Why Conservatives/Republicans Turned Against Science

[CactusCarlos]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021718266

Ichingcarpenter (26,960 posts)

Why Conservatives/Republicans Turned Against Science
 
A prediction: When all the votes have been counted and the reams of polling data have been crunched, analyzed, and spun, this will be clear: Few scientists will have voted for Republican candidates, particularly for national office. Survey data taken from 1974 through 2010 and analyzed by Gordon Gauchat in the American Sociological Review confirm that most American scientists are not conservatives. A 2009 study by the Pew Research Center found that only 9 percent of scientists self-identified as conservative, while 52 percent called themselves liberals. Only 6 percent of American scientists self-identified as Republicans. This state of affairs is bad for the nation, and bad for science.

It was not always this way. In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon won the votes of 31 percent of physicists, 42 percent of biologists, 52 percent of geologists, and 62 percent of agricultural scientists (compared with 43.4 percent of the popular vote). While these data do not include party affiliation, they suggest that the scientific community of the late 1960s was much more evenly divided between the two major parties than it is now, and, with the exception of physicists, slightly more conservative than the American voting public at large.

Why have scientists fled the Republican Party? The obvious answer is that the Republican Party has spurned science. Consider Mitt Romney's shifting position on climate change. As governor of Massachusetts in 2004, he laid out a plan for protecting the state's climate. As presidential candidate, he has said that climate change is real, but has questioned whether humans are causing it. His stance is consistent with the Republican Party platform, which unambiguously calls for expanding the production and use of the fossil fuels that drive climate change. In 2009, Paul Ryan accused climate scientists of "clear efforts to use statistical tricks to distort their findings and intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change," echoing false accusations leveled against climatologists at the University of East Anglia. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan exemplify the conservative turn against science, but what explains it?

It seems hard to believe today, but environmental protection used to be a bipartisan affair. In the early half of the 20th century, Republican and Democratic administrations pursued conservation, setting aside land as national forests and parks but leaving pollution control to local and state governments. By the 1950s, however, pollution became a national issue. Above-ground nuclear-weapons testing spread radioactive fallout globally, along with a fear of the consequences. Rachel Carson's 1962 book, Silent Spring, documented the adverse effects of pesticides, especially DDT. Less well remembered but equally important was the work of Clair Patterson, a geochemist at the California Institute of Technology, who showed that lead pollution from cars had reached Antarctica. By 1970 it was no longer plausible to argue that pollution was a local problem—a "neighborhood effect," as the economist Milton Friedman called it in 1962...........SNIP..........SNIP.


Much more at the chronicle of higher education:


http://chronicle.com/article/The-Conservative-Turn-Against/135488/

We turned against science?  Can someone forward me a copy of the memo?

[Vagabond]

A lot of scientists work at universities and know full well that continued government largesse in the form of grants that keeps the gravy flowing depends on democrats.  Republicans aren't anti-science, it's that enough of them are against bad investments.

Rachel Carson lied.  The continued belief in her lies kills hundreds of thousands every year because governments are hamstrung from using DDT to combat malaria outbreaks.

[USA4ME]

Libs, allow me to explain to you the science of my wallet.

.

[txradioguy]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021718266

We turned against science?  Can someone forward me a copy of the memo?

Can you cc me on it...I seem to have missed it as well.

[thundley4]

A lot of scientists work at universities and know full well that continued government largesse in the form of grants that keeps the gravy flowing depends on democrats.  Republicans aren't anti-science, it's that enough of them are against bad investments.

Rachel Carson lied.  The continued belief in her lies kills hundreds of thousands every year because governments are hamstrung from using DDT to combat malaria outbreaks.

Exactly.  Scientists that live off of government grants are not much different than welfare scammers.

[FiddyBeowulf]

Exactly.  Scientists that live off of government grants are not much different than welfare scammers.

Explains why the DUmmies sympathize with them so much.

[Texacon]

Just another attempt to proclaim intellectual superiority.  Nothing to see here.

KC

[SSG Snuggle Bunny]

Define "science."

[JohnnyReb]

Define "science."

Science: The art of having an answer and making up the fudged data to support it.

[Carl]

"Scientists" turned against science in favor of leftist propaganda.

[GOP Congress]

Rachel Carson has been responsible for more deaths than Hitler, Stalin, and Lenin.

Combined.

In fact, more than TWICE the combined amount.

It is reliably estimated that Rachel Carson's book, which led to the banning of DDT, alone has cost over 300 million deaths in Africa, primarily because of its effects in slowing, and even stopping, malaria.

The combined amount of oppressive deaths (not counting actual "killed in action" statistics of all wars) is 125 million.

Will Rachel Carson be viewed in the same light? HA!!!!

[J P Sousa]

It seems sombody is misrepresenting conservatives.

Why Don't Conservatives Trust Scientists Like They Used To?
http://reason.com/blog/2012/03/30/why-dont-conservatives-trust-scientists

  CONFIDENCE IN SCIENCE BY CONSERVATIVES HAS DECLINED SINCE 1974: “That represents a dramatic shift for conservatives, who in 1974 were more likely than liberals or moderates (all categories based on self-identification) to express confidence in science. While the confidence levels of other groups in science have been relatively stable, the conservative drop now means that group is the least likely to have confidence in science.”
 
The reason is the use of science as an argument-from-authority for bigger government. If scientists want more trust, perhaps they should try not to be tools.
 

AND;

  It's Hard to Make Predictions, Especially About the Future

The new book Future Babble explains why dart-throwing monkeys are better at predicting the future than most pundits.

http://reason.com/archives/2011/04/05/future-babble
 

I guess you can put "scientists" in there as well.   
.

