Via Tim Lambert, Crooked Timber, at the instigation of John Quiggin, has organised a seminar on Chris Mooney’s book The Republican War on Science.
An excerpt from one of John’s posts:
As the lack of scientific support for favored Republican positions becomes more evident, we are seeing the transition from a War Over Science to a War On Science, involving attacks on the social institutions of science, including journals like Science and Nature (here’s Michael Fumento at Powerline), the idea of peer review, and scientists as a group, stigmatised by Tom Bethell as a white-coated priesthood of political correctness. The fact that Bethell’s work is promoted by the Heritage Foundation, and that the same terms are being recirculated by the global rightwing commentariat is an indication that this is already a mainstream Republican position, although perhaps not yet the dominant one.
Not surprisingly, the shift to a War on Science has seen a realignment of positions from the Science Wars. The Republicans are now lining up with some of their erstwhile opponents, postmodernist and social constructivists in the humanities and social sciences, who can provide more sophisticated arguments in the War on Science than those derived from Velikovsky and his successors.
Go read the whole thing.
Elsewhere: Jason Soon takes aim at the “cultural constructionist left” over at Catallaxy.
Will these demons never leave us in peace?
The War on Science is coming from two directions. One is from the Religious Right, and their main targets are evolution and stem cell research. The other is from the Corporatist Right, particularly the oil companies, and their main target seems to be environmental science, in particular the science of global warming.
Perhaps we need a ritual of exorcism?
The postmodern critique of science is certainly sophisticated (in the original sense), but coherent it ain’t.
Silkworm, if you read Steve Fuller’s contribution, you’ll find that the Cultural constructionist/literary Left is another enemy of science, and probably a far more insiduous one than the Religious Right because we at least know where the latter stands
http://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/27/if-there’s-a-war-please-direct-me-to-the-battlefield/#comment-149852
This fellow is talking out of his rear end but he knows his verbal sophistries. Calling the established theory of evolution ‘neo-Darwinism’ is of course the classical rhetorical ploy to get the luvvies all huffing and puffing about those ‘evil men’ like Richard Dawkins and EO Wilson ‘justifying patriarchy’ as the sensible leftie PZ Myers
http://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/27/if-there’s-a-war-please-direct-me-to-the-battlefield/#comment-149674
More foolishness here from the representative of the Cultural Constructionist Left as he joins hands with the Religious Right (Philip Johnson). Two sides of the same coin, both with vested interests in the theistic view of humanity.
http://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/27/if-there’s-a-war-please-direct-me-to-the-battlefield/#comment-149633
Interesting article on the ID debate by Madeleine Bunting at the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1740392,00.html
Bunting has made a career out of attacking Dawkins while Dawkins has done more than most people to promote science. I’d bet the number of people he has got enthusiastic about science exceeds the fictional people that Bunting claims have been turned off because of his writing – most of these people wouldn’t be buying science books anyway. As Ophelia Benson writes here, her (and Ruse’s claim) is simply a wild exaggeration:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=1294
Also see a debunking of Bunting by PZ Myers here
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/03/the_dawkinsdennett_boogeyman.php
Jason, I’ll crosspost what I said in response to similar points you made in your post at Catallaxy:
My totally non-expert take on Steve Fuller is that he assiduously craves controversy to promote his social epistemology discipline, and sell more books.
Not a bad assessment tigtog. That’s why I was so pissed off with his stuff. He seems to be taking a contrarian stance just for the hell of it or for publicity reasons or to show how clever he can be, stabbing his allies in the back in the process. It’s far worse than sincere foolishness.
Two psuedoscience causes taken up by my fellow Leftoids are (1) fluoridation of drinking water is a major health hazard and (2) vaccinations are a causal factor in autism.
Much to my frustration, a number of my fellow Greens are on the anti-fluoridation bandwagon. I wonder how many of them realise that this cause was once the preserve of the far right groups, such as the League of Rights in Australia and the John Birch Society in the United States?
I suspect the problem is that the fluoride put in our water is a non-organic chemical and in fact an industrial waste product. Some Greenies have never met a man-made chemical they truly liked.
Sadly, elements in the boutique left also have exaggerated concerns about the possible side effects of vaccinations. It is a constant battle for public health officials to hose these down. The autism scare persists beside a wealth of evidence that discredits it.
As is often the case, there are just enough mavericks with appropriate qualifications on each of these bandwagons to suck in concerning numbers of gullible and ill-informed folk.
Steve Lomborg, The Skeptical Greenie
The vaccinations cause autism crowd come from both sides. The appalling Melanie Philips is one of the leading proponents in the UK.
jason, you do not know what you are talking about. education is not scientific research. what the kids are being educated about is the *idea* of ID or creationism instead of the *idea* of science. this is surely a battle against stupidity (see below), but it is not a battle in the *domain of science*. It is a political battle around ideas and the economic and material realities they do or do not represent. If it is a scientific problem, then this is evidence of the politics of science exactly in the way that you decry, if on the other hand, and what I think is more accurate, it has absolutely nothing to do with science and is a battle over the reproduction of fundamentalisms in State-based social institutions, then it is fought in the media and juridical arms of the State. (If scientific discourse has lost its meta-narrativising function so it can self-legitimate its own discourse, then this has nothing to do with left pomo. Don’t shoot the messenger, lol!)
a version of my comment from cat-laxity:
here is the shorter version of some of the work on science from the left pomo. rational ’scientific’ work can not be produced without an intimate relation to stupidity. in fact, rational scientific work is the after-effect of a battle with stupidity. this battle is fought along material, cultural, social, political and lastly ’scientific’ fronts. researchers don’t call it stupidity, they call it a ‘problem’. the thing is that due to the complexity and specificity of the problems, ’stupidity’ for proper academic researchers is probably smarter than than the smartest common person. it is a war against a problem not the *realisation* of ‘good science’. (it is that thinking that caused this problem in the first place.) that is the difference between rational ’scientific’ practice, which battles stupidity, and the forwarding of non-scientific theses, such as ID or creationism, in that for the latter there is no battle against stupidity (only the realisation of a transcendental ‘rationality’).
plucking terms out of the air (ID, left pomo, etc) and using then to forward an ideological- or belief-based argument is stupid. indeed I have commented here in an attempt to combat stupidity.
Damn straight, Steve. I for one can longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
Erm is that a very abstruse way of saying you’re defending Steve Fuller’s proposal to teach ID alongside evolution, glen? Is evolution just a ‘reproduction of fundamentalisms’? Why not teach astrology and numerology while you’re at it?
I’ve dealt with Fuller and Dover on this blog http://larvatusprodeo.net/2005/12/22/after-dover/ Basically I think he was just practicing what he preaches: the opening of the sphere of autonomy for researchers compels him to ‘collaborate’ as often and as widely as possible, particularly if they’re offering him $100 [an hour] to drink coffee and chat about his work (note the the judge telling him to slow down and lay off the caffeine)
If you’re an anti-ID crusader and you only read one contribution, make it Kieran Healy’s. Erudite as always.
I thought dsquared asked the most interesting and relevant questions, cutting to the heart of the problematic (ie. to what extent is this an American phenomenon), but his use of Adorno was bloodcurdling ironic given that theorist’s contribution to the Positivismusstreit with Popper. Talk about a social constructionist war on science!
While you’re about it you might try battling incoherence.