At Slate, Daniel Sarewitz posits that the dearth of Republicans in scientific fields is bad for the country. After all, diverse political viewpoints foster debate, right?
Consider the case of climate change, of which beliefs are astonishingly polarized according to party affiliation and ideology. A March 2010 Gallup poll showed that 66 percent of Democrats (and 74 percent of liberals) say the effects of global warming are already occurring, as opposed to 31 percent of Republicans. Does that mean that Democrats are more than twice as likely to accept and understand the scientific truth of the matter? And that Republicans are dominated by scientifically illiterate yahoos and corporate shills willing to sacrifice the planet for short-term economic and political gain?
Or could it be that disagreements over climate change are essentially political—and that science is just carried along for the ride? For 20 years, evidence about global warming has been directly and explicitly linked to a set of policy responses demanding international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, and the redistribution of wealth. These are the sort of things that most Democrats welcome, and most Republicans hate. No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science.
What's missing from this "analysis," though, is the idea that there actually isn't a debate among scientists and that scientists may have abandoned the Republican Party because the Republican Party has abandoned them. What we should do about climate change is up for some debate, but the facts on climate change are not. The Republican Party has, for many years, attacked basic scientific knowledge on everything from evolution to stem cells and stymied policies that are meant to handle our evolving knowledge of the ways in which we interact with the world. Scientists are likely scientists first and Democrats second, like most people, and not the other way around. The high correlation isn't evidence that scientists are working to provide rationale for Democratic policies, but that Democrats are listening to them.
-- Monica Potts