[franksolich]

I've found Republicans and conservatives to be the most scientific people around.

It's just that our perspective is different; we look at science as a tool, a help, a resource, while primitives look at science as God.

One of my favorite daydreams involves when the Sistine Chapel in Rome has to be enlarged because of the burgeoning number of Christians worldwide, usually brown people, and hence too Michelangelo's frescoes expanded.

In the "Last Judgement" part, I'd like to see a picture of old pot-bellied balding hippies angrily screaming at, and shaking their fists at, their false gods of science, medicine, and technology, which not only failed to keep them young forever, but even to just keep them alive forever.

[franksolich]

Exactly.  Scientists that live off of government grants are not much different than welfare scammers.

That's it.

I've met more than one--actually, five over the past twenty years--reputable physician who've said that governmentally-funded AIDS research has been one giant boondoggled cluster****, and ruinously expensive, catering to egos rather than to research.

[franksolich]

A lot of scientists work at universities and know full well that continued government largesse in the form of grants that keeps the gravy flowing depends on democrats.  Republicans aren't anti-science, it's that enough of them are against bad investments.

Rachel Carson lied.  The continued belief in her lies kills hundreds of thousands every year because governments are hamstrung from using DDT to combat malaria outbreaks.

Sometime late in the Bush administration, the United Nations came out with a study inferring that the environmentalists had been the biggest mass-murderers of the 20th century, far exceeding the carnage of Mao, Stalin, Lenin, and Hitler.

The study bounced around the internet for a week or two, and then was pulled back and "revised" lest it be offensive to old hippies.

[Mr Mannn]

Hmmm. Who was it that shut off NASA? Ah yes, the democrats.

Rats name call at republicans because we were against stem cell research. They support it only because it justifies abortion. ever since we are the ones against science.
--When the Catholics objected to being forced to pay for abortions...rats morphed it into a GOP war on women.

Bottom line, democrats want to kill babies. They will say anything, do anything, lie cheat and steal so they can kill babies. They will gladly tell you that killing babies is the number one issue with women. Lies lies lies.

I really wonder at the democrat focus on killing. Its not just babies, its now the elderly with Obamacare.
They have a phone app that can identify households with party affiliation. I don't like the rats having a tool like that when all they can do is justify killing people.

[jukin]

Every engineer I know except two (software guys) are republicans. The thing about engineers is that we take theory and then make reality. Scientists don't rally do that. It's hard because the physical world won't change, won't say OK let's look at it differently. Engineers, making scientific theories work on a real and useable scale.

[JohnnyReb]

Democrats killed the "Super Collider", a 54 mile long, 6 billion dollar, tunnel for scientific research under Texas ...a project that could have had an extraordinary impact upon mankind......but spent 20+ billion dollars on a 3 mile long tunnel under Boston that serves no useful purpose other than to move Yankees from one side of town to the other.....and is already falling apart.

[docstew]

We believe in science, or maybe more specifically the scientific method.
We see others have performed experiments in the way they govern their societies with wealth redistribution, one party rule, etc., and we see that those experiments have refuted their operational hypothesis. We see that libs have consistently come to the wrong conclusion from these experiments, namely that the experimenter was at fault, not the hypothesis itself. We see no need to repeat these experiments, since we see the resultant failure costs lives, money, and human suffering.

[vesta111]

We believe in science, or maybe more specifically the scientific method.
We see others have performed experiments in the way they govern their societies with wealth redistribution, one party rule, etc., and we see that those experiments have refuted their operational hypothesis. We see that libs have consistently come to the wrong conclusion from these experiments, namely that the experimenter was at fault, not the hypothesis itself. We see no need to repeat these experiments, since we see the resultant failure costs lives, money, and human suffering.

I would like to know what a real scientist is ???? Few Scientists do their experimenting all by themselves, takes a hoard of team workers to get a project off the ground.

It takes MONEY to go into the field of any science and as most country's look at any good results of any experiment as a " Can the military use this for something "? All countries will pay a bundle of money to keep the Scientists and their crews on their toes. 

Odd is it not that some of our biggest break through come only when someone makes a mistake, Puts a slide in a microscope backward or an EX-ray in sideways, takes film of a distant Galaxy backward looking at earth not from it and discovers some mighty interesting things.

Betty Hill under hypnosis drew a diagram she saw when she was as she believed taken aboard a outer space craft.  It took the Russians to screw the map up, looked at it backwards to find that the map had everything in the right place.   This was 10 years later, most scientists had given up on that map but the mistake brought more interest in space projects then we civilians know.

Were it not for science, would any of us be here ????   

[Toastedturningtidelegs]

The vast majority of scientists think life begins at conception.....Which party believes that and which party doesn't again?

[jtyangel]

The vast majority of scientists think life begins at conception.....Which party believes that and which party doesn't again?

Shhh. You are hurting dumbass brains:)

[JohnnyReb]

The vast majority of scientists think life begins at conception.....Which party believes that and which party doesn't again?

Lets expand on that a little. The DUmmies believe that since a fetus can't survive outside the womb it's not "life"....right....so therefore a woman has the right to kill it abort it...right?. Well, since DUmmies can't live without government support, therefore those of us who pay taxes should have the right to abort kill the DUmmies....right?

[Toastedturningtidelegs]

Lets expand on that a little. The DUmmies believe that since a fetus can't survive outside the womb it's not "life"....right....so therefore a woman has the right to kill it abort it...right?. Well, since DUmmies can't live without government support, therefore those of us who pay taxes should have the right to abort kill the DUmmies....right?

Sounds completely reasonable to me...

[Toastedturningtidelegs]

Shhh. You are hurting dumbass brains:)

They do that everytime they sit down....