Three of the possible Republican nominees for president of the United States don't believe in evolution. Over half of Americans apparently agree, at least when asked a straightforward true-or-false question on the topic. A quarter of Americans still think the sun goes around the Earth. Only about a third of Americans know of and believe in the big-bang theory. The debate over global warming? When Science magazine surveyed all of the hundreds of peer-reviewed research on the subject a few years ago, there was not a single published article contrary to the scientific consensus that human activities have been warming the planet. Not a single one. And yet local "experts" insist that building more roads eliminates traffic congestion, despite all empirical evidence to the contrary. Some circles still insist on debating the connection between HIV infection and AIDS, despite nearly 30 years of evidence. Seattle—the most educated city in the country, home to the public university receiving the most federal research funding—is also host to the Discovery Institute, an organization that shoehorns warmed-over creationist theories from the 19th century into science textbooks.
As a community, we've apparently forgotten how to think. In our conversations, our political debates, our schools, and particularly the lay press, science is presented as some sort of overgrown trivia contest. Conflicts are manufactured and false doubt is conjured out of thin air. No one plays this game better than the political right. Science is really about evaluating imperfect evidence, developing models, and empirically probing the world around us. When did we lose this?
An astonishing myriad of challenges face us. We've managed to change the climate of the planet, eradicate huge swaths of living organisms permanently, rip a hole in the protective ozone layer, kill off massive numbers of pollinating insects, and grow our population and consumption of resources well beyond what our planet can sustain—all in just a few decades. Empirical reason, scientific discovery, and technological advance really are all we have to deal with all this. This willed ignorance of reality—to demand that the Earth was created in seven days a few thousand years ago and that the sun circles around it, to insist that man did not evolve from prior living things, to require absolute and divine proof before acting—is a luxury we cannot afford. There was no paradise from which we were cast. No divine salvation is coming. Any Eden will be of our own making, coming from human endeavor and knowledge.
Reality really does have a liberal bias. Certainly we can do better than the Discovery Institute and a parade of press releases about the latest scientific "breakthrough." So here I am—a liberal, agnostic, Jewish, pro-homo human embryonic-stem-cell researcher, with two engineering degrees (biomedical engineering and computer science) and on my way to both an MD and PhD. Every week, I'll give a wonk's view of the world around us and how we know what we know.
