new Republic. "Nothing is more necessary to the culture of the higher sciences or of the more elevated departments of science than meditation; and nothing is less suited to meditation than the structure of democratic society," Tocqueville observed in "Democracy in America."

For a very long time, this appeared to be the rare Tocqueville insight that was off the mark. Our current age, though, seems bent on proving him right after all.

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