Politics and science literacy

Marco Rubio
www.therightsphere.com

by Massimo Pigliucci

It’s time to pick on my friend Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, a little bit, . Knowing him, I am sure he will take my remarks as a friendly challenge for all of us to improve the way we all think about certain issues, and I am of course extending him an open invitation to respond or comment on this blog post whenever and in whatever fashion he feels appropriate.

So, what’s my beef with Phil? It’s about a post he has published recently, on the infamous interview with Florida Senator Marco Rubio (apparently, and regrettably, a rising star in the Republican firmament) conducted by GQ magazine. In the interview, Rubio was asked his opinion about the age of the earth — something that has unfortunately become a standard litmus test for Republican Presidential hopefuls since the well documented turn away from reality that has characterized the party. Predictably, Rubio’s response was that he wasn’t a scientist, but “whether the earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.”

Phil, like any reasonable person, was outraged that a prominent public figure, a potential Presidential candidate  no less, could be so obtusely equivocal about a basic scientific fact. (Of course, whether Rubio really is that much of a simpleton or whether he was simply pandering to the half of the US population which denies basic scientific facts, is another matter altogether.)

Phil’s (and my own, for that matter) reaction, however, got partly — and I think correctly — chastised by Daniel Engber in a follow up article published in Slate (the same magazine that hosted Phil’s initial essay). Engber cited another well known American politician as saying this:

“My belief is that the story that the Bible tells about God creating this magnificent earth on which we live — that is essentially true, that is fundamentally true. Now, whether it happened exactly as we might understand it reading the text of the Bible, that I don’t presume to know.”

Care to guess who this second politician is? None other than our esteemed current President, Barack Obama, speaking in 2008 as a Presidential candidate. The point that Engber was trying to make, I think, is neither that Phil Plait should have been aware of the Obama quote when skewering Rubio, nor that Rubio and Obama are therefore to be considered on the same intellectual level. After all, Phil is not a political commentator, and Rubio has been a constant supporter of the teaching of creationism while Obama has expressly said that he believes in evolution. The point, rather, is that we all have ideological blinders, and that as a consequence we are sometimes a bit too quick in using strong language to condemn our opponents while turning a blind eye when our allies say something remarkably similar.

But what really caught Engber’s attention was the broader picture Phil painted from the Rubio quote. Here is Phil, commenting on Rubio’s position that esoteric issues like the age of the earth have no bearing on the status of the American economy and how to improve it: “Perhaps Senator Rubio is unaware that science — and its sisters engineering and technology — are actually the very foundation of our country’s economy? All of our industry, all of our technology, everything that keeps our country functioning at all can be traced back to scientific research and a scientific understanding of the universe.” [Italics in the original.]

But that is simply not the case, as Engber points out in his commentary: “Lots of basic scientific questions have no bearing whatsoever on the nation’s short-term economic growth. ... Lots of scientific questions don’t matter all that much when it comes [even] to other scientific questions. It’s possible — and quite common — for scientists to plug away at research projects without explicit knowledge of what’s happening in other fields. And when a bedrock principle does need to be adjusted — a not-so-unusual occurrence, as it turns out — the edifice of scholarship doesn’t crumble into dust. DVD players still operate. Nuclear plants don’t shut down.”

My experience both as a scientist and as a philosopher of science tell me that Engber is right on the mark. When I was a practicing evolutionary biologist, I had to constantly write grant proposals for the National Science Foundation, to keep my lab going and my graduate students and postdocs reasonably fed. NSF at one point started asking for a layperson statement of the proposed research, with the admirable goal of making the basic ideas available to the general public, who after all was footing the bill. NSF now also asks for a statement of broader impact, where the Principal Investigator has to explain why taxpayers should be paying for the usually highly esoteric research being proposed — often to the tune of hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars per year. Here is where things get funny: I noticed that both I and all my colleagues were stumped, and resorted to vague statements about the “long term implications” of basic research for scientific applications, eventually (way, way down the line) leading to potential applications concerning human health, the quality of the environment, and so on. But if pressed, we would have been in a really difficult position to elaborate on exactly how, say, studying the mating patterns of tropical butterflies, or the genetic structure of a species of small flowering plants, could plausibly be related to cures for cancer or any other kind of improvement to human life.

