Is who to vote for a scientific question?

Nature magazine has endorsed Barack Obama. That's Nature magazine, the one that deals with issues of science.

If Nature was endorsing candidates on the basis of where they stood on issues that affected scientific progress or on how they would affect the amount of dollars for scientific research, it would be easy to see its motivations. These would of course put the magazine in the role of a special interest, but at least it would make some sense.

But Nature says that this is not why it is endorsing a candidate:

There is no open-and-shut case for preferring one man or the other on the basis of their views on these matters. This is as it should be: for science to be a narrow sectional interest bundled up in a single party would be a terrible thing. Both sides recognize science's inspirational value and ability to help achieve national and global goals. That is common ground to be prized, and a scientific journal's discussion of these matters might be expected to stop right there.

So why does Nature magazine endorse Obama? Because he more closely reflects the "values of scientific enquiry." That's right, science apparently encompasses values:

... science is bound by, and committed to, a set of normative values — values that have application to political questions. Placing a disinterested view of the world as it is ahead of our views of how it should be; recognizing that ideas should be tested in as systematic a way as possible; appreciating that there are experts whose views and criticisms need to be taken seriously: these are all attributes of good science that can be usefully applied when making decisions about the world of which science is but a part.

In what way is science "bound by, and committed to, a set of normative values"? Science is bound by values? How? According to what definition of science can you say that it involves values in any way? Scientists can be bound by and commited to values, but science itself? A scientist can adhere to a set of values, but not insofar as he is a scientist. He can adhere to them insofar as he is a man, or as he is a philosopher, or as he is a citizen, but not a scientist.

Any values that "science" possesses are derived from something other than science, since science itself stays exclusively on the fact side of the fact/value distinction. The Nature editorial suggests this, but, in the very same paragraph contradicts it. It says one of the "values" of science is placing a "disinterested view of the world as it is ahead of our views of how it should be..." This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. "Values" involve precisely how things "should be." That's what values are.

And what is a political endorsement anyway except a statement saying who people should vote for?

The Nature editorial even talks about science's "core values":

Writ larger, the core values of science are those of open debate within a free society that have come down to us from the Enlightenment in many forms, not the least of which is the constitution of the United States.

The values of open debate have nothing to do with science. They are entirely ethical or political concerns.

Why do scientists say such stupid things? The biggest reason is this: As soon as science starts talking about itself, it is outside its area of expertise. If science is the empirical study of natural things and processes, then, since science is not a natural thing or process, a scientist can't say anything about it--at least not as a scientist. If science is not an object of science (which, according to the definition of science, it can't be), then whatever a scientist says about it he says as something other than a scientist.

You can't talk scientifically about science. You can talk philosophically about science, or ethically about science, or emotionally about science, but the one thing you can't do is talk scientifically about it. And one of the most common mistakes scientists make is to forget this.

The Nature editorial endorsing Obama betrays a complete lack of understanding of science's inherant limitations and a completely confused set of notions about what science is. That's what happens when people try to pretend they're not being political partisan when, in fact, they are.

The editors at Nature should stop hiding behind their laboratory smocks and just come right out and say that they are pushing their own personal political agendas--political agendas that lie outside the scientific enterprise. Anything less just undermines their own credibility.

Sarah Palin and the fruit fly controversy

When you start hearing criticism of Sarah Palin for her position on fruit flies, you know it's time for the election to be over--just so the liberals can have some time to chill and get some oxygen to their brains.

Abortion: a disqualifying issue

A number of years ago, William F. Buckley, Jr. was discussing the abortion issue with a guest on his program, "Firing Line." The guest challenged Buckley's assertion that a conservative should not vote for a candidate who supported abortion. The guest charged that this was "single issue" voting.

Not at all, said Buckley. "Abortion is not a single issue," he explained: "It is a disqualifying issue."

If you had, say, a candidate with whom you agreed about everything, but he was in favor of bringing back slavery, Buckley asked, would you vote for him? No. Because slavery is a disqualifying issue.

Abortion operates in the same way (or should) for a voter who believes that life begins at conception. As Buckley explained, a prolife voter should no more vote for a pro-abortion candidate than he would for a person who favored infanticide--because that's exactly what abortion is.

Is the world coming around to Wendell Berry?

Harold Goddard once said: "The world is forever catching up to Shakespeare, only to fall behind him again." I don't think the modern world has yet caught up with the 73 year-old Wendell Berry, but Rod Dreher, writing in the Dallas Morning News, says he thinks it might be about to.

I told my wife the other day that Wendell Berry is the only author whose books I read for their own sake, not for anything I might glean from them to "use". They are not, in that sense, "practical," and yet, saying that, I realize they have changed my life and the way I think--and ultimately the way I do things--more than any other.

I find it increasingly remarkable how many of my conservative friends, some of whom are what my son calls "Rush babies," have been discovering Wendell Berry. What happens in their thinking about life and culture--I should perhaps rather call it an attitude--I can only describe (having gone through it myself) as akin to a Copernican revolution.

One friend told me, "I have spent the better part of my adult life studying C. S. Lewis. I'm spending the rest of it studying Wendell Berry."

Here is Dreher, writing about how Berry answers the very problems of which today's economic crisis has made us painfully aware:

Could any man be less relevant to the politics and culture of our time than an old Kentucky poet-farmer who is so out of step with the times that he refuses to use a computer and still tills his earth using draft horses? And yet, given the converging crises of this extraordinary moment in American history, it just might be that in the winter of a long and honorable career, Wendell Berry's moment has arrived.

Check out the rest of this wonderful article here.

The best looking site on the web

I marvel at it every time I make a visit to The Daily Beast. It is simply the best looking website on the net. Not only the that, but the content is as good as the format. It's what we want to be when we grow up.

Chicago considering setting up gay-only schools?

Chicago is reportedly thinking about setting up homosexual-only schools as a "safe haven" for gays and lesbians. We're not entirely sure what they're supposed to be keeping them safe from. Perhaps the fawning and flattery towards gays from obsequious school officials and an ideologically sycophantic media has finally become too much for them and they just want some peace and quiet.

Back to premodernism: While postmodernism buries modernism, St. Thomas is still relevant

Why postmodernism's critique of modernism is irrelevant to Thomism. Another great post from Just Thomism.

A Chart of National Debt growth

Thanks to Sophistpundit for pointing this one out. What a chart! Click on it and see it in all its economic glory:

If Obama failed with $10 million in education dollars, can he be trusted with billions?

The CATO Institute on the Obama's failed education initiative in Chicago and what it means for the country if he's elected.

What McCain's health credit plan would do

Another great chart from Harvard economist Greg Mankiw:

Is Sarah Palin stupid? No, says former Ms. Magazine editor

I promise not to ever do this again, but here is a former editor in chief of Ms. Magazine, writing in the Daily Beast, on Palin's critics:

It's difficult not to froth when one reads, as I did again and again
this week, doubts about Sarah Palin's “intelligence,” coming especially
from women such as PBS's Bonnie Erbe, who, as near as I recall, has not
herself heretofore been burdened with the Susan Sontag of Journalism
moniker.

That's one of those comments you always imagine someone blowing the smoke from the end of her pen after she finishes writing it.  Elaine Lafferty makes some very interesting observations about Palin after spending some time with her.  "What is often called her 'confidence,'" says Lafferty, "is actually a rarity in national politics: I saw a woman who knows exactly who she is."

Question: Should voters use abortion as a litmus test?

Answer: Yes.