Anti-Science

The blogosphere is all over this one:

Sarah Palin gives a policy speech on scientific research:



You’ve heard about some of these pet projects they really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

Of course, the inevitable PZ Myers had something to say about it:

This idiot woman, this blind, shortsighted ignoramus, this pretentious clod, mocks basic research and the international research community. You damn well better believe that there is research going on in animal models — what does she expect, that scientists should mutagenize human mothers and chop up baby brains for this work? — and countries like France and Germany and England and Canada and China and India and others are all respected participants in these efforts.

Yes, scientists work on fruit flies. Some of the most powerful tools in genetics and molecular biology are available in fruit flies, and these are animals that are particularly amenable to experimentation. Molecular genetics has revealed that humans share key molecules, the basic developmental toolkit, with all other animals, thanks to our shared evolutionary heritage (something else the wackaloon from Wasilla denies), and that we can use these other organisms to probe the fundamental mechanisms that underlie core processes in the formation of the nervous system — precisely the phenomena Palin claims are so important.

And here's tristero weighing in on the fitness of not only Sarah Palin, but whoever allowed her to say those things, for any office whatsoever.

Here's Biochemical Soul.

When I heard this issue forth from my T.V. I literally could not believe what I had just heard. I had to rewind my TiVo just to make sure. I write now filled with more anger at the the current state of this union than I have felt in some time (albeit, anger cut with a good dose of hope).

Why the anger, you say? What’s wrong with her statement, you ask?

This statement of “public policy” exhibits an almost unbelievable level of the ignorance of Palin and those that support her – and on multiple levels.

Read it -- it's a solid, concise take-down of Palin's position.

The general consensus is that the woman's ignorant as a rock, which I'm not going to dispute, but I want to take a step back and look at it from a slightly different angle. I mean, she's repulsive, not because she's ignorant, not even because she's happy being ignorant, but because she glorifies ignorance. One of our most serious problems over the past few years has been that we're falling behind in basic science, largely due to the efforts of people like Palin and her supporters. I don't know that there's any changing those atttitudes, because especially in science, they have a deep conflict: "science" in their minds is anti-god. Especially biology, because biology is all about evolution. That fact that we can't make any progress in treating things like autism without understanding evolution doesn't register. Hell, we can't even develop new drugs without understanding evolution. (This is a world view that rejects the idea of a continuum, and so rejects the idea that there are relationships in nature that we can find very instructive -- everything is absolute, everything was created as is. Yeah, right -- take a look around you.)

There's also the fact that science is, and always has been, an international endeavor. (That's why Ph.D. candidates in any discipline are generally required to have a reading knowledge of at least one other language, the particular language being a function of where the most important work has been done in the field.) Imagine how well that sits with Palin's exclusivist, isolationist, anti-immigrant base (whose ancestors, of course, were immigrants themselves).

No, she is ignorant, and I don't think she's particularly intelligent, but she's shrewd. This wasn't a policy speech, except incidentally, and the policy it outlines is distinctly anti-science. It was a political speech designed to once again rally the ever-shrinking base. (Here's tristero again nailing the tactics.) I'm sure it worked very well, and it's only a plus in Palin's eyes that the elite -- which is to say, people who actually know what they're talking about -- is attacking her for it. The only way to counter it is to wipe McCain/Palin out at the polls.