BOOK REVIEW
Ideological Assaults
Daniel Kevles
The Republican War on Science. Chris Mooney. x + 342 pp.
Basic Books, 2005. $24.95.
At a press conference in February 2004, representatives of the Union
of Concerned Scientists declared that the administration of
President George W. Bush has "disregarded" the principle
that the contributions of science to public-policy decisions
"should always be weighed from an objective and impartial
perspective." The Union considered the disregard a sharp
departure from the long-standing practice of "presidents and
administrators of both parties." But in fact, since World War
II, when the modern era of governmental science advising began, both
presidents and Congress have latched on to technical views that
suited their political purposes. Who can forget Harry Truman's
decision to proceed with the hydrogen bomb against the advice of his
distinguished atomic advisers? Or the enthusiasm in Congress for a
nuclear-powered airplane, not to mention a national missile defense,
both against sound scientific opposition?
Still, through much of the postwar period, such high-profile
episodes concerned, in the main, national security and
big-technology projects. The Union of Concerned Scientists has a
point in that during the administration of George W. Bush the
politicization of science can be found in numerous areas of public
policymaking far beyond defense. Chris Mooney informatively develops
that argument in The Republican War on Science. A young
political journalist, he is at times snide and polemical, but he has
done a lot of homework and has produced a book that is disturbing by
reason of its steady, and for the most part sober, accumulation of
evidence and indictment.
Mooney divides his policymaking cases into two broad categories:
those in which science challenges economic interests, notably on
issues such as the preservation of endangered species and the human
causes of global warming; and those in which it runs athwart the
tenets of the religious Right, especially in human stem-cell
research, the claims of "intelligent design" and the
impact of abortion on women's health. He does not say what policy
involving these science-rich issues should be but only argues
against distortions and misuses of science in the policymaking
process. He explains that if political conservatives don't want to
conserve species, they should say so rather than trying "to
blind us all with science."
Mooney notes that the broadening of the politicization of science
arose in tandem with the expansion that began in the 1960s of
federal regulation of the environment, health and safety, all of
which are areas entangled with expert knowledge. These initiatives
were in part the products of technical knowledge deployed by liberal
reformers. In response, conservatives took a leaf from the liberals
and started organizing their own think tanks, many of them in
Washington, D.C., such as the handsomely funded Heritage Foundation
and American Enterprise Institute.
Recognizing the increasing dependence of regulatory policy on
technical knowledge, conservatives went on to establish various
science-specific think tanks, including the Annapolis Center for
Science-Based Public Policy, which is heavily funded by industry,
and the George C. Marshall Institute, a "hotbed," Mooney
says, "of global warming doubters and contrarians," which
gets a great deal of money from ExxonMobil, among other donors. The
principal institutional engine of the crusade for intelligent design
is the Discovery Institute, which is based in Seattle.
"Manufacturing uncertainty" is how a tobacco company
document once described that industry's use of research to contest
the regulation of its product. Drawing on the think tanks, among
other sources, conservatives, many of them allied with the
Republican Party, have similarly employed marginal science in the
interest of their causes. The theory that human activity is causing
global warming is accepted by the overwhelming majority of the
world's climate scientists, but conservatives combat the claim, with
all its implications of the imperative need for greater restrictions
on the burning of fossil fuels, by stressing the views of a tiny
dissenting minority. Senator James Inhofe, a hard-core conservative
Republican from Oklahoma, proclaimed in a Senate speech in 2003,
"With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony
science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest
hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it."
Like advocates of creation science in the 1980s, the proponents of
intelligent design contend that life is too highly organized to have
developed by chance and that it must therefore be the work of an
intelligent designer. They attach enormous scientific significance
to their ideas; the creationist biochemist Michael Behe has even
written that the alleged discovery of design in nature "rivals
those of Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrödinger,
Pasteur and Darwin." These advocates call for "teaching
the controversy" between intelligent design and Darwin's
theory, as though the content of intelligent design were a
scientific match for Darwinism. Fortunately, in 1987 the U.S.
Supreme Court struck down creation science as a stalking horse for
religion and said that it was therefore inappropriate in
public-school science classes. In December 2005, a court in Dover,
Pennsylvania, similarly banned teaching intelligent design in such classes.
In the vein of many of the activists who reject human-caused global
warming, members of the religious Right use science to cloud rather
than to clarify, emphasizing claims that fall well outside
mainstream science. They insist, for example, that condoms are
ineffective in preventing HIV and other sexually transmitted
diseases and maintain that abortion elevates the risk of breast
cancer or mental illness in women. "Where religious
conservatives may once have advanced their pro-life and socially
traditionalist views through moral arguments, they now increasingly
adopt the veneer of scientific and technical expertise," Mooney writes.
He does acknowledge, in one of a number of gestures at
evenhandedness, that Democrats, not to mention many biomedical
scientists, have exaggerated the imminence of the medical benefits
that are supposed to come from investments in therapeutic human
cloning. But he holds that liberals "are almost never as guilty
as the Right." The Bush administration has certainly been
heavy-handed in its policymaking regarding human stem-cell research.
The administration's fealty to the religious Right has blocked it
from allowing the expenditure of federal funds to create or use any
embryonic stem-cell lines beyond those authorized by the president
in August 2001. In 2004, the administration dismissed the biologist
Elizabeth Blackburn from the President's Council on Bioethics; she
was an outspoken critic of the scientific and therapeutic prospects
of research on adult stem cells, which the Council supported, as
distinct from research on embryonic stem cells, which the Council
did not back.
Overt political interference has also appeared in the management of
several agencies. For example, at the Fish and Wildlife Service,
according to a survey by the Union of Concerned Scientists, almost
half of respondents working on endangered species said that they had
been "directed, for nonscientific reasons, to refrain from
making [findings] that are protective of species." And last
year, the Food and Drug Administration refused to approve a
"morning after" pill despite a recommendation from its
Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee that had passed by a
vote of 23 to 4.
Conservatives have also managed to confound regulatory initiatives
through piecemeal measures such as the Data Quality Act, which came
into effect in October 2002. A boon to industry, the act authorized
challenges early in the regulatory process to the dissemination of
technical information that is adverse to the entity being regulated.
A leading member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce reflected that
"in the end, what we're going to get is far more than we could
have ever gotten by having a comprehensive regulatory reform law
passed." Data-quality challenges have been raised against
actions proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, among
others, and now there is a drive to subject enforcement of the
Endangered Species Act to a comparable demand for a higher burden of
evidentiary proof than is normally possible with the imperfect data
environmentalists are compelled to rely on.
At its press conference in February 2004, the Union of Concerned
Scientists announced that more than 60 distinguished scientists and
government officials, including 20 Nobel laureates, had signed a
statement denouncing the Bush administration's misrepresentation and
suppression of scientific information and tampering with the
scientific advisory process. The president's science adviser, John
Marburger, called the allegations "wrong and misleading."
Mooney considers Marburger's rebuttals inadequate and
asserts—convincingly, given the range of evidence in his
book—that "we can infer that the Bush administration
almost certainly had politicized science to an
unprecedented degree."