Is Science Losing Its Stature?

With the East Anglia “climategate” scandal slowly starting to get a little media attention, I’ve found out I’m not the only one worrying it will tarnish all scientific research.  At the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henniger has an opinion piece warning that the credibility of all science is at risk.  In it he brings up some valid points why this may happen and this quote gets to the heart of the dilemma:

Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost.

There is great danger in mixing politics and science, but I’ll only address the biggest and possibly least perceived danger. That being the loss of stature in the public eye. Over at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey breaks down the Rasmussen Reports poll that shows 59% believe data on global warming has been falsified.  What is amazing in these polarized times is that majorities across the strata believe this. If that isn’t a loss of credibility, I don’t know what is.

I’ve always thought AGW was based on faith rather than hard science as that massive nuclear furnace in the center of our solar system dictates more than we fully comprehend. Perhaps it is because I remember two previous panics that were widespread.  In the 1970’s it was the fear of another ice age that some of the AGW scientists actually pushed back then.  Later on the terror of the hole in the ozone layer dominated the media and led to a banning of CFC’s to reduce damage to it. In these I see the arrogance of man combined with the allure of hysteria making for bad science driven by the politics of anti-capitalism.

Shifting gears a bit, it doesn’t help that we are starting to hit some hard walls with scientific research producing practical results. While the search for knowledge is a good thing, in the end most of it needs to deliver something of use to humanity in general. This is particularly true in medical research.

The Telegraph has a sobering article about the diminishing returns of the huge amounts of money thrown into medical science.  While I think the title of the article is overly pessimistic or sensational, it is hard to argue that we aren’t getting our moneys worth.  Such high hopes were placed on the human genome project that it couldn’t possibly live up to expectations.

Unfortunately, it is not looking good there and if science is done objectively as is suggested in this article, it may open a Pandora’s Box of political and racial problems.  The promise of finding the causes of diseases and ways to treat them with gene cocktails has not had much success so far, possibly due to the small sample. Geoffrey Miller posits that the research will instead go in another direction once wider sampling is done:

The trouble is, the resequencing data will reveal much more about human evolutionary history and ethnic differences than they will about disease genes. Once enough DNA is analysed around the world, science will have a panoramic view of human genetic variation across races, ethnicities and regions. We will start reconstructing a detailed family tree that links all living humans, discovering many surprises about mis-attributed paternity and covert mating between classes, castes, regions and ethnicities.

In the pop culture, the original Star Trek television series speculated that there will be a eugenics war between genetically enhanced and superior humans with the rest of humanity.  That is where we got the memorable villain, Khan.  If we do get the kind of research suggested, I don’t think that scenario is too far fetched.  The wealthy will want to tinker with their progeny and I can see state run programs in totalitarian states wanting to achieve dominance in a genetic arms race. Worse, I can see racial strife based on both rejection and embracing of the studies coming out of the research.

All of that could lead to an extreme neo-Luddite reaction, especially if science has already become viewed as just another political football. The last people to see that coming will be the scientists themselves due to their living in insulated academic bubbles.  Perhaps more transparency and less politics would help, but it needs to happen quickly before the public consigns science to the trash heap of politics.