Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America

Fool Me Twice Solutions to the largest problems the world faces--climate change, energy, biodiversity loss, ocean health, water supply, and bio-security--are scientific and technological, but politics is failing to keep up with them. Otto combines the great minds of the science world to write a behind-the scenes look at the top science questions facing the country now and in the near future. Full description

CHAPTER 1

LET'S HAVE A SCIENCE DEBATE

Now we are met on the great battlefield of a new civil war, and the greatest part of that battlefield is the global warming battle. Now I know that in American-speak you have a word for global warming. Can someone tell me what it is?

[Crowd: "Bullshit!"]

Now look here. Barack Hussein Obama has just flown over in Marine One and landed on the White House lawn. He is now hiding behind the drapes in the Oval Office. He cannot hear you. Global warming is?

[Crowd: "Bullshit!"]

That's better. I think he heard that one.

--LORD CHRISTOPHER MONCKTON, 20101

HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM

"Whenever the people are well informed," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "they can be trusted with their own government."2 This sentiment lies at the heart of the American-style democracy that has for more than two centuries inspired the world. Much like the "invisible hand"3 that guides Adam Smith's economic marketplace,* so too does the invisible hand of the people's will guide the affairs of men and women through the democratic process.

But today the invisible hand seems confused and indecisive. Congress seems paralyzed, unable to act on many key issues that increasingly threaten the economic and environmental vitality of the nation and the planet. Ideology and rhetoric increasingly guide policy discussion, often bearing little relationship to factual reality. And the America we once knew seems divided and angry, defiantly embracing unreason.

At the same time, science is exploding all around us. There is a phase change going on in the scientific revolution: a shifting from one state to another, as from a solid to a liquid. There is a sudden, quantitative expansion of the number of scientists and engineers around the globe, coupled with a sudden qualitative expansion of their ability to collaborate with each other over the Internet. These two changes are dramatically speeding up the process of discovery and the convergence of knowledge across once-separate fields, a process Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson calls consilience.4 We now have fields of inquiry where economics merges with environmental science, electrical engineering with neuroscience and physics, computer science with biology and genetics, and many more. This consilience is shedding new light on long-held assumptions about economics, the world we live in, and the nature of life itself.

Over the course of the next forty years, science is poised to create more knowledge than humans have created in all of recorded history. How that knowledge will impact life, and whether our society and our form of government will be able to withstand the rush, depends upon how we answer political questions we are currently struggling with. There is unfortunately no similar phase change going on in our politics, and therein lies the rub. Can we manage the new science revolution to our best advantage, or will we be its unwilling victims?

At the same time that we are being overwhelmed by progress, we are facing a host of legacy challenges from the science of the last century that are now being pushed to the forefront by global development. They include climate change and energy; ocean acidification and overfishing; biodiversity loss and habitat fragmentation; pandemics and biosecurity management; freshwater resource management; transportation; waste management; chemical, biological, nanotechnological, and genetic pollution; population control; national security; science education and economic competitiveness; and economic growth on a finite planet without degrading it.

Thanks to early science, we have prospered, but it has come at a cost. We now have a population that we cannot support without destroying our environment--and the developing world is just coming online using the same model of unsustainable development. We are 100 percent dependent on science to find ways to preserve our environment and support our population while maintaining health, wealth, freedom, and opportunity.

Between these two areas--the wild future that is rapidly emerging and the unresolved past we can no longer ignore--science is poised to whipsaw us in the coming decades like never before. This has the potential to produce even more intense social upheaval and political gridlock at the very time we can least afford them. We have within our grasp the potential to become the shining city upon a hill: vibrant, creative, and pristine, a beacon to all who love freedom. But we may also slip into decline, sliding day by day, almost without notice, into an environmental and economic morass, resentful and angry with each other over what we are losing, not realizing it is because of our own actions. For health and prosperity to continue, science can no longer be separated from policy making, religion, and economics. In this new age of connectivity, these four great houses of power must learn to work more closely together.

But can they?

