Overheard this morning on NPR’s Cartalk.
From a song leading into one of the breaks:
300 miles to Winnemucca
I drive a van; I ain’t no trucka’
Top that if you can.
Image: John Constable, “The Hay Wain,” 1821. Location: The National Gallery, London. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
See this comment from Kevin on the Daily Kos thread responding to the McCain/science post below.
Kevin wrote:
Thoughts from a Cancer Biology graduate student (8+ / 0-)
I’m new to the site, but I just thought i’d throw my two cents in here. I’m finishing up my PhD in Molecular Cancer Biology at Duke University and I hope to give you some insight as to how bad things are getting in the scientific community. When i first entered graduate school in 2002, nearly 25 percent of all new grants were being funded by the NIH. Now, slightly more than 10 percent are. This has led to limited job opportunities for graduating students, a smaller group of professors holding a larger piece of the NIH pie (fewer new ideas and perspectives on complex and longstanding problems), and will surely have long lasting consequences on the ability to recruit new brilliant minds as the job market continues to decline.
I urge all to speak to your congressmen, and speak up about a problem many will talk about and few will actually do anything for. You can also find out more information at the American Association for the Advancement of Science website www.AAAS.org.
Technology is at the heart of almost all new invention. At a time when we need great thinkers to solve problems inherent in the U.S. and clearly the rest of the world (i.e. global warming, petroleum dependency, health sciences research and yes, even our countries defense capabilities) the Bush administration has taken away funding and slowed the progress that we’ve been moving towards in all these areas. Unless steps are taken soon, our ability to solve these problems will be greatly compromised in order to pay for a war we dont need, and tax cuts we cant afford.
Pay close attention to the key number in Kevin’s post: there has been a nearly 60% drop in grants funded by the NIH over the education of one graduate student. Similar cutbacks are occuring at other major science and engineering funding agencies.
Everything Kevin says about the consequences of such a decline is true: fewer grad students; fewer jobs for newly graduated researchers (not to be confused with graduated beakers); shrinking incentives for technically or mathematically skilled undergraduates to consider science or engineering basic research as a career, and so on.
The larger consequences follow on with shocking speed. It takes a long time — decades — to build up a research infrastructure. Labs, space, machines — but above all people who have ideas and time and room enough to pursue ideas that don’t work out (most of them) and the few that do. (Take a look at this NOVA program about Judah Folkman for the virtues of persistence and the absolute necessity of an ongoing flow of grad student and post doc money to produce important results.)
As Kevin argues, it takes much less time — years, maybe a decade, to unravel the technical capacity to do research. To take an example from the engineering side of things. As late as 1973, with the launch of Skylab, the United States possessed the ability to lift large payloads into orbit, and to carry manned missions as far as the moon, all using one of the true monuments of 20th century technology, the Saturn V rocket. That was the moon rocket’s last flight. Within a few years, though much of the infrastructure of the moon missions remained, the core manufacturing capacity to build more such rockets was lost.
The consequence: Skylab was designed to remain safely in orbit until 1981, two years past the scheduled debut of the Space Shuttle, which would be deployed to dock with America’s space station (yup, we had one thirty five years ago), and move the facility to a higher orbit.
Then Skylab’s parking orbit deteriorated early, in 1979. The shuttles, behind schedule, were unavailable. The last Saturn Vs had already long since been mothballed and placed, in some cases, on museum display. The production line had been shut down for almost a decade. A decade after landing men on the moon, the US had exactly no space vehicles capable of carrying humans to near earth orbit.
And now, even though the shuttle does exist, we lack anything approaching the heavy life capacity the US space program possessed forty years ago. Hence the very costly, unlikely-to-finish-anytime-soon Ares rocket development project, now scheduled for first flight in 2015, forty three years after the last American walked on the moon.
That is: to put it in the words of that noted analyst of science policy, Joni Mitchell,
Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you’ve got ‘Til its gone
To return to the core theme of this post, this blog, and Kevin’s comment: John McCain’s priorities for federal spending put science funding in deep danger. If we continue to gut funding for basic science research and education, we face the loss not just of specific projects left undone, but of the capacity to do the cutting edge science and technological investigation that is the foundation of our prosperity and our national security.
Usually I illustrate this blog with fine art. But this clip from a seminal work in American motion picture history seems more appropriate somehow.
