Support for science is not just becoming rarer in the United States – it’s becoming an electoral liability. What’s going on? Simon Wilson reports.
Are Americans turning anti-science?
Some of its politicians certainly are. It is a worrying sign of the times that support for science has not just become rarer, but that in some quarters it is an out-and-out electoral liability. Jon Huntsman, the ex-US ambassador to China who is competing for the Republican presidential nomination, tweeted (in disbelief at the “anti-science” views of some his rivals) that “I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.” Plenty of Americans did, and his campaign has barely got off the ground. According to Huntsman, “the minute the Republican party becomes the anti-science party… we have a problem”. Yet the stated views of several of his rivals appear to reflect an anti-science lurch. In 2008, the rightwinger John McCain was happy to state openly that he supported the scientific consensus that climate change is real and caused by humans. Four years on, all that has changed.
In what way?
Leading Republican candidates have been open about their disdain for science. Texas governor Rick Perry described evolution as “a theory that is out there – and it’s got some gaps in it”. Herman Cain has said “I don’t believe… global warming is real”, while Michele Bachmann has derided it as “all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax”. Mitt Romney, the long-time frontrunner whom the party has signally failed to get behind, has been obliged to pander to this kind of anti-scientism too. As recently as June, Romney’s position was reasonably clear: “I believe, based on what I read, that the world is getting warmer. And No. 2, I believe that humans contribute to that.” But a few weeks ago he told an audience in Pittsburgh: “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet.” As a New Scientist editorial put it recently: “When candidates for the highest office in the land appear to spurn reason, embrace anecdote over scientific evidence, and even portray scientists as the perpetrators of a massive hoax, there is reason to worry.”
What about Democrats?
It would be wrong to suggest that Republicans have a monopoly on ‘unwisdom’. For example, in 1927, three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan claimed that “all the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teaching of evolution”. More recently, anti-scientific bias is freely displayed in the kind of (typically) left-liberal opinion that lines up against genetically modified crops, prefers “natural” medicine to proven science, or that ascribes autism (for example) to childhood vaccines.
Do politicians reflect popular views?
There’s certainly a trend towards anti-science thinking. Climate scientists agree (or about 98% do) that global warming is happening and that it is at least partly caused by humans via industrialisation. However, only 57% of Americans believed in 2010 that this is true (down from 71% in 2008). As for Darwinian evolution – as secure a fact as any in science – it is deemed true by just 45% of Americans, and is actively rejected by almost as many, making the US among the world’s least-convinced Darwinians.
What’s going on?
Writing in New Scientist, Shawn Lawrence Otto, co-founder of lobby group Science Debate, puts forward three linked reasons for this anti-science stance. First, a generation has grown up since “postmodern” thinking became part of the academic mainstream, teaching cultural relativism and lack of respect for the possibility of “objective” truth. Second, the rise of populist radio and news coverage in the US, since 1987 rules set aside the requirement for “fair” coverage of controversial subjects. And third, the rise of “false balance” in media coverage giving undue exposure to extreme views – for example, the tendency of journalists to pit climate scientists against deniers, as if the views were of equal value.
Why does all this matter?
Because truth matters. It is surely important that societies do not have leaders living out their own fictions about how the world works. When he was president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki’s false belief that HIV does not cause AIDS resulted in policies that caused 300,000 premature deaths, according to an academic paper in the Journal of Aids. When politicians use debating-style tactics to sway public opinion about science (cherry-picking data, sneering at the settled view of the community of experts), it undermines the practice of science, which is the most reliable knowledge-generating system the world has devised, and is already based on a fundamentally sceptical system of conjectures and refutations. If anti-scientism is allowed to flourish in the US, it will ultimately damage its economy, as the best scientists are attracted elsewhere and American prestige is sunk.
Why the press misunderstands science
Earlier this year, the geneticist Steve Jones wrote a study warning that the BBC, often seen as a bastion of fair-mindedness and independence, has routinely failed to understand the nature of science. As a result, it has failed to make a distinction “between well-established fact and opinion” and had thereby given undue publicity to marginal beliefs such as climate change denial and anti-MMR vaccine activists. Adversarial dispute is often a good way to cover democracy in action, reckons Robin McKie in The Observer, but not science. “It serves us well with politics and legal affairs, but falls down badly when it comes to science because its basic processes, which rely heavily on internal criticism and disproof, are so widely misunderstood.”