It Isn't Just The Right Taking A Big Poop On Science
To borrow from Tolstoy, it turns out that each side is anti-science in its own special way.
At Skeptic.com, Kenneth W. Krause reviews Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left, by Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell:
The authors contend that American media have long bestowed a "free pass" on the political Left (primarily progressives), who are just as likely [as the Republicans] to "misinterpret, misrepresent, and abuse" science to advance their ideological agendas. In fact, the authors say, progressives are currently waging an "undeclared war on scientific excellence itself."
They accuse progressives of propagating a number of socially destructive myths, among them the assumptions that everything "natural" is good and everything "unnatural" is bad. Accordingly, homeopathy is just as good as or better than traditional medicine, vaccines actually harm children, and nuclear energy promises unprecedented sickness and loss of life.
...Unsurprisingly, progressives have corrupted the social sciences too, perhaps to the point of permanent reputational taint among both the general public and the scientific community. Recall, for example, the oppressive and unscholarly manner in which Harvard president Lawrence Summers was vilified in 2005 for merely suggesting that, one, men and women might have distinguishable natural abilities related to math and science, and, two, that personal preference rather than discrimination might account for female "underrepresentation" in high-end STEM careers.
"Summers learned the hard way," the authors say, "that the feel-good fallacies of progressive thought are stronger than the values of free inquiry and the primacy of the scientific method." Indeed, where was the intellectual debate before Summers' resignation in 2006? Is it really so improbable that different genders evolved or learned different talents? Or is it more likely, perhaps, that academics have been bullied into the "gender equality" camp with threats of being branded as sexist?
...Cornell University researchers Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams recently published a hard-hitting and no doubt divisive paper addressing this very issue. After reviewing 20 years of data, Ceci and Williams--married with three daughters of their own--decided that the evidence of discrimination against women in math-intensive fields is "aberrant, of small magnitude" and "superseded by larger, more sophisticated analyses showing no bias, or occasionally, bias in favor of women."
In agreement with their previous analyses, Ceci and Williams surmised instead that the gender gap results primarily from women's career preferences and fertility and lifestyle choices. In other words, adolescent girls tend to gravitate toward careers focusing on people as opposed to things, and female Ph.D.s interested in childrearing are less likely to apply for or maintain tenure track positions. Incidentally, as a secondary explanation, the duo pointed to evidence for upper tail disparities in cognitive ability.
As for who is worse on science:
The fact is that all ideologues are impediments to science, whether libertarians, religious zealots, and free-market fundamentalists on the one hand, or environmentalists, feminists, and social engineers on the other. Science--indeed, truth generally--is served mostly by those who conceive of themselves as individuals first and group members second (if at all). But seldom if ever are its ends advanced by committed disciples to any idea or cause.