Scientists and Engineers for America: Questions for Your Candidate
I don’t see much point in voting today, since the results for my state are demographically preordained. But this has still been an interesting election cycle for me as a scientist.
At some point in my career, I decided scientific objectivity required me to be apolitical, at least in the public sphere. When wearing my scientist-educator hat (it goes so well with the lab coat and goggles), I take pains to speak neutrally about social issues, even if I have strong opinions about them. I felt scientists should remain above the partisan fray, in order to preserve our professional credibility in the service of society as a whole.
The problem is, scientists aren’t being consulted on the big issues, like global warming (the really big issue) or stem cells. The process of science is being misrepresented to the public, who don’t grasp how it’s funded, conducted, or reviewed. And increasingly, scientists are getting pissy: staying above the fray might be ideal, but letting bad science slide is negligent.
The nascent Scientists and Engineers for America is the latest group to push for scientific expertise in policy. Practically as soon as the organization was created, it was accused of elitism and partisanship, and it remains to be seen if it can overcome the mudslinging. But many scientists feel they have to do something. The public already has an abysmal grasp of scientific principles. If we won’t enter the fray, we’re contributing to the problem of scientific illiteracy — and to the larger problems humans create, when we refuse to investigate how our actions shape the world around us. Those problems are much, much larger than partisanship.
The authors of Freakonomics, Stephen Dubner and Steven Leavitt, wrote a short article about global warming for the New York Times Sunday. I liked their conclusion:
While arguing that global warming would produce a net agricultural gain in the United States, they specify which states would be the big winners and which ones would be the big losers. What’s most intriguing is that winners’ and losers’ lists are a true blend of red states and blue states: New York, along with Georgia and South Dakota, are among the winners; Nebraska and North Carolina would lose out, but the biggest loser of all would be California. Which suggests that in this most toxic of election seasons, when there seems not a single issue that can unite blue and red staters (or at least the politicians thereof), global warming could turn out to be just the thing to bring us all together.
Ideally, it would. But I think there’ll be a lot more of the fray before it does.