A: Apparently, sadly…Yes
By way of background: over the last eight years of Republican power, of the George Bush administration’s misrule, science in America has come under attack in several ways. Among them:
1: Official denialism, censorship, government sanctioned lies and misrepresentations so thorough as to rise to the level of falsehood. See Seth Shulman’s account; Chris Mooney’s book; and anything from the wealth of reporting on climate change deceit, reproductive health nonsense, and the disastrous conflation of religious ideology with public health and HIV prevention world wide.
(Those last two links are to Elizabeth Parisi’s blog and just-about-available book, both titled The Wisdom of Whores. The book is at the top of a growing pile of well written books about crucial topics accreting on my desk. I’ll blog more about Elizabeth’s and several others over the next few weeks — important stuff here).
2. Going further in the same vein — when inconvenient results could not be suppressed, the Bush administration turned to a more direct solution, blocking further research that might yield ideologically unacceptable research. The lengths to which this “I Can’t Hear You” twitch can go can be seen in this 2005 decision to pull out of Agent Orange research in Vietnam.
3. Delegitimizing science through active public disdain. My bile will probably force a separate blog post on an issue I’ve already screamed about — but this quote from GOP Congressman John Duncan captures the theme pretty well:
Rep. John Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, said that it seems “rather elitist” that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate. “I don’t think it’s something we should abandon,” he said of abstinence-only funding.
(Acute readers will notice the depressing similarity between Duncan’s statement and the one discussed here.)
John McCain has participated in his party’s and its leaders sins against reason. Examples range from his support for the same abstinence funding Congressman Duncan so eloquently defended, to his support for “teaching the controversy” (sic) thus admitting Intelligent Design (sic) into the classroom — but that’s not the key reason to think that his administration will be hostile to science (though such pandering does not inspire much hope, to be sure).
That is, McCain has been willing to go along to get along with the party — and nothing in his gas tax holiday idiocy suggests that he has the interest or willingness to think critically about technical questions, nor to listen to those who do.
But that said, the real test of McCain’s attitude towards science as a would-be President comes where it always does in government. That is to say:
Follow the money.
Here’s the last bit of background: our once dominant international lead in science and engineering training, basic education and research funding has suffered significantly over the last eight years.
To take the NSF as a proxy for science funding as a whole, the appropriation for FY 2002 (the first for which Bush II was responsible) was 4.789 billion dollars, while the current, FY 2008 number comes only to 6.06 billion — an increace of 1.217 billion nominal dollars or a cumulative increase of 25.4% over seven years. That is essentially flat when inflation is factored in, and the year over year number for 2007-2008 actually lags behind current inflation.
Other areas of government supported research fare even worse. You don’t want to be a DOE supported particle physicist right now — nor one trying to solve our energy dependence through fusion research.
So the question for would-be President McCain is: what will you do to reverse the current decline in funding for basic and applied science and engineering research?
The answer is nothing — or worse.
How do I know this, given the near complete lack of detailed science plans on the McCain ‘08 policy page?
Because of this speech, delivered on April 14 and billed as a major address on his approach to the economy. He said…
“I promise you, if I’m elected President, I won’t leave office without balancing the federal budget. And I won’t do it with smoke and mirrors.”
Then: “I won’t balance the budget by allowing the President’s income and investment tax cuts to expire. When we passed those tax cuts, we increased spending as well. That’s unacceptable … “
Next up, (in this speech delivered the next day): “I will also send to the Congress a middle-class tax cut — a complete phase-out of the Alternative Minimum Tax to save more than 25 million middle-class families more than 2,000 dollars every year.”
And finally (from McCain’s website) ” A greater military commitment now is necessary if we are to achieve long-term success in Iraq.”
Now for a simple exercise in counting on one’s fingers.
2007 budget authority for the Iraq conflict topped 133 billion (or more than 20 times NSF’s budget. (Put another way: we could double basic science spending in this country for what we spent for about 17 days of the conflict.)
McCain wants to spend more — not to mention the increase in the general military budget he also envisions.
Eliminating the AMT will cost the government an enormous sum — as much as 1.2 trillion dollars over the next decade.
Retaining the Bush tax cuts for the top 1 percent of American taxpayers eliminates the possibilty of recovering lost revenues or covering the cost of new spending commitments made elsewhere in the McCain “plan” (sic).
And finally, achieving a balanced budget means that McCain will have to find the cash to cover a deficit that in the first six months of FY 2008 alone is running over 311 billion dollars (very roughly 10 percent of the budget for the entire year).
One last detail: discretionary domestic spending in FY 2007 (the last year with comprehensive data) — everything from roads to midnight basketball to science but excluding defense and veterans spending — came to 522 billion dollars.
