According
to Dave Levitan, author of Not a
Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science,
it was Ronald Reagan who first used the phrase “I’m not a scientist, but...”
and then proceed to make outrageously false statements that were easily
disproved by scientific evidence. The plague of false statements has
proliferated until now politicians, almost all of them Republicans, seem to
feel obligated to tell lies and pretend that they are being scientific in doing
so.
Politicians,
like most other people, can be forgiven for not understanding science. It can
sometimes be very complex. But what any reasonable non-scientist would do is to
trust scientists to understand science. It is reasonable for politicians and
others to demand to see some evidence, and I think scientists are obligated to
provide evidence. I present evidence to my students and readers all the time.
But once this is done, the non-scientists should at least acknowledge that the
evidence has been presented. It would really, really, really bother me if I
made a statement outside my field of expertise, only to discover that 99.9
percent of the experts disagreed with it. But this never seems to bother
Republicans.
Levitan
goes through lots of examples of Republican politicians lying and trying to
cover it up with the appearance of scientific fact. He classifies the examples
into a small set of patterns. I mention just six of them.
One
of these patterns is cherry-picking. In global warming, a Republican can pick
the warmest year in the 1980s and the coldest year in the 2000s and point out
that the temperatures are not very different—deliberately ignoring the fact
that all the other 1980s temperatures were cooler and all the other 2000s
temperatures were warmer. It’s like finding a seven-foot-tall giantess and a
four-foot tall male dwarf and saying that women are three feet taller than men.
Another
pattern is to ignore the follow-up. For a while, the so-called Climategate
scandal circulated around the conservative pseudo-media. When the news first
came out, there was the possibility it might have been true. Subsequent
investigations have shown, however, that there was no scandal at all. But
Republicans still talk about it as if it is true.
Yet
another pattern is to praise scientists and then, behind their backs, undermine
them. Many Republican representatives have praised NASA then said that NASA’s
climate data are false.
Yet
another pattern is for the politicians to claim that if we do not know
everything about a subject, then we know nothing about it. Republicans demand
absolute certainty about every aspect of climate science—every ocean current,
every glacier, every local slight variation of temperature—or else we can say
nothing at all about climate science. This is, of course, hypocritical, because
these same Republicans make statements about things regarding which uncertainty
remains, in fact, they make stuff up without any evidence at all.
Yet
another pattern is for Republicans to make fun of anything they do not
understand. Following the lead of Sarah Palin, they love to make fun of
biologists who study fruit flies. What Republicans deliberately ignore is that
fruit flies have many of the same genes, and mutations in those genes, that we
do. Biologists can study the effects of those mutations in fruit flies, which
have two-week life cycles and regarding which there are no ethical concerns.
There is an autism-related mutation in fruit flies. Fruit flies don’t get
autism, but we can experimentally study the gene in them, which we could not do
in humans.
The
last category that Levitan considers is the straight falsehood, in which a
politician just makes something up. His first example is Todd Akin saying that
a woman’s body can spontaneously abort a fetus that resulted from rape, and
that therefore abortion laws should not contain any exceptions for rape—since
rape pregnancies simply do not occur. But I think Levitan missed something
here. Todd Akin must have heard, somewhere in a biology class in which he was
half asleep, about what biologists call the Bruce Effect. Some mammals, such as
mice and monkeys, are, in fact, able to abort unwanted fetuses. In geladas, for
example, when a female is taken over by a new dominant male, her body aborts
fetuses that were fathered by a previous dominant male. This must have been
what Akin was thinking about, only it does not happen in humans.
Of
course, there are examples of Republicans just making stuff up. Mike Huckabee
(who fancies himself a highly ethical Preacher of the Gospel) said that a
single volcano can produce as much carbon dioxide as a hundred years of human
activity. In actuality, the biggest recent volcano, Pinatubo, released 0.05
gigatons of carbon; but human activity releases 10 gigatons per year, that is,
1000 in a century. Huckabee’s numbers were off by a factor of twenty thousand.
But, if you are a preacher, who’s counting?
Understandably,
in the infinitely tortured world of Republican political thought, there are
examples that may not fit into any of Levitan’s categories. One example that he
did not (as I recall) mention comes from Michele Bachman (whom he did mention
in a different connection.) She said, in 2006, that we should not worry about
global warming, or any other environmental issue, because Jesus has already
saved the world. You will notice that Bachman did not say, “Don’t worry about
terrorism; Jesus already saved the world,” or, “Don’t worry about the economy,
Jesus already saved the world.” She used—deliberately—a line of reasoning that
she would not use in other contexts.
The
only problem I have with Levitan’s book is that it is too timid. The Republican
politicians he cites are not merely making mistakes, or bending the truth, or
even merely lying. You can pretty much summarize the entire Republican position
as, “I’m not a scientist, but I don’t need to be, because God has made my brain
infallible and utterly incapable of error, so I can just make stuff up and God
is obligated to make it true.” Republican politicians do not merely mangle
science. They are blasphemers who consider the possibility that they may be
wrong to be as unthinkable as God Himself being wrong. Of course, if Levitan
had said this, the publisher would have rejected it. (Maybe Levitan tried and
had to back down.)
Republicans
have guns and consider themselves to be incapable of error even after thinking
about something for only a few seconds. What could possibly go wrong?