INTELLECT VS. INTELLIGENCE

Science Friction: The growing--and dangerous--divide between scientists and the GOP. (Nicholas Thompson, July/August 2003, Washington Monthly)

Any administration will be tempted to trumpet the conclusions of science when they justify actions that are advantageous politically, and to ignore them when they don't. Democrats, for instance, are more than happy to tout the scientific consensus that human activity contributes to climate change, but play down evidence that drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (which they oppose) probably will have little impact on the caribou there. But Democrats will only go so far down the path of ignoring scientific evidence because they don't want to alienate their scientific supporters. Increasingly, the Republicans feel little such restraint. Hence the Bush administration's propensity to tout scientific evidence only when it suits them politically. For instance, though numerous studies have shown the educational benefits of after-school programs, the Bush administration cited just one recent report casting doubt on those benefits to justify cutting federal after-school funding. Meanwhile, the White House has greatly increased the federal budget for abstinence-only sex education programs despite a notable lack of evidence that they work to reduce teen pregnancy. The administration vigorously applies cost-benefit analysis--some of it rigorous and reasonable--to reduce federal regulations on industry. But when the National Academy of Sciences concluded that humans are contributing to a planetary warming and that we face substantial future risks, the White House initially misled the public about the report and then dramatically downplayed it. Even now, curious reporters asking the White House about climate change are sent to a small, and quickly diminishing, group of scientists who still doubt the causes of global warming. Many scientists were shocked that the administration had even ordered the report, a follow-up to a major report from the 2,500-scientist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's leading climate research committee. Doing that was like asking a district court to review a Supreme Court decision.

This White House's disinclination to engage the scientific community in important policy decisions may have serious consequences for the country. One crucial issue that Congress and the Bush administration will likely have to confront before Bush leaves office is human cloning. Researchers distinguish between "reproductive cloning," which most scientists abhor, and "therapeutic cloning," which may someday allow researchers to use stem cells from a patient's cloned embryo to grow replacement bone marrow, liver cells, or other organs, and which most scientists favor. When the President's Council on Bioethics voted on recommendations for the president, every single practicing scientist voted for moving therapeutic cloning forward. Bush, however, decided differently, supporting instead a bill sponsored by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) to ban all forms of embryonic cloning.

John Marburger, the president's current scientific adviser--a longtime Democrat who says that he has good relations with Bush and is proud of the administration's science record--wrote in an email statement which barely conceals his own opinion: "As for my views on cloning, let me put it this way. The president's position--which is to ban all cloning--was made for a number of ethical reasons, and I do know that he had the best, most up-to-date science before him when he made that decision." Jack Gibbons, a former head of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, calls Bush's proposed ban "an attempt to throttle science, not to govern technology." Harold Varmus, the former NIH director, believes that "this is the first time that the [federal] government has ever tried to criminalize science."

Mr. Thompson touches on, but then backs off of, an important distinction here. Conservatives do not oppose science generally, but those specific manifestations of it that might be termed intellectual. Richard Hofstadter talks about the difference in his book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life:

[I]ntelligence is an excellence of mind that is employed within a fairly narrow, immediate, an predictable range.... Intelligence works within the framework of limited but clearly stated goals, and may be quick to shear away questions of thought that do not seem to help in reaching them. [...]
 
Intellect, on the other hand, is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of mind. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines.

Elsewhere in the essay, when Mr. Thompson cites Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower as past Republican supporters of science and contrasts them with President Bush, it's notable that what they supported were hard sciences and technical innovation, not the schemes and fever-dreams of the most "creative" and "contemplative" minds of their day. In fact, as I recall, Lincoln would routinely have to turn away folks who'd dreamt up new super-weapons to win the war and anyone who's seen The Right Stuff will recall Ike's hostility to the space program.

One can imagine the incredulity with which such men would have met a gaggle of environmentalists waving global warming studies that spin out dire scenarios based on a supposed one degree rise in Earth temperatures over a couple centuries. Of course, when Richard Nixon, one of the other "pro-science Republicans" was president, these same folk would have been waving studies claiming a new Ice Age was coming. We've always wondered, if Nixon had moved aggressively to raise the temperature of the planet and if global warming turns out to be real, rather than just a means of attacking business, precisely how hot would the planet be now? Why was the anti-scientific decision not to warm the globe good, but the anti-scientific decision not to cool it now equivalent to playing Russian roulette with the species? And during the Lincoln, Eisenhower and Nixon administrations the intellectuals were warning of population explosion destroying our societies and the planet. Yet now the West, which reached unimaginable heights of prosperity while its populations grew, faces a birth dearth that may cause massive social disruption and economic decline. What might be the state of the world if we'd listened to the respected intellectual Paul Ehrlich and driven the population down to one billion people (ever notice how the advocates of this idea always assume they'll be in the one billion?) No, thoroughly politicized and ideology-driven ideas like human-induced climate-change, overpopulation, Darwinism, etc.--those purely speculative and contemplative "sciences"--are nothing to base federal policy on.

As for the scientific pursuits that more directly implicate ethical questions, it's impossible to imagine someone having the temerity to tell a Lincoln or an Eisenhower that he should support cloning, never mind have the federal government pay for it. And the last quote above, that "this is the first time that the [federal] government has ever tried to criminalize science" is particularly idiotic. There are a wide range of experiments on human beings that would have great scientific value but that you aren't allowed to conduct. Why do we use animals to test foods and drugs rather than human beings? We know that 52 pounds a day of Red Dye #2 is poisonous to a rodent, but how much can a healthy person eat? When medical students are required to study cadavers rather than perform vivisections, is not science being throttled? Why are nuclear and other hazardous materials so strictly regulated? Why can't every university physics program have its own reactor to play with? Is free thought dead in America? Hardly; we just regulate science when it would otherwise pursue ends that are dangerous or morally abhorrent.

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Oddly enough, there's a quote from Carl Sagan that's exactly on point: "The reliance on carefully designed and controlled experiments is key... We will not learn much from mere contemplation." Any theory claiming to be a science which does not yield to such carefully controlled experimentation, although it may turn out to be true, need not command overmuch respect until it does.

What makes this so odd is that there's another oft-cited quote from Dr. Sagan:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge - even to ourselves - that we've been so credulous.

Coming from the fabulist who dreamed up Nuclear Winter--a way of opposing the Cold War with phoney science--that has the haunting quality of a confession. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 13, 2003 7:56 PM