So to put all this stuff in one tightly wrapped package:
To deliver on his commitments on taxes, defense and fiscal responsiblity, John McCain would have to eliminate all discretionary spending — including the few tens of billions spent on science R & D.
There is, of course, no real world political calculation that would permit that to happen. But McCain’s priorities are very clear — trillions for defense; trillions more for tax cuts. For the rest, as he put it himself, “the best way to protect the tax cuts and balance the budget is to stop spending money on things that are not the business of government and on programs that have outlived their usefulness or were never useful to begin with.”
In that context, does anyone think that basic science, graduate student fellowships, young investigator grants and all the rest will survive at anything like current levels — much less with funding increases to catch up even to what has been lost to inflation over the last presidency?
This post has gone on too long.
Why so many words when I could simply have said, “It’s the arithmetic, stupid.” Whatever else John McCain would do as President, advancing the cause of science in America is not plausibly one of them.
I’ll leave it to the reader to dwell on the economic and national security consequences of such a choice
*For the record the most comprehensive study to date, performed under contract for the US Department of Health and Human Services, found that
The impact results from the four selected programs show no impacts on rates of sexual abstinence. About half of all study youth had remained abstinent at the time of the final follow-up survey, and program and control group youth had similar rates of sexual abstinence. Moreover, the average age at first sexual intercourse and the number of sexual partners were almost identical for program and control youth.
Image: Gustave Courbet, “The Wrestlers,” 1853. The work of art depicted in this image and the reproduction thereof are in the public domain worldwide. The reproduction is part of a collection of reproductions compiled by The Yorck Project. The compilation copyright is held by Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. Source: Wikimedia Commons
…John Cole’s got it.
Inverse Square tries hard not to be a political blog; my gig is connecting something of science — a story, an approach, maybe just a concept — to the public square. So I won’t write today anything about yesterday’s elections. There’s plenty out there, better and wittier and more comprehensive and all that.
But check out Cole’s picture; it truly does say what needs to be said as economically as you can imagine.
Then read the rest of the post. It nails the central issue for next six months. If it isn’t Cole’s best work, it’ll do till something better comes along.
Carthago The contemporary GOP delenda est.
(h/t Mrs. Small, my Latin teacher at Berkeley High back at the dawn of time.)
(In deference to the excellence of Cole’s art direction, I’ll break local style and give no picture here.)
Parts of the blogosphere is having (a) some fun with Senator Clinton’s sudden self-discovery as the scourge of experts or (b) a collective WTF at her continued attempt to reorganize the space time continuum in which we live into one that suits her better. (Not to mention this gem of a solution to high gas prices that apparently neither Clinton nor McCain considered.)
But the jump the shark moment — or perhaps the most recent leap in the 400 meter shark hurdle race — has to be this. Senator Clinton, perhaps recently bitten by a radioactive spider, has decided that she now has the mojo to break up OPEC.
Great idea! Why didn’t anyone think of that before?
Plenty of folks have already had their way with this one too. The most succinct that I have seen so far comes from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. The basic take is, in essence, that Clinton is playing King Canute, without that monarch’s self awareness. (Or perhaps she’s Glendower in Henry IV: She can call spirits from the vasty deep, but with Hotspur we may reply, “Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?”)
But to pick up on Josh’s take, I’m given to understand that the next target of the growing anti-elitist lobby will be the law of gravity. However, even were Senator Clinton to add her voice to the chorus of disdain for Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and other such out of touch eggheads, this issue has in fact already been put on the table.
Ah well. It will all be over soon.
Image: J.W.M Turner, “The Sea at Egremont,” 1802. The work of art depicted in this image and the reproduction thereof are in the public domain worldwide. The reproduction is part of a collection of reproductions compiled by The Yorck Project. The compilation copyright is held by Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
…Comes from that trenchant blogger, Charles Darwin.
He writes:
Elsewhere the Telegraph’s Mr Highfield reports that starlings know when humans are watching them. A trait that first developed in France, is my guess.
Stumus Vulgaris Bardotis, no doubt.*
Image: Brigitte Bardot. Photograph taken at a cocktail party in 1968. Licensed under a GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2 or later. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
*Betraying my age here, I think.
….now over.
The blogosphere has been all over Hilary Clinton’s bizarre, preposterous, and just plain awful defense of the gas tax holiday nonsense to which she has, seemingly, attatched the last shred of her hopes of winning the nomination. See John Cole for his customary clarity and — how to say this…– precision guided rhetoric. The Carpetbagger (Steve Benen) is on the case; so is Matthew Yglesias … and best of all, Brad Delong channels Robert Reich to drive a stake through the heart of Clinton’s latest.
