The War on Science, and Nuttiness at NASA

This site is for discussions related to the development and implementation of a new sex-education curriculum in Montgomery County, Maryland. That in itself is not really very interesting, is it? The interesting aspect, we all realize, is the place of this new curriculum at the current instant in history. A curriculum was developed and presented at an inopportune time, a week after the 2004 presidential elections, and it became the focus of an attempted takeover of the school district by reactionary elements in the county. TeachTheFacts.org was formed to oppose those elements, whose original stated goal was to recall the entire school board, but who retreated to the safer position of maligning the new curriculum, pretending it was morally offensive, and eventually going to court in a drive-by lawsuit that resulted in a temporary restraining order, which resulted in negotiations, which resulted in the school district agreeing to start over. --Which is where we are now, waiting for a new curriculum to be delivered by MCPS, so it can be evaluated, approved, and put into place.

In the meantime, the same "culture wars" swirl around us, and discussion of other battle zones have been considered relevant to our conversations here. The argument over evolution, attempts to undermine and deny evidence of global warming, and other topics have pointed to an overall retreat of the American public from a position of intellectual curiosity, openness, and rigorous skepticism, to a way of thinking that relies on authority and denies science when it conflicts with that authority. Often, the authority is religious, but in many cases it is simple authoritarianism, as when those who question decisions made by leaders of business and government are labeled "traitors" and worse. It seems to me to be a retreat from the gains of the Enlightenment, a dive back toward the womblike, blind security of the Dark Ages, and it sets America apart from the rest of the industrialized world, which is still marching forward.

Here is an example of the kind of thing I am talking about. The scientists who work at NASA have traditionally set a world standard. Yeah, the bureaucracy might fail sometimes, but the scientific research there is second to none. But then, you put these political appointees in charge, and they try to paint everything a color the authorities prefer.

A recent New York Times article covered the recent flap over NASA political appointees trying to get the lead climate scientist to stop talking about global warming, and went on to mention some related issues. Down in the story, we learn about a young man who, after working on the Bush campaign and inaugural committee, was given a job as writer and editor in NASA's public affairs office in Washington. Well, he's gone now, it turns out he had lied on his résumé. But in the meantime, while he was there:

... In October, for example, George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word "theory" after every mention of the Big Bang, according to an e-mail message from Mr. Deutsch that another NASA employee forwarded to The Times.
...
In the months before the 2004 election, according to interviews and some documents, these appointees sought to review news releases and to approve or deny news media requests to interview NASA scientists.

Repeatedly that year, public-affairs directors at all of NASA's science centers were admonished by White House appointees at headquarters to focus all attention on Mr. Bush's January 2004 "vision" for returning to the Moon and eventually traveling to Mars.

Starting early in 2004, directives, almost always transmitted verbally through a chain of midlevel workers, went out from NASA headquarters to the agency's far-flung research centers and institutes saying that all news releases on earth science developments had to allude to goals set out in Mr. Bush's "vision statement" for the agency, according to interviews with public-affairs officials working in headquarters and at three research centers.
...
The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen's public statements.

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."

It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most." NASA Chief Backs Agency Openness

See, this isn't how science works, in case you need to be told that.

One fun thing about science is that it is fundamentally a challenge to authority. It questions everything. If somebody says that things fall down, you get to ask what "down" means. And then you find it means "toward the center of mass," and then you find that objects are gravitationally attracted to one another in proportion to their mass, and then you wonder about really massive things, like stars, and little tiny things, like atoms -- but it all starts with questioning the untested wisdom. "Down" might work for common folk, but a scientist can't leave it at that.

In Montgomery County, we find science under attack. Uneducated people think that scientific findings should be accessible to them. We just had a guy in the comments section say that Darwinian evolution was easy to understand. But if you go to the literature, you will not find easy reading -- oh, it's fine when pop-novelists write science fiction, it's all exciting, but that is not where the science happens. Science succeeds in part by sealing itself off from public debate.

Bundled with this is a failure of uneducated people to understand the scientific method, the nature of theory and the impossibility of inductive proof. They think you can criticize a scientist and his research because there is no "proof." Well, there's never "proof," there's only knowledge, and it always contains some nonzero amount of uncertainty. Science has excellent methods for minimizing the uncertainty, but science is an ongoing debate, it isn't a list of facts. There is always doubt and skepticism, and that's how it's meant to be. That's why the state of knowledge keeps improving.

When there is a scandal, and it happens especially in fields where the stakes are high, where there's a lot of money, people try to slander the entire enterprise of science. Ulterior motives, even political motives, are attributed to researchers who have devoted their lives to understanding some arcane topic, when their conclusions disagree with those that would be consistent with a certain political perspective.

Now we face a discussion over sexual variation and what should be taught in the schools. Scientists who study the topic, and medical experts who deal with patients and research subjects every day, have concluded that sexual orientation is not a choice, and that being gay is not a disease. They haven't concluded that it's really really cool, or that everybody should be gay, but those who know the topic really well just don't see it as a problem in itself. They would like to understand the subject better, but in their studies they have learned that orientation not a moral choice, it's just the way some people are.

Montgomery County is a prosperous place with lots of highly educated people. We owe it to our citizens to provide state-of-the-art knowledge to their children. Let's not let religious and political authorities tell us what science has found.