When Bill Nye the Science Guy
complains of a war being waged on science, he should look in the mirror. Nye,
who is actually the mechanical engineering guy—that’s his educational
background—is more guilty of undermining science (properly understood) by politicizing
it than almost anyone this side of Al Gore.
No one is attacking science. Why would they? Science is a
powerful method for understanding the physical universe. Science’s tools
are observation, careful measurement, testing, experimentation, falsification,
and the like. Given the incalculable benefits that have arisen from applied
scientific endeavors over the centuries, who on earth isn’t “pro-science”?
Why, then, did science become the subject of
international protective protest marches? Blame political cynicism. Organizers
of the March for Science hoped to harness the authority of science to prevail
in hot-button public policy and cultural controversies involving scientific
inquiry. But politicizing science is the real subversion—if you convince people
that they have to choose between “science” and their moral, political, or
religious beliefs, support for science could well wane.
There are at least three means by which these supposed
defenders of science actually undermine it through their political tactics:
Conflating “science” with ethics and
morality: Science is amoral. It
is very effective at deriving knowledge and learning facts, but it can’t tell
us right from wrong, good from bad, or moral from immoral. Yet self-described
science advocates often blur those crucial distinctions by accusing the people
with whom they disagree with on an ethical or public policy question of being
“anti-science.”
Nye has been a prime example of this across a wide swath
of public controversies, from climate change to abortion. With regard to the
latter, Nye infamously appeared in a YouTube
video promoting abortion rights in which he contended that
pro-lifers lack a proper “scientific understanding” of “the facts.” But in fact
he is the one who seems to be confused: Nye proclaims that “fertilized eggs are
not human”—even though an egg, once fertilized, ceases to exist as the
one-celled embryo called the zygote comes into being. He continues that the
sperm joining the ovum “is not all you need. You have to attach to the uterine
wall, the inside of a womb, a woman’s womb.” It could be argued that
implantation is the point at which a woman becomes pregnant. But that doesn’t
have anything to do with the biological nature of the embryo itself. Besides,
embryology textbooks—real science—tell us that a new organism or, to put it
another way, a human being comes into existence once fertilization has been
completed.
More to the point, science can only tell us the
biological nature of the entity destroyed in an abortion; it cannot tell us
whether the destruction is right or wrong. Hence, it is a scientific fact that
Nye and I are the same organisms today that we were when we came into existence
as one-celled embryos. But when Nye tells us, “Nobody likes abortion. But you
can’t tell somebody what to do!” in his YouTube mini-lecture, that is political
advocacy masquerading as a scientific claim.
Wielding the term “anti-science” as
an epithet to stifle legitimate debate: I have been the subject of such
attempted stifling. As first discussed in these pages a few years ago, I was branded
“anti-science” by Glen Hank Campbell, now the head of the American Council on
Science and Health, who accused me of “hating biology” and viewing IVF “as a
tool of Lucifer.” What had I done to deserve such public shaming? I
opposed plans to use a novel IVF procedure to create a “three-parent” baby.
How was that “anti-science?” I may have been
misguided—though I don’t think I was—but I most certainly wasn’t opposing
science, biology, or even reproductive technologies per se. I was making
an ethical argument that it would be wrong to use this
technique on humans, a position with which Campbell disagreed. But rather than
engage in debate, Campbell tried to quash it with the “anti-science” slur—a
strategy deployed often in moral and policy arguments around embryo research,
climate change, evolution, abortion, human cloning, genetic engineering, GMOs,
transhumanism, and other controversial areas.
Using the authority of “scientific
consensus” to stifle heterodox hypotheses and
alternative fields of research: Science is never truly settled.
Indeed, challenging seemingly incontrovertible facts and continually
retesting long-accepted theories are crucial components of the scientific
method.
Examples of perceived truths overturned
by subsequent discoveries are ubiquitous. Here’s just one: So-called
junk DNA that does not encode proteins was, until relatively recently,
thought by a large majority of scientists to have no purpose, and was even used
as evidence of random and purposeless evolution. But continuing investigations
in the field led to the discovery that most “junk DNA” actually serves
important biological functions.
Think what might have happened if scientists seeking to
continue exploring this area of inquiry had been warned away because
of the “scientific consensus.” What if the self-appointed guardians
of existing perceived wisdom had gotten researchers to abandon their
investigations for fear of losing university tenure, being scorned by
colleagues, or having research funding
blocked? The biological truth about non-protein-coding DNA might
well have never been discerned. Yet these are the very
anti-science tactics deployed today to chill scientific challenges to
the theory of evolution and the questioning of “consensus” climate change
conclusions.
Politicizers of science are not as clever as they think.
People are watching, and the real victim of their abuse could be support for
science itself. Indeed, the more vehemently establishment
thinkers and their media camp followers seek to suppress alternate views
and research, the more they attempt to crush ethical debates with the “anti-science”
cudgel, the less people who are served by science will trust the
sector. And that will be bad for everyone.
Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at
the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism.
