Impeach Bush for using junk science

Because the people at the top of our government are responsible for making decisions that could cost the lives and ruin the health of millions of citizens, they should be equipped with the best information and the best expertise.  Unfortunately, the White House has decided to muzzle experts and choke off critical debate on numerous topics of critical national significance.  Why?

The Administration’s political interference with science has led to misleading statements by the President, inaccurate responses to Congress, altered web sites, suppressed agency reports, erroneous international communications, and the gagging of scientists. The subjects involved span a broad range, but they share a common attribute: the beneficiaries of the scientific distortions are important supporters of the President, including social conservatives and powerful industry groups.

http://democrats.reform.house.gov/features/politics_and_science/index.htm

It’s gotten so bad that prominent Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner has called the president’s science adviser a “prostitute”:

The United States has been engulfed by a kind of “science war,” one pitting much of the nation’s scientific community against the current administration. Led by twenty Nobel laureates, the scientists say Bush’s government has systematically distorted and undermined scientific information in pursuit of political objectives. Examples include the suppression and censorship of reports on subjects like climate change and mercury pollution, the stacking of scientific advisory panels, and the suspicious removal of scientific information from government Web sites.

The list goes on and on:

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The importance of pop quizzes

You’ve just noticed several people carrying signs that say “Down with Ice Cream.”   You approach them to ask what is so bad about ice cream.  After listening to them for a few minutes, it becomes clear to you that there is a misunderstanding.  To them, the phrase “ice cream” actually means kicking dogs.  They are against kicking dogs. 

“Oh, you mean that you’re against kicking dogs?” you ask.

“Down with ice cream!” they nod.

It’s impossible to have a meaningful conversation without a common understanding of the words being used.  “Evolution” is a good example.   When I hear someone speaking disparagingly about evolution I can trigger the following exchange:

Q:  What’s so bad about evolution?

A: It’s just a theory (#1) that says that everything here is just an accident (#2) and that people came from monkeys (#3).

Zero for three, every time.  In short, most people who “oppose” evolution are against something other than the scientific theory of evolution.  Further, most anti-evolutionists I’ve encountered don’t know what scientists say about evolution and don’t care [Good places to learn what scientists think would be here and here.]

The irony is that most people who oppose evolution are not opposed to any of the major facts upon which evolution is based (e.g., that random mutations occur, that some of these mutations make organisms more likely to survive long enough to bear offspring, or that a parent’s traits tend to be passed on to its children).  In fact, opponents don’t usually …

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Finding Function in “Wasteful” Human Activities

In 1997, Amotz and Avishag Zahavi published a remarkable book:  The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin's Puzzle.  The theme of the book, substantiated by the authors by use of dozens of case studies of animals in the wild, is twofold: In order to be effective, signals have to…

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Be Conscious of Your Unconscious to Set you Free

A lot of people are beating up on old Sigmund Freud these days.  More than a century ago, however, Freud hit a particular ball out of the park and it’s still sailing:  he concluded that many important thought processes are unconscious. 

In Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), Mark Johnson and George Lakoff listed some of the many important unconscious mental activities:

  • Accessing memories relevant to what is being said.
  • Comprehending a stream of sound as being language, dividing it into distinctive phonetic features.
  • Picking out words and giving them meanings appropriate to context.
  • Making semantic and pragmatic sense of the sentences as a whole.
  • Framing what is said in terms relevant to the discussion.
  • Making inferences relevant to what is being said.
  • Constructing mental images where relevant.
  • Filling in gaps in the discourse.
  • Noticing and interpreting a speaker’s body language.

In short, most of what is going on in our heads is unconscious. Lakoff and Johnson concluded that “unconscious thought is at least 95 percent of all thought and that our unconscious conceptual systems function like a “hidden hand” that “shapes how we automatically and unconsciously comprehend what we experience.  It constitutes our unreflective common sense.”

Nietzsche expressed this same idea in Thus Spake Zarathustra: 

“It is by invisible hands that we are bent and tortured worst.”

Freud and Nietzsche have been proven absolutely correct on this point.  That consciousness is only the “tip of the iceberg” has been conclusively proven by hundreds of experiments outlined in numerous …

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