Will Obama Kill Science?

Title of an article by John Derbyshire at National Review.

One of the cries raised against Republicans is that they are "anti science". In fact, this meme is what lies behind questions directed at evolution, climate change, stem cell research, and similar issues at debates.  The Derb wonders if a Democrat victory might not actually be more harmful for scientific progress.

Still, anyone of a gambling inclination who wanted to bet on what the really sensational science headlines of the next few years will be, would not be looking to the LHC. As I commented in National Review three years ago:

[W]e are passing from the Age of Physics to the Age of Biology. It is not quite the case that nothing is happening in physics, but certainly there is nothing like the excitement of the early 20th century. Physics seems, in fact, to have got itself into a cul-de-sac, obsessing over theories so mathematically abstruse that nobody even knows how to test them.

The life sciences, by contrast, are blooming, with major new results coming in all the time from genetics, zoology, demography, biochemistry, neuroscience, psychometrics, and other "hot" disciplines. The physics building may be hushed and dark while its inhabitants mentally wrestle with 26-dimensional manifolds, but over at biology the joint is jumpin'.

Whether it will go on jumpin' may depend on the result of November's election. There is a widespread feeling in the human sciences — particularly in genetics, population genetics, evolutionary biology, and neurophysiology — that the next five to ten years will see some sensational discoveries. Unfortunately those discoveries will have metaphysical implications more disturbing than were those of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, and Dirac may have seriously upset our ideas about matter and energy, but at least they left our psyches and our political principles intact.

Those items may not remain intact much longer. The conceptual revolution among human-sciences researchers has in fact already taken place. This is not widely understood because (a) news outlets are very reluctant to report it, (b) powerful political forces have an interest in suppressing it, and (c) researchers prefer getting on quietly with their work to having their windows broken by mobs of angry protestors.

While those sociobiology wars were going on — while E.O. Wilson was having a jug of ice water dumped over his head at an AAAS symposium by people shouting "Racist Wilson you can't hide, we charge you with genocide!" (1978); while Art Jensen looked set fair to be kicked out of the AAAS altogether following agitation by Margaret Mead et al. because of his 1969 paper on group differences in I.Q.; while Stephen Jay Gould was assuring his readers that "Human equality is a contingent fact of history" (1985) and Richard Lewontin was celebrating "the funeral of reductionism" (1983); while Charles Murray was being profiled in the New York Times Magazine as "America's most dangerous conservative" (1994) — while all that was happening, research results were steadily trickling in, building up the water pressure behind the nurturist dam.

That dam now has more cracks than the surface of Europa and water is spraying out all over. The only thing that could stop a complete collapse would be the power of government …

… Which might be forthcoming in the event of an Obama victory. The younger generation of human-sciences enthusiasts trend conservative/libertarian, and Obama has them worried. For a glimpse of the kind of discussions that their fears generate, read through the recent thread on Gene Expression here. Samples:

[Sarah] Palin is the most libertarian candidate to run since the Reagan administration … we're fighting to hold territory, not to take it. We just need to hold off the left till genomics can come through. We're going to be knocking off sacred cow after sacred cow in the next decade or so …

The Democrats do not want the genetic discoveries to lead to widespread knowledge about the truth about human differences. The Democrats are really more anti-Darwinian than the fundamentalist Christians who deny the origin of species …

We need to step very carefully as we as going up against the official state religion, namely PC, and until we reach critical mass we'll be convicted in the media and go straight to the gulag rather than be afforded the benefit of a [S]copes trial. [J]ust think of how many fedguv bureaucrats and NGOs owe their livelihoods to the axiom of equality … an Obama administration will passionately go after the heretics.

The Left's restraints on science do not get publicized. Where's the big research for IQ genes? Where's the funding for that? Where's the big research program for psychometrics? The Left strangled that very thoroughly.

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Thus if human-sciences research is shut down in the U.S.A., our understanding will cease to advance, or will advance much more slowly. A mass exodus of researchers to some more hospitable nation, in the manner of Jewish scientists fleeing the Nazis, is not likely. U.S. academic life is very cozy, and nobody is threatened with concentration camps. Researchers are just being told, in the soft-totalitarian tones of that memo Henry Harpending displays, that there are project areas towards which the federal government takes a stance of strong disapproval, with effects including, but not limited to, zero funding.

Barack Obama was raised in an atmosphere of "cultural Marxism." His mind was set that way, and he retained the essential precepts of the creed into adult life, as his close association with somewhat-more-than-cultural Marxist Bill Ayers illustrates (as of course do Obama's remarks quoted above). Obama would fill his administration with cultural Marxists like himself, whose attitude to human-sciences research is the one spelled out by Edward O. Wilson in his book On Human Nature.

Marxism is sociobiology without biology. The strongest opposition to the scientific study of human nature has come from a small number of Marxist biologists and anthropologists who are committed to the view that human behavior arises from a very few unstructured drives. They believe that nothing exists in the untrained human mind that cannot be readily channeled to the purposes of the revolutionary socialist state. When faced with the evidence of greater structure, their response has been to declare human nature off limits to further scientific investigation. A few otherwise very able scholars have gone so far as to suggest that merely to talk about the subject is dangerous.

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