Science Turns Authoritarian

Excerpts from Wired article
By Kenneth P. Green and Hiwa Alaghebandian Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Science is losing its credibility because it has adopted an authoritarian tone, and has let itself be co-opted by politics.

In a Wired article published at the end of May, writer Erin Biba bemoans the fact that "science" is losing its credibility with the public. The plunge in the public's belief in catastrophic climate change is her primary example. Biba wonders whether the loss of credibility might be due to the malfeasance unearthed by the leak of emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, but comes to the conclusion that malfeasance isn't the cause of the public's disaffection. No, people have turned against science simply because it lacks a good public relations outfit.

While nobody would dispute the value of a good PR department, we doubted that bad or insufficient PR was the primary reason for the public's declining trust in scientific pronouncements. Our theory is that science is not losing its credibility because people no longer like or believe in the idea of scientific discovery, but because science has taken on an authoritarian tone, and has let itself be co-opted by pressure groups who want the government to force people to change their behavior.

We decided to do a bit of informal research, checking Lexis Nexis for the growth in the use of what we characterize as 'authoritarian' phrasing when it comes to scientific findings.

In the past, scientists were generally neutral on questions of what to do. Instead, they just told people what they found, such as "we have discovered that smoking vastly increases your risk of lung cancer" or "we have discovered that some people will have adverse health effects from consuming high levels of salt." Or "we havefound that obesity increases your risk of coronary heart disease." Those were simply neutral observations that people could find empowering, useful, interesting, etc., but did not place demands on them. In fact, this kind of objectivity was the entire basis for trusting scientific claims.

But along the way, an assortment of publicity-seeking, and often socially activist, scientists stopped saying, "Here are our findings. Read it and believe." Instead, activist scientists such as NASA's James Hansen, heads of quasi-scientific governmental organizations such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, editors of major scientific journals, and heads of the various national scientific academies are more inclined to say, "Here are our findings, and those findings say that you must change your life in this way, that way..."

Full Article:
http://www.american.com/archive/2010/july/science-turns-authoritarian

["O Timothy, keep that which is committed to your trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called" (1 Timothy 6:20)]