Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

Science has _always_ been political. On the front page a few days ago was the story of a bunch of physicists bitching at each other over what happened in WWI

I have a book from Scientific American from the 1960s that has a whole section removed for the british audience because it contained instructions on how to run experiments on bears. That is a political act.

But, seeing as how administrations of various colours have differing approaches to funding science, its pretty hard for "science" to be a-political. Trump has expressed "policy" for completely removing NOAA, which provides massive datasets for wider research. His track record isn't great on funding wider science either. So its probably legitimate to lobby for more funding, no? (did the editor actually lobby effectively, is a different question)

Now, should the editor of SA also take on other causes, probably not. But "science" has been doing that for year (just look at psychology)

>I have a book from Scientific American from the 1960s that has a whole section removed for the british audience because it contained instructions on how to run experiments on bears. That is a political act.

I think you'd need a bit more evidence for that being "political". A far more plausible reason for the removal is that Britain doesn't have bears to any degree (there have been isolated sightings but most think they've been extinct there for over 1000 years).

It's true! Britain has no bears so we like any refrence to them to be removed from our books ensuring we never have to think about them.

Yeah, scanning through the recently published articles it seems "Reason" has no problem with the politicisation of science if it means the slashing of govenment funding.

Reason is an explicitly political magazine that advocates for Libertarian ideas of small government.

I need to find it again but it said something along the lines of:

"this chapter has been removed as it describes experimentation on live bears."

it then goes on to apologise and has a lovely passive aggressive:

"we would hope that British readers would not like to carry out such experiments on live animals"

Strangely enough, I read about a bear that was lurking around at Paddington Station.

But that's a Peruvian bear.

There were also rumours of a pooh bear in East Sussex.

Let me guess, he claims he's just a tourist, but had two 400lb suitcases.

There’s a version of a book on birds that doesn’t have the gannet in it.

(Monty Python reference)

And a book on trees that doesn't have the larch in it.

Galileo. Oppenheimer.

I think those two examples are already enough to show that science has been political for 400 years.

In all seriousness, no, it shows that there were at least two cases of political science in the last 400 years, not that all science is.

I think there have been more, and it plays a role, but I don't buy that you can just dismiss the criticism of political science with the claim that it always is.

There are matters of degrees, and it's almost universally acknowledged to be bad, because it usually means results and emphasis have been distorted because of the politics.

The swallow may fly south with the sun, or the house martin or the plover seek warmer hot lands in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land.

I just chose one example from the early years of science, and one modern case. Anyone can fill in countless cases of science being highly politicized in the intervening centuries.

> There are matters of degrees, and it's almost universally acknowledged to be bad, because it usually means results and emphasis have been distorted because of the politics.

No, science is generally objective, but its results have political implications. To take the pandemic as an example. Virology and epidemiology came to a clear, objective, true conclusion: social distancing and vaccination would drastically reduce the death toll of the pandemic. However, because there are people who reject social distancing (e.g., people who run businesses) and vaccination (anti-vaxxers and opportunistic politicians who see that as an issue they can push), virology and epidemiology have become politically controversial. It's also politically convenient in the United States to distract from the government's own failure to effectively respond to the pandemic by pushing conspiracy theories about the virus coming from a lab in a scary foreign country (and if you don't accept that this is a conspiracy theory, I'm sorry, but you've fallen victim to the widespread propaganda on this issue in American media over the last few years, which is 100% at odds with the conclusions that the scientific community has reached). The problem isn't with virology or epidemiology themselves. The problem is with how the society and political system respond to science.