THE SILENCE OF THE INVISIBLE HAND

Science provides us with increasingly clear pictures of how to solve our great challenges, but policy makers are increasingly unwilling to pursue many of the remedies science presents. Instead, they take one of two routes: Deny the science, or pretend the problems don't exist. In fact, political and religious institutions the world over are experiencing a reactionary pull-back from science and reason that is threatening planetary stability and long-term viability at the very time we need science the most, and nowhere in the world is this pullback more pronounced than in the United States.

Can it be that science has simply advanced too far, or that our world has simply gotten too complex for democracy? In a world dominated by science that requires extensive education to practice or even fully grasp, can democracy still prosper, or will the invisible hand finally fall idle? Are Americans still well informed enough to be trusted with their own government?

Judging by Congress, the answer increasingly seems to be no. In an age when most major public policy challenges revolve around science, less than 2 percent of congresspersons have professional backgrounds in it. The membership of the 112th Congress, which ran from January 2011 to January 2013, included one physicist, one chemist, six engineers, and one microbiologist.5

In contrast, how many representatives and senators do you suppose have law degrees--and whom many suspect avoided college science classes like the plague? Two hundred twenty-two. It's little wonder we have more rhetoric than fact in our national policy making. Lawyers are trained to create a compelling narrative to win an argument, but as any trial lawyer will tell you, that argument uses facts selectively and only for the purposes of winning the argument, not for establishing the truth.

FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL

The problem is even more pronounced in presidential politics. Consider climate change, arguably the greatest policy debate facing the planet. In late 2007, the League of Conservation Voters analyzed the questions asked of the then-candidates for president by five top prime-time TV journalists-- CNN's Wolf Blitzer, ABC's George Stephanopoulos, MSNBC's Tim Russert, Fox News's Chris Wallace, and CBS's Bob Schieffer. By January 25, 2008, these journalists had conducted 171 interviews with the candidates. Of the 2,975 questions they asked, how many might one suppose mentioned the words "climate change" or "global warming"? Six. To put that in perspective, three questions mentioned UFOs.6 The same could be said of any one of several major policy topics surrounding science. Not a single candidate for president was talking about them. It was like they didn't even exist.7 But in a world increasingly dominated by complex science, these questions--and not who's wearing what lapel pin--are what will determine our future.

In the fall of 2007, this strange avoidance of science in our national dialogue was also noticed by Charles Darwin's great-great-grandson Matthew Chapman, who wondered what could be going on.

A film director and the screenwriter for such films as 2003's Runaway Jury, Chapman picked up the phone and began calling friends to see if they'd noticed this, as well. He reached physicist Lawrence Krauss, science journalist Chris Mooney, marine biologist and science blogger Sheril Kirshenbaum, science philosopher Austin Dacey, and this author, and we all agreed that the silence on science issues was astounding. As a group, we founded what ultimately grew into the largest political initiative in the history of science, Science Debate 2008, an effort to get the candidates for president to debate the major science policy issues.8

We put up a Web site, placed op-ed pieces in national publications, and reached out to contacts and leading science bloggers. One of those blog- gers, Darlene Cavalier of ScienceCheerleader.com, connected us with the US National Academies and became part of our core team. Within weeks, thirty- nine thousand people from across the political spectrum had signed on, including several Nobel laureates; prominent scientists; the presidents of most major American universities; the CEOs of several major corporations; and political movers ranging from John Podesta, President Bill Clinton's former chief of staff, on the left to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on the right. We had obviously touched a nerve. Feeling affirmed, we then reached out to the campaigns.

They ignored us. This is, of course, a classic campaign tactic. You never, ever give energy to anything that you wish would go away. You simply do not engage, because the moment you do there is a story, the thing gets legs, and if you don't have your message already developed, you can lose control of your narrative. Many a campaign has been sunk by violating this cardinal rule. The question was why they wouldn't want to engage.

We called Ira Flatow and went on NPR's Talk of the Nation: Science Friday. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the US National Academies, and the nonprofit Council on Competitiveness signed on to our group as cosponsors. Our steering committee was cochaired by two congressmen, one from each party, and included prominent Democrats, Republicans, and even the leader of the Academy of Evangelical Scientists and Ethicists. Soon we represented more than 125 million people through our signatory organizations.

