with National Public Radio because it was “the most liberal” media outlet in the country and telling a contractor that the word “theory” had to be inserted after every mention of the big bang on NASA’s website presentations being prepared for middle-school students. The big bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion,” Deutsch told the contractor. “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. . . . 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.” Deutsch later resigned after it was revealed that he had fabricated his academic credentials, and did not graduate from college.
Other Bush public-relations appointees were muzzling scientists at other agencies, or altering scientific information in official agency reports to fit a preconceived ideological agenda, angering many scientists. (The same tactics would be employed by Canada’s Conservative Harper government just a few years later.)
The problem became so widespread that, in early 2007, the House Oversight Committee held hearings investigating the distortions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was forced to discontinue a project called Programs-That-Work, which identified sex education programs found to be effective in scientific studies, none of which were abstinence-based. On the National Cancer Institute’s website, breast cancer was falsely linked to abortion. The morning-after pill, an emergency contraceptive that prevents ovulation after unprotected sex and may in rare circumstances prevent an already-fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus, was held back from Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for over-the-counter sale even though scientists and physicians had judged it to be safe and determined that it was actually likely to reduce the number of abortions. (Later, it would also be partially held back by the Obama administration, again contrary to the recommendations of panels of scientists.) “Faith-based” initiatives like abstinence-only sex education, by contrast, were federally funded at high levels, even when they were contradicted or shown ineffective by science. And business-friendly FDA administrators failed to remove the arthritis drug rofecoxib (Vioxx) from the market even after it became apparent that it was causing heart attacks, resulting in more than fifty thousand American deaths—nearly as many as the number of American soldiers lost in Vietnam. FDA administrators made calls to a whistleblower-protection attorney and a leading medical journal in an attempt to discredit the scientist who brought the problem to light.
The Watershed
By the 2008 election, antiscience views had become entrenched as mainstream political planks of the Republican Party. The focus was on three main areas: denying the science of reproductive medicine, denying the science of evolution, and denying the science of climate change. Its messaging followed a public-relations playbook that had been developed in part by Southern US tobacco companies to fight the emerging science-based conclusion that smoking causes cancer, and by US agribusiness in fighting the revelations that pesticides were disrupting the environment and hazardous to health. Like climate disruption, these had been facts that, if widely accepted, could undermine entire industries. “Doubt is our product,” a tobacco executive wrote in a 1969 memo to fellow tobacco executives, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”
Controversy is the most common aspect of modern antiscientific attacks, because it takes advantage of the reasonable-sounding but incorrect idea that a “healthy debate” reveals the truth. When such a debate pits knowledge against a passionately articulated opinion, the opinion often wins. “For what a man had rather were true,” as the father of modern science, Francis Bacon, noted, “he more readily believes.”
Today, this is called motivated reasoning, or, more simply, confirmation bias. During a 2006 Alaska gubernatorial debate, Republican Sarah Palin provided a good example of the problem when she came out in favor of teaching creationism in science class. “Teach both,” she said. “You know, don’t be afraid of education. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools.”
By 2008, it had become doubtful whether a Republican candidate for president could get the party’s endorsement without taking a stridently antiscience position. Democrats, in turn, seemed terrified of offending evangelical swing voters, preferring instead to either out-conservative the conservatives or avoid discussing science and technology altogether. Antiscience advocates on the left could be just as vicious as the right’s climate deniers when scientists pointed out that their ideas that cell phones cause brain cancer, vaccines cause autism, genetically modified crops are unhealthy to eat, and similar notions were not supported by the evidence. Scientists hoped that John McCain would somehow rebuff this trend. McCain had long crafted a reputation as a “maverick” and a “straight shooter.” If anyone could stem the tide, they thought, he could. But they couldn’t even get Obama to engage in a debate, much less McCain.
Finally, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, I was hiking in Rocky National Park with my son Jake. He was thirteen, and as the two if us stood on the continental divide, leaning into a fifty-mile-per-hour wind, I was struck by the irony the location symbolized: left and right, past and future, proscience and antiscience. So many divides, and I was trying to straddle them all as the leader of the ScienceDebate effort, while the political wind was trying to blow me away. I had been very public in the attempt to get the candidates to engage, and felt I was letting down my cofounders as well as the entire scientific enterprise that had gotten behind us. But I was there with Jake in the backcountry and it was beautiful on top of the Rockies. We hiked back down and made our way into Estes Park, Colorado, and as we got back into cell-phone range my phone started buzzing with voicemails from the Obama campaign. While Obama wouldn’t participate in a televised forum, he would participate in an online “debate.” Scientists were jubilant. Finally, someone was listening.
Days later, McCain agreed as well, and the press, given a classic conflict frame, was finally interested. The ScienceDebate story, and the candidates’ answers to “The Top 14 Science Questions Facing America” made nearly one billion media impressions—an enormous opening of the floodgates on stories that had previously been ignored. The public finally started seeing discussions of the candidates’ positions on climate change, energy, health care, the environment, economic competitiveness, and a host of other science policy topics. Obama used our mission statement—to “restore science to its rightful place”—in his inauguration speech. And once in office, the candidate who had started out not particularly friendly toward science seemed to embrace it as a central part of his strategic approach. He appointed several of our early supporters to cabinet-level posts. Steven Chu became energy secretary. John Holdren became presidential science advisor. Jane Lubchenco became undersecretary of commerce and director of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Harold Varmus led the National Cancer Institute. Marcia McNutt became director of the US Geological Survey. John Podesta led Obama’s transition team. The administration had more scientists than any in memory. Perhaps, scientists dared to hope, the dark days of unreason had finally passed. They couldn’t have been more wrong.
Are There Really Two Sides to Every Story?
The problem, as we’ve already seen, wasn’t limited to the candidates. Many reporters (and editors, who often direct reporters’ lines of questioning) are—like many politicians—humanities majors who were required to take few or no science classes in college. The classes were hard, and they ducked them, and now few seem to understand science’s unique importance to the democracies they report on. Most seem to think, incorrectly, that the public shares their disinterest. In an age when so many major policy problems are dominated by science, this is a concern.
Another part of the problem may be that journalists, scientists, and politicians each approach questions of fact from differing perspectives. Journalists look for conflict to find an angle, so there are always two sides to every story. Bob says 2 + 2 = 4. Mary says it is 6. It sounds surprising, but Mary may have legitimate reasons for her perspective. The media outlet gets a good headline and an interesting story, the controversy rages, and newspapers or web clicks are sold. A scientist would say that, based on the knowledge built up from observation, one of these claims can be shown to be