New IST Science Policy Blogs
February 23rd, 2006Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
The IQ of the science policy blogosphere just increased. The periodical Issues in Science and Technology, a publication of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, has unveiled several of the authors of its new group blog. They are ASU’s Daniel Sarewitz and OECD’s Jerry Sheehan. For those interested in science policy, they are worth a look and perhaps a link in your favorites. Here is one of Dan Sarewitz’s recent posts:
It comes as a relief to learn, from a recent NY Times article, that scientists have recently gone to Capitol Hill to give Members of Congress and their staff a briefing on “how science works.” It’s a little weird, I guess, that a single briefing could explain what centuries of inquiry and debate by scientists, philosophers, sociologists, historians, and others have failed to achieve, but I accept that one has to simplify these things for the lay audience. According to the article, Science editor Donald Kennedy told the Congressional audience that “the ultimate test of truth in science” is the replication of results: Hmmmm. Well, there’s certainly no way to replicate a billion or so years of Darwinian natural selection, so I guess the theory of evolution must not be science. And obviously you can’t replicate a general circulation model’s prediction of the future behavior of climate, since the future hasn’t happened yet, so apparently climate modeling isn’t science either. I suspect there’s some subtlety here that I’m missing, but I’m sure our elected officials were able to grasp it.
Have a look. We’ll keep you updated as Issues adds more contributors.
February 23rd, 2006 at 10:19 am
Someone should tell those dudes to advertise their RSS feeds a little more prominently. If anyone’s interested, the URLs are:
http://issues-org-danielsarewitz.blogspot.com/atom.xml
http://issues-org-jerrysheehan.blogspot.com/atom.xml
February 23rd, 2006 at 10:26 am
This irritates me just like the Jasanoff comment. While I have no particular interest in rehashing that entire thread, I would just like to say that the implication of Sarewitz and Jasanoff is that no effort should be made to educate policymakers on the processes that science uses. Science is simply too hard for them to understand.
I think that’s crazy. And it’s going to lead to bad policy.
Regards.
February 23rd, 2006 at 12:26 pm
You … no, I fear you really aren’t kidding, are you?
Sarewitz: “Kennedy told the Congressional audience that “the ultimate test of truth in science” is the replication of results: Hmmmm. Well, there’s certainly no way to replicate a billion or so years of Darwinian natural selection, so I guess the theory of evolution must not be science. And obviously you can’t replicate a general circulation model’s prediction…”
There you have it. My thirteen year old niece’s Advanced Placement Biology high school class is doing gene splicing and selection on bacteria. Do you suppose it only works because their teacher is secretly praying that it does? Or could there be something to natural selection since artificial selection replicates it so reliably?
Ask any farmer or dog breeder.
Just how dumb does he think our Congresspeople ….
Oh.
Okay, you’re right. He’s appropriate in context. Send a fundamentalist to catch a fundamentalist, eh?
February 23rd, 2006 at 2:50 pm
I suspect that Hank’s daughter, farmers, and dog breeders are all practicing intelligent design.
On the other hand, Sarewitz may not know much about science.
February 23rd, 2006 at 5:33 pm
All- I’d encourage you to make comments on Sarewitz’s blog, I’m sure he’d welcome them. Just FYI, he has a PhD in Geology from Cornell, so he probably know something about science
February 24th, 2006 at 5:33 pm
Rocks for brains.
(Don;t feed me straight lines and I won;t sin)
February 25th, 2006 at 11:36 pm
Andrew Dessler wrote:
“I would just like to say that the implication of Sarewitz and Jasanoff is that no effort should be made to educate policymakers on the processes that science uses. Science is simply too hard for them to understand.”
Actually, the implication of Sarewitz and Jasanoff is that scientists who try and educate the public (be they policymakers or not) assume that science is too hard for them to understand. Which is insulting.
They also imply that such an education process is:
1) insufficient to influence policy
This kind of public education only tells people what science does. Why scientists do what they do, or why science (and how it is conducted) matters to (insert person and occupation here) is rarely dealt with as much detail or consideration. I think this lack of complete education has something to do with an interest in researcher autonomy – but that could be another post.
2) too simplistic to accurately reflect the complicated nature of scientific research.
Sarewitz covers this pretty well in his blog, and we’ve dealt with it a fair amount here at Prometheus. Science is more than just the scientific method. And I would suggest that the issues of great concern to policymakers these days rely on science that has difficulty in following the traditional scientific models, due to difficulties in replication, ethical/technical/resource limitations, or other reasons.
and 3) scientists are presumed to know the policy process (and its associated politics).
Perhaps this is a result of the traditional disdain of the social sciences and humanitites by the natural sciences, or a naivete about the universality of any Ph.Ds knowledge base. In any case, there is a serious disconnect between how policymakers solve problems and how scientists solve problems. When one tries to use the methods they learned in the other area, cognitive dissonance is a likely outcome.