Sentiment against Science on Left and Right
An interesting topic came up at the law-and-econ lunch today: who are more anti-science, conservatives or liberals?
We didn’t explore it (it was a tangent on the issue of bias in academia), and I don’t have time to think it out now, but I do like the question. Conservatives include anti-evolution Fundamentalists, all of whom oppose a standard scientific conclusion, and many of whom oppose the scientific method too. These are separate questions, however. Many Creationists are “doing science”: they are applying the standard scientific methods of logic, testing, sifting of evidence, and so forth. They are just doing it wrong. As for “Intelligent Design”– that is clearly Science. It uses the same method as the rest of science, and does not dispute the solidly grounded conclusions of science (it gets controversial, of course, but only over the places where mainstream scientists is stuck– the ultimate origins of life, the immediate ancestors of homo sapiens, etc.).
On the other hand, most of the opposite to research on evolution and to its applications to daily life come from the Left. Sociobiology has turned out to be more popular with conservatives than with liberals, as have genetic theories of behavior and intelligence. Liberals are hostile to the very idea of applying science to differences between races and sciences, or to such things as curing homosexuality. In practice, it is from the Left that a scholar will get into academic trouble, not from the Right. You can do all the studies on evolution that you like, and conservatives won’t object in the slightest– not even Fundamentalists are calling for a purge of biology departments. But as we can tell from the Larry Summers affair at Harvard, a young scholar who does research on differences in ability between males and females is going to about as employable as a card-carrying Communist in 1955, and a lot *less* likely to get tenure in his current institution.
So I don’t know the answer.