SCENES FROM THE SCIENCE MARCH
The “March for Science” is underway today, featuring the usual mountebanks like Michael Mann and Bill Nye. Liberals sure are fond of marching. It is doubtful that this march represents a true cross-section of actual scientists, but you never know. In any case, the whole thing parodies itself, making our job easy.
In 2004, Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin wrote a shocking admission in the New York Review of Books: “Most scientists are, at a minimum, liberals, although it is by no means obvious why this should be so. Despite the fact that all of the molecular biologists of my acquaintance are shareholders in or advisers to biotechnology firms, the chief political controversy in the scientific community seems to be whether it is wise to vote for Ralph Nader this time.” (With political judgment this bad, is it any wonder there might be doubts about the policy prescriptions of scientists?) MIT’s Kerry Emanuel, as mainstream as they come in climate science (Al Gore references his work) warned: “Scientists are most effective when they provide sound, impartial advice, but their reputation for impartiality is severely compromised by the shocking lack of political diversity among American academics, who suffer from the kind of group-think that develops in cloistered cultures. Until this profound and well-documented intellectual homogeneity changes, scientists will be suspected of constituting a leftist think tank.”
So, yeah, this kind of thing is sure to help the cause of science:
