Time for a Renaissance of Reason

It is no longer news that the Bush administration has a problem with scientific evidence. Reports from Congress, scientific organizations and patient advocacy groups have documented instances in the past eight years when the executive branch undercut efforts to understand climate change; deal realistically with unwanted pregnancies, drug use and sexually transmitted diseases; explore the full potential of stem cells; or acknowledge evolution, to give just a few examples. In Templetonian equanimity, received wisdom today competes openly with fact-finding as a means of knowing, and evidence finds itself bigfooted by preconception. In the process, blossoming ideas are aborted.

Like a growing number of others, I can no longer pretend that this doesn’t matter.

The orderly and unbiased testing of reality to see how things actually work—the art and science of science—has ever been the engine of better health, higher productivity and greater economic power, not to mention enhanced entertainment and leisure-time options. So it is something of a wonder that so many today eschew it, and so openly.

But while incurious leaders and an undereducated public surely account for much of this disconnect, scientists and the marketers of science deserve blame too, having done so much to lose the public’s trust.

Unkeepable promises, exaggerated claims, financial conflicts of interest. It all starts to sound like the worst of politics and business. So why believe scientists when they tell you that the Earth is going to cook, or that vaccines don’t cause autism, or that life has been living for 4 billion years?

This is an excellent time for a Renaissance of reason. For one thing, the world is not waiting for us to put our lab coats back on. And while there is nothing that says the United States really has to be No. 1 in science, being on top is good for the competitive juices and can, if nothing else, bolster the gross national product. But more fundamental is the simple fact that facts work best. They are the raw materials on which ingenuity and innovation work their alchemy.

It’s not just the facts, Ma’am, of course. “Facts do not speak for themselves,” Stephen Jay Gould once wrote, “they are read in the light of theory.” And not just scientific theory, as Gould probably meant, but political theory too. So yes, when it comes to crafting policies, power and politics will have their say.

But first there has got to be an honest call for facts. And some assurance that the facts that do come in—the ones showing that new drug to be a winner, for example—are not just the ones that were left standing after the evidence for nasty side effects was buried.

The United States has lost a good deal of credibility in recent years, and has even been ridiculed, because of its careless blending of faith and fact. Faith, for example, that government and taxes are bad and that markets will bring us what we need, even as evidence has repeatedly shown that without blue-skies, taxpayer-funded basic research there would be no Internet, no biotechnology, no DNA databases to convict the criminal or exonerate the bystander—not to mention no science for science’s sake, the nonprofitable but hugely enriching enterprise of finding out what the heck we are and where we came from.

We Americans have been ridiculed, but we can fight cat calls with fact calls. My goal is to have history look back at the post-Bush era as the time when evidence was reintegrated into the business of government decision making.

Tags: Media, scientific integrity

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