Jeff's Lunchbreak: The Progressive War on Science?

War on Science, Image Credit: Khairil Zhafri I subscribe to the Skeptic Society's Skeptic magazine and get their online eSkeptic e-mails. For the most part, it's a pretty good organization, and I enjoy reading their articles. However, nobody's perfect, and I find myself questioning their articles from time to time. This morning, I found a new eSkeptic in my inbox, with the title, The Progressive War on Science. It was a review of a book, Science Left Behind by Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell, claiming that the political left is just as anti-science as the political right. The reviewer mostly just repeated the claims of the book without providing any counter arguments.

Now, I don't think that the left is guilt free in regards to abusing science. It's a problem in society in general, so it's going to cross party lines. The issue is which side is worse. And when out of the entire crop of potential Republican presidential candidates, only three of them supported both anthropogenic climate change and evolution, and then two of them later backpedaled on their positions, I think it's pretty clear which side that is.

The book conceded that Republicans are anti-science on some of those highly visible issues, but claimed that there were other issues where progressives were guilty. The problem, at least according to the examples listed in the article, is that when I was reading through the issues claimed to be problems for progressives, I recognized many of them from the Texas Republican party platforms over the past few years. For example, here's one paragraph from the review.

And despite studies showing conventional crops to be equally nutritional and both personally and environmentally safe (never mind vastly less expensive), "organic" foods--whatever that means in a shamefully unregulated industry--are somehow superior products. Ditto for raw, unpasteurized dairy products and juices left untreated for foodborne illnesses.

Here's what Texas Republicans had to say about that in 2010*:

Unprocessed foods - We support the availability of natural, unprocessed foods, which should be encouraged, and that the right to access raw milk directly from the farmer be protected.

Here's another quote from the article.

They accuse progressives of propagating a number of socially destructive myths, among them the assumptions that everything "natural" is good and everything "unnatural" is bad. Accordingly, homeopathy is just as good as or better than traditional medicine, vaccines actually harm children, and nuclear energy promises unprecedented sickness and loss of life.

In addition to the quote above about unprocessed foods, here are a couple more quotes from the Texas Republican Party Platforms, the first from 2010, and the second from 2012.

Health Care and Nutritional Supplements - We deplore any efforts to mandate that vitamins and other natural supplements be on a prescription-only basis, and we oppose any efforts to remove vitamins and other nutritional supplements from public sale. We support the rights of all adults to their choice of nutritional products. We strongly favor legislation recognizing legitimate alternative health care choices. [emphasis mine - JRL]

Immunizations - All adult citizens should have the legal right to conscientiously choose which vaccines are administered to themselves or their minor children without penalty for refusing a vaccine. We oppose any effort by any authority to mandate such vaccines or any medical database that would contain personal records of citizens without their consent.

This isn't the first time Michael Shermer and the gang over at the Skeptics Society have tried to paint the left as just as bad on science as the right. Shermer had an article in Scientific American earlier this year, The Liberals' War on Science . It was refuted briefly by PZ Myers in his blog entry, Shermer's false equivalencies. As Myers pointed out, and as I alluded to above, ignorance of science is a general problem in the country. However, when it comes to the leadership of the parties, i.e. the elected politicians, there's much more of a problem among Republicans than Democrats. Rebecca Watson has a more in depth rebuttal in her blog entry, Is There a Liberal War on Science?.

There's an interesting article in Mother Jones, It's Not Your Imagination: Republicans Really Don't Like Science. It lists the results of a study looking at trust in science over the years. While conservatives, liberals, and moderates all trusted science roughly equally back in 1974, in recent years, the level of trust among conservatives has plummeted.

Admittedly, the article in eSkeptic this week did list a few problems that do seem to be more of a problem with the left than the right, but when half of your examples don't support the point you're trying to make, then your point probably isn't a very strong one. And considering the points made in some of the other articles linked to above, it really does appear that the problem of anti-science is more of a problem in conservative leadership, not just the rank and file.

Anti-science attitudes are a problem for the whole country and cross political divides, but it's more pronounced on one side in particular, and it's not the progressives.

Related Entries:

The Texas Republican Platform, or Why I'm Not a Republican (reviewing the 2008 platform)
The 2010 Texas Republican Platform
The 2012 Texas Republican Platform

Image Credit: Khairil Zhafri, Flickr

*As shown by the 'Related Entries' links above, I've reviewed the Texas Republican Party Platforms for the past few years. I skimmed through my reviews to find the quotes I included in this article. There may be relevant sections to each of the issues from the most current platform, but I don't feel like wading through that entire document again. Plus, it's not as if 2008 is the distant past. Showing that Republicans were supporting those issues as recently as 5 years ago shows that it's not a 'liberal' problem.