But neither the politicos nor the science blogging world have picked up on what seems to me one of the central implications of Clinton’ s statement that
I’m not going to put my lot in with economists, because I know if we get it right, if we actually did it right, if we had a president who used all the tools of the presidency, we would design it in such a way that it would be implemented effectively….You know, it’s really odd to me that arguing to give relief to the vast majority of Americans creates this incredible pushback…..
We’ve got to get out of this mindset where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans.
(You can check out the whole transcript here.)
There are two things that jump out of the quote. First, it is incredibly muddled or rather, actually more than a muddle. Clinton here depends on an obvious contradiction: she doesn’t trust elite opinion, but she will need elite-level policy design and implementation to give the idea even a remote chance of working.
Sorry — it’s one or the other; expertise or failed policy…but not both.
That’s one. The other, broader implication is that we actually just held the long hoped for science debate — and the winner is clear.
I’m going to blog this week on what John McCain’s publicly announced budget plans mean for science (nothing good, and actually worse than that) — and I’ve already taken whacks at a few of his more obvious gaps and loopiness on more or less scientific topics. There is nothing in his record or in the statements McCain has made on the campaign trail that suggests that he has made the connection between scientific research or the critical thinking scientific training inculcates and the economic health and national security of the United States. He lost the science debate long ago.
But what of Hilary? Up until recently, she hadn’t been doing too badly. She, like McCain and Obama, have wavered on some things - all three have fallen into the peculiar trap of waffling on the autism/vaccine issue, for example — and all the criticism I and many others showered on McCain on this one falls to the other two as well.
But broadly speaking, judging by the issues papers on her website, Clinton has maintained a fairly sophisticated approach to global warming and applied research, with the implication that the policies near and dear to scientists’ hearts — more money, and even more important, respect for the real knowledge developed within by scientific process, would flow under a Clinton presidency. What Clinton provided for public consumption may be boilerplate, but it has been good boilerplate.
But now, what she said at the Indiana interview this morning changes the game. She said, in effect, if the smart boys and girls don’t agree with her, then to hell with them.
That is, of course, precisely the anti-rational madness that has dominated the George Bush years. It is inimical to science or a scientific world view. If we are to pick and choose the facts we like, it is a very short step, quickly taken, to making them up. And that way lies an ever more rapid collapse of the American republic.
Science won’t care. Nature doesn’t care. People will still do the work, because it is interesting; it is useful; it satisfies personal needs and passions and responds to a seemingly universal human eagerness for knowledge.
It’s just that there is no natural law that requires that the leading edge work be done here. Even if it does, if we can coast on the accumulated intellectual capital we still possess, there is no guarantee that it will be allowed to inform the way we live here. We can lose the extraordinary benefits of generations of world scientific leadership surprisingly quickly — and announcing that you will ignore the advice of experts when it pleases you is a pretty good way to grease the skids for such a decline.
Barack Obama is no perfect paragon — the vaccine stuff is a relatively minor demonstration that he can pander too, soothing a passionate pressure group despite overwhelming expert advice. He is, after all, a politician, a very good, a very compelling one. I’m willing to bet that he’ll find times when the inherent uncertainty in science gives him useful cover for the lesser but more popular choice.
But on the gas tax holiday he has been exemplary. He recognized the flaws in the idea — from the fact that it won’t work, to the realization that even if it did work precisely as designed it’s still the wrong policy to pursue if you take the issues of energy independence and global warming seriously.
He’s said so in a range of ways and places, and he has taken the trouble to explain the subtleties of his position.
That’s the way a president who can hear advice talks. And that capacity is what American science needs more than any particular policy stance.
We may not have had our science debate in any formal sense — but on the gas tax issue, our candidates have managed to perform a reasonable simulation of one. And as I said at the beginning, there is one clear winner.
Image: Nar Singh, “Jesuits at Akbar’s Court” illustration for the Akbarnama, c. 1605. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
I just want to call attention to Eric Roston’s latest post on the news of a research paper on ocean circulation and possible northern hemisphere cooling for the next decade or so.
Eric makes one key point — that those who would either seize on or deny this result because of a preconceived commitment to a policy prescription miss the real nature of science: that it is an ongoing, self-destroying, self-renewing enterprise. (He also makes the point that the mass media, and especially advocates, have a terrible time figuring out what each new iteration of scientific understanding actually means, especially in as complicated a subject as climate.)
Read Eric. To what he said I’d add just one point, something that Steven Postrel failed to grasp in the provocation that got this whole exchange of posts going.
That is: the central issue in the uncontrolled experiment we are doing by injecting carbon pollution into the atmosphere is not the precise change in global average temperature that will result, nor specific predictions about the fate of this locality or that.
Rather, it is about the ever increasing uncertainty about weather and climate that accumulates as wholesale changes in the bulk chemical composition of the atmosphere work their way through the physics, chemistry and biology of climate.
As I discussed below at too great length, the problem with climate change now, whether natural or anthropogenic, is that human beings have built an enormous, complex, and in many ways very vulnerable material infrastructure on certain assumptions about the stability of climate.
Current carbon profligacy casts those assumptions into doubt. We thus face both the daily costs of weather and more persistant patterns that do not conform to our expectation (Katrina; prolonged droughts; etc), and the costs of insuring ourselves against less and less accurately quantifiable risks of future climate events.
That uncertainty ultimately becomes something else: the fact of a climate regime different from the one within which we have built our cities and planned our farms. The Dust Bowl, or the collapse of the Sahel provide recent examples of the kinds of consequences we may expect from such an effect: not just suffering, but movement — the migration of peoples that traditionally produce stress at least, and armed conflict at worse.
The imperative both to understand climate dynamics and to avoid turbocharging whatever transformation is going on, derives from a healthy caution in the face of confounding the fundamental human belief that the world will behave tomorrow pretty much as it does today.
Update: Eric Roston’s name spelled correctly, again with apologies.
Image: Dallas, South Dakota, May 13, 1936. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The next episode of Friday Newton blogging is going to have to wait for an off-day edition; end of term woes and committee meetings have sucked up all the time I was going to spend putting together my material on Newton’s gambling habits.
But what would Friday be without some rather off-axis look at science in the public square?
So, stealing a patch of PZ Myers turf, I thought I’d share what I picked up from my MIT colleague Anette Hosoi a few weeks ago.
Hosoi’s lab uses biological sources to provide inspiration for the creation of small robots; Hosoi and her group are most famous for their work on a robotic snail. (Video, courtesy of my students in the Graduate Program in Science Writing, can be found here– bottom of the page, after two videos on the humanoid robot, Domo.
As it happened, I was taking around a visitor the other day — the incomparable David Macaualay. (Name dropping alert — at least for those of us sufficiently steeped in geek to know the wonderfulness of Macaulay’s books and films on engineering, the made world, design, the brain and pigeon’s eye-views of Rome.)
Professor Hosoi and her students were in fine form, showing us the latest in mechanical swimmers, the updates to the artificial slime on which the labs’ snails crawl and so on. Last up was a student new to me since the last time I hung out over there. Her project…well it seems that the Department of Defense’s wild eyed boys and girls at DARPA got a look at this video
Someone over there said “I want me one of these.”
So Hosoi’s team, among others are now trying to deliver a design for, a robotic octopus, a deformable robot capable of carrying a payload — sensors, weapons, whatever — into and out of the tightest spots evah. Your defense dollars at work.
What can I say? Actually, it’s a sweet, rich problem, with all kinds of potential applications in peace as well as war. If Hosoi or any one else responding to DOD’s prompt comes up with a good solution, it will have confronted a number of serious physics and engineering hurdles to get there; this is the kind of problem folks come to places like MIT to research.
What’s really going on is something PZ has known for years: we are humbled by the powers of the mighty cephalopod. Besides which, this is a hell of a lot better way to spend my tax dollars than on ESP, trained naval warfare dophins, and ballistic missile defense.
That is to say…I never in my wildest dreams thought I would link approvingly to John Derbyshire and The Corner (online stuff from Bill Buckley’s old shop, for those who don’t have the pleasure of dipping into the right-wing blogosphere).
But, man, is Derbyshire right about this. He slams Ben Stein for asserting that science caused the holocaust, while reaching this conclusion:
Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.
Such oleaginous piety while channeling tropes from the Protocols is grotesque. Fortunately Derbyshire calls him on his anti-science stupidity with one of the greatest Enlightenment quotes I never knew till now:
I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves.
(Voltaire to Rousseau on reading the latter’s The Social Contract.)
The most interesting part of Derbyshire’s comment is the hint of dawning realization that the anti-science nonsense for which he indicts Stein is in fact a deeply woven thread within modern American conservative politics. The fact that it has evoked the kind of morally bankrupt holocaust denialism of Stein’s current ravings has woken Derbyshire up; will it be enough to lead to a broader break with the dangerous anti-rational strain in the broader movement to which he has long pledged allegiance?
(h/t Andrew Sullivan)
Note: