Science and technology are not just for scientists. Without them, we wouldn't be able to treat cancer or diabetes; enjoy instantaneous communication; drive, fly, or ride across the country; read this piece on an iPad; and so much more that we take for granted today.
That's why it can be disastrous when political opposition and special interests are a barrier to the advancement of science.
The scientific community has been sounding warnings about the dangers of global warming and climate change for years. Evidence of increased carbon dioxide emissions, melting of glaciers and polar icecaps, and other indicators of global warming is overwhelming; however, some governments have been reluctant, if not hostile, to accepting and acting on this information in order to limit future damage.
Stem cells offer great potential for medical advancement due to their ability to grow into almost any type of cell, meaning cells damaged by injury or disease could be replaced with healthy versions. However, for years, federal funding for embryonic stem cell research was sharply limited.
John Scopes was arrested for teaching evolution in Tennessee 87 years ago. The consequent "Scopes Monkey Trial" resonates today in the ongoing attempts to block the teaching of evolution in public schools and/or to require science teachers to include creationism or "intelligent design" in their classroom curriculum. The reemergence of this movement undermines the importance of basing scientific findings on testable evidence, violates the separation of church and state, and denies our students fundamental knowledge. The withholding of this knowledge puts U.S. students at a decided disadvantage in the global technology economy.
Most conversation recently about STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) in the political arena has focused on budget cuts. Schools across the country are dealing with layoffs, larger class sizes, and a lack of science facilities and equipment. Public research universities sustained a reduction of about 10 percent in the past decade. California Governor Jerry Brown proposed in his 2012-2013 budget to cut the high school science requirement from two years to one. Funding shortfalls impact both the quality and quantity of educational opportunities available to our students and their eventual ability to compete in a global economy, which requires ever-increasing levels of technical knowledge and innovation.
The U.S. economy depends on the nation's continued investment in the advancement of science education and research -- the ability to constantly push the frontiers of research by building on the results of others. This is why preserving and increasing funding for STEM education is a major priority for SSP. Good policy comes from good science without the threat of political influence. Unfortunately, this is not always the reality.
Society for Science & the Public (SSP), a respected, longstanding nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, is positioned to be a clear, strong voice for science -- first, to counter skeptics and deniers; and second, to ensure that science is fully and compellingly represented in the competition for public resources and in the public discourse on science policy.
For 91 years, SSP has promoted the understanding and appreciation of science and the vital role it plays in human advancement. In this era of skepticism and intense competition for resources, we must redouble our efforts to promote the importance and value of science and science education; support research funding and legislation; and serve as a credible information source for science policy issues.
Doesn't it seem absurd that environmentalists often seem to be debating religious zealots and the whole thing is labelled as political? I think this confusion is the root cause of the problem. The only religious entities that are still staunch environmentalists seem to be the Amish albeit indirectly.
The great challenge for science is not to demonstrate that it works, but to educate the public how it works. This is made difficult by the rise of a new form of politics, an anti-science politics that seeks to destroy scientific infrastructure and even individual scientists out of the misguided and erroneous notion that in doing so, the politically inconvenient truths that science exposes can be kept from public discussion. The challenge for science will be to better understand how the resistance to scientific understanding originates, propagates, and maintains itself within our culture, and how to set science on a course of overcoming this difficulty.
Although science ultimately makes decisions based on reason and application of intelligence and the consequences of both deductive and inductive reasoning, the Darwinian reality is that humans do not. Until scientists can unlock the secrets of how our evolutionary limitations hold science back, the future of science is not secure. Indeed, science tells us that we are rapidly running out of time to find answers to this challenge.
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These processes are well understood and have been closely described by social and cultural historians very well since Hofstadter's work on anti-intellectualism. The problem you then describe is,
'' how to set science on a course of overcoming this difficulty.''
There is no course for science to overcome this difficulty. It is not a scientific problem. It is asocio-political problem and it can only be overcome in these realms and in these terms. There is an ideological collision between the premodern and the modern. Gradually and painfully, moderns are learning that making compromises with premoderns does not lead to progress. It leads to deadlock. Premoderns have to be defeated politically. Otherwise we might find, as is to some extent already the case, that modern science has become the slave of premodern ideology.
and cultural dimensions to anti-intellectualism, both are products of
evolutionary history and consequently both are rooted in underlying
neurophysiology, behaviorial biology, and genetics. Unlocking the detailed
mechanisms of how this is done and its implications to human biology and its
cultural and political dimensions will be the single key challenge to science in
addition to global warming, which like a chess clock gives science and the rest
of humanity for that matter only a finite amount of time to achieve such
understanding.
To argue that historians have somehow solved the problem and to suggest that
"these processes are well understood" is almost certainly a very premature assertion, unless Hofstadter delves into the underlying neuronal and molecular biology of human thought. We don't yet know enough to be able to control how or when sophism trumps hypothesis testing, but its clear that it is a scientific question.
Frankly, for all that is known about history, science and medicine, we still
have a great deal to learn about ourselves. We simply are not privy to the many
neuronal, molecular, and genetic processes that fundamentally shape our lives,
regardless of the level of our intellectual conceit. Until we are, I think the
fundamental problem posed here and that science faces will remain. Unlike political discourse and sophism, science can answer such questions.
For that reason, public discourse on science policy is at an all time low.