Indeed, on the rare occasions in which scientists are pressed on these matters they resort to the worst kind of evidence: anecdotes instead of rigorously quantified surveys of the connections between basic and applied research. Moreover, these anecdotes are often somewhat historically incorrect, since most scientists don’t actually have either the time or the inclination to read serious scholarly research in the history of their own field. So the last resort becomes something like, “well, this [i.e., my] topic of research is intrinsically interesting,” which means little more than that the person in question finds it fascinating and wants funding for it.

Before I leave room for misunderstanding, I do think that a healthy society ought to fund basic scientific research, just as it ought to fund the arts and the humanities. And I do think that there are (often vague, serendipitous) connections between basic and applied research (I am also perfectly aware of the porous boundary between these two categories). But I think that a lot of scientists are far too casual in their justification for why the public should pay for their specific, often very expensive and almost always not particularly useful (to the public), research. We keep forgetting that publicly financed science is a rather novel (mostly, post-WWII) luxury that has come to sustain a great part of the academy — just ask Galileo how he had to earn his living (by pandering to fickle princes all over Italy, as well as by selling his perfected version of the telescope to the Venetians, for war-related uses). It is dangerous to take this situation for granted, and it is dishonest to pretend that it all directly benefits the millions of people who foot the bill while having no clue as to what we do in our laboratories.

There is a deeper philosophical reason why Engber is right and people like Phil and myself ought to be more cautious with our outrage at the cutting of scientific budgets or at politicians’ opportunistic uttering of scientific nonsense to gather supporters and votes. Knowledge in general, and scientific knowledge in particular, is not like an edifice with foundations — a common but misleading metaphor. If it were, it would be more likely that, as Phil so strongly stated, everything is connected to everything else, so that ignoring, denying, or replacing one piece of the building will likely create fractures all over the place.

But that’s not how it works. Rather, to use philosopher W.V.O. Quine’s apt metaphor, knowledge is more like a web, with some threads being stronger or more interconnected than others. (Interestingly, the largest database of scholarly papers available to date is called the Web of Knowledge, though I doubt the name is a knowing wink to Quine.) If you see science as a web of statements, observations, experiments, and theories, then it becomes perfectly clear why Engber is right at pointing out that quite a bit of independence exists between different parts of the web, and how even relatively major chunks of said web can be demolished and replaced without the whole thing crumbling. There really is next to no connection between someone’s opinions about the age of the earth and that person’s grasp of the state and causes of a country’s economy. (Just like, to use another example from Engber’s article, there is little relationship between Francis Collins’ philosophically naive beliefs about Christianity and his undoubted abilities as a scientist and current head of the NIH. If one bought into the “everything is tightly connected to everything else” view of science, the effectiveness of figures like Collins would amount to an unexplained miracle, so to speak.)

Still, there is an important point where Phil is absolutely correct and that I think Engber underestimates. What is “chilling” and disturbing about people like Rubio (but not people like Obama) is that they have embraced a general philosophy of rejecting evidence and reason whenever it is ideologically or politically convenient. That is what is highly dangerous. Quite frankly, I’m comfortable having a born again Christian leading the NIH, as long as he doesn’t start funding prayer-based medicine. I’m even ok — in a regrettable, chagrined way — with politicians being preposterously ambiguous about the age of the earth, as long as they then turn around (as Obama, but not Rubio, did) and recognize the real and present danger posed by climate change. Indeed, the real problem isn’t Rubio, or even the evidence-avoiding Republican party. The problem is that half of the American population keeps voting for these clowns, in the process, jeopardizing the entire world’s future. But that is a different topic rooted in broader failures, failures for which the scientific and science education communities are not entirely innocent either.