In 1989, the communist dictatorship oddly named Union of Soviet Socialist Republics reached the extent of a third giant hole in the Arctic Circle, Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3, where they'd been drilling for 19 years. It clocked in at nearly 8 miles deep.
In 1993, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave us "defining deviancy down", a clever bit of alliteration based on the work of sociologist Emile Durkheim from his defining work of 1895. Durkheim wrote that crime is normal, it is going to happen, but by defining what is deviant, a community decides what is not and creates a reasonable standard for living together.
Peak Oil, which was supposed to have happened in 1992, set off the craze of declaring 'peak' everything, to such an extent it is a running joke now.(1) The good news for Peak Oil believers is that they are going to be right eventually. Oil is a 'fossil' fuel and we aren't making any more giant dinosaurs. Even in the 1970s, when the peak oil date was floated, no one outside environmental doomsday prophets believed it, because it fell victim to the plight of most advocacy-based projections; it created a curve of demand but assumed technology and science, and therefore the supply, would be static. By creating a false metric they concluded all the oil that would ever be found had been found.
In American scientization of politics culture, evolution acceptance is a big deal, as is climate change. Yet other science acceptance issues get much less attention.Why? Evolution and climate change are not the most pressing short-term science issues we face, food, energy and medicine are. I am in awe of evolution but no one dies if some crank school district wants to put religion side-by-side with biology in a classroom, and American CO2 emissions from energy, obviously our biggest polluter, are back at early 1990s levels, thanks to science finding ways to make natural gas extraction better.
Throughout the 20th century, medical research and public health science was primarily done by corporations - the United States, with 5 percent of the population, generated more than 50 percent of the money and a whole lot more of the science.No more. Medical research has declined in the United States. It's a win for multiculturalism and a win for globalization but a loss for the U.S. Yet we have no one else to blame. We are not being out-competed by China when it comes to science, we are losing medical research because we have been taught to hate drug companies and that new drugs should be cheap. That has had substantial impact on our policy.
Literature scholars love to debate Shakespeare. Like 'the greatest baseball player of all time' everyone can have an opinion and they are all just as valid, if even a modicum of thought went into it.(1) He was real, he was not real, he was a fraud, he was the greatest writer of all time, he was a woman, you name it and someone in the humanities has argued for it. He was Catholic? Catholics say so, at least after the fact, but that evidence is circumstantial, like everything else except his writing.
One of the biggest struggles in toxicology is creating the correct parameters so you are modeling the real world as closely as possible. It's an enormous task to model the environment with its millions of factors, so controlled studies are done using animals.Scientists design experiments that give an animal a lot of something at once and that can tell them 'this is the threshold where more analysis is a waste of time' and perhaps also find an effect that may be worth studying in more detail. It's a time-honored technique but it's also a technique that can be exploited.
Picture this scenario: A politician is appointed to run NASA who thinks its budget is too high and then half its money and a third of its workforce is on its way to evaporating. Public support for a mission to Mars is nonexistent.It must be in late 2015, after anti-science Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has control of NASA, if you read science media (and then whatever Huffington Post and Slate are).
With organic food a $105 billion industry juggernaut, various groups are looking to don that health halo. Even frozen food. If you don't think food can be "fresh" and "healthy" while still being frozen, you probably also do not believe organic food has more antioxidants and uses fewer pesticides and therefore are not the target market and you can stop reading.
In late 2008, the euphoria over electing a man who specifically said he wanted to put science back in its rightful place began to fade. The president-elect, it seemed, preferred the company of UFO believers, an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and a guy who thought girls couldn't do math.
Groups like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration set the gold standard worldwide for science - but they are still soundly criticized. Every time the EPA clears a pesticide it is blasted because the studies it mandates are "industry-funded", which is required by law. As are trials for drugs.
For many people, the disclaimers about side effects of drugs at the end of television drug commercials (along with the omnipresent 'see our ad in Golf magazine' small print) are somewhat laughable - like with Proposition 65 'cancer-causing chemicals' here in California, when everything is a problem, nothing is - but they have a serious societal impact when the FDA says it.
A solid 12 years after most of its audience stopped watching "The West Wing", I decided to start - all 154 episodes. In the interest of transparency, I disclose I skipped two - one was a retrospective and one was nothing but a debate between two characters that no one could care much about
who were running for president to succeed the sitting president played by Martin Sheen. Real debates are boring enough but a fictional one written by one political side is really tedious.
Freedom of speech is an Enlightenment ideal - unless it is someone we disagree with politically, then it is common to say they are being an ideologue, when it comes to politics, or on the take, when it comes to science, or #partoftheproblem, when it comes to cultural militancy.Advocates have mastered their framing when it comes to science. That is why political groups like Union of Concerned Scientists and National Resources Defense Council can say they accept science when it comes to climate change, but when it comes to food, energy and medicine, they are not anti-science, they are just 'testing the conclusions' of science in a reasonable way.