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES TALK RELIGION, NOT SCIENCE

Still the candidates refused to even return phone calls and e-mails. So we decided to organize a presidential debate and turned to the national media outlets for help. This being science, we brought on as broadcast partners PBS's flagship science series Nova and the news program Now on PBS. David Brancaccio, Now's host, would moderate. We set a date shortly before the all-important Pennsylvania primaries and teamed up with the venerable Franklin Institute in Center City Philadelphia to host. But despite the urging of advisers like EMILY's List founder Ellen Malcolm, who was involved with Senator Hillary Clinton's (D-NY) campaign, and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, who was supporting Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), both of those candidates refused invitations to a debate that would center on the US economy and science and technology issues; Senator John McCain (R-AZ) ignored the invitation entirely. Instead, Clinton and Obama chose to debate religion at Messiah College's Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, campus--where, ironically, they answered questions about science.

How, it's reasonable to ask, has American political culture come to a point where science can be discussed only in a forum on religion? What little news coverage of this stunning development there was didn't seem to affect the campaigns at all.9, 10 The candidates continued their policies of nonengagement.

By then it wasn't just scientists who thought this was odd. Science Debate and the nonprofit ResearchlAmerica, which works to make medical research a higher national priority, commissioned a national poll and found that 85 percent of the American public thought that the candidates should debate the major science issues. Support was virtually identical among Democrats and Republicans. Religious people clearly were not put off by the idea. It seemed that the candidates alone were reticent. Something in American political culture had made science taboo.

With the window closing for a debate before the endorsing conventions, after which point the Democratic and Republican Party-controlled Commission on Presidential Debates would take over, we recruited marine scientist and former AAAS president Jane Lubchenco to help organize a debate in Oregon in August. Obama and McCain refused this one too, opting instead to hold yet another faith forum, this time at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California.

The scientific, academic, and high-tech communities were stunned. They saw it as a rebuke, and a travesty of American politics. Science has been responsible for roughly half of all US economic growth since World War II,11 and it lies at the core of most major unsolved policy challenges. How could people who wanted to lead America avoid talking about science? Intel chairman Craig Barrett reached out to former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina on the McCain side to encourage his participation, and Varmus redoubled his efforts to convince Obama.

Meanwhile, our supporters had submitted more than 3,400 questions that they wanted us to ask the candidates. Working with several leading science organizations, we culled them into "The 14 Top Science Questions Facing America" and released them publicly (see page 321 for the original list). The candidates still ignored us.

ARE THERE REALLY TWO SIDES TO EVERY STORY?

To be fair, the problem wasn't limited to the candidates. They were aided and abetted in their nonengagement by American journalism. Here was virtually the entire US science enterprise, the most powerful engine for economic growth and human advancement in world history, calling for the candidates to debate key science topics like climate change, health care, and energy, the candidates were dodging the questions, and almost no media outlets would cover it. Clearly, America's fourth estate had lost its moorings.

Some of this reticence may have been because many reporters and their editors (who often direct reporters' lines of questioning), like many politicians, were not required to take science classes in college, and few seem to understand science's importance to democracy. In a time dominated by science, this poses some serious concerns.

Another part of the problem may be that journalists, scientists, and politicians approach questions of fact with differing perspectives.

Journalism: There are always two sides to every story.

Bob says 2 + 2 = 4. Mary says it is 6. The controversy rages.

Science: Most times, one side is simply wrong.

I can demonstrate using these apples that Bob is right.

Politics: How about a compromise?

New law: 2 + 2 = 5

The problem with the modern journalistic approach is that it falls short of full reason. Journalistic techniques used to be employed as a means of fact- checking somewhat akin to scientific research. For example, reporters would get multiple sources to corroborate a story (which is an account of events in reality), or they wouldn't run the story. But today, some journalists don't even attempt to establish the reality or truth of a story. Instead, they go out of their way to present "both sides," as if this were admirable. The first casualty of this approach is journalism's own credibility, and its ability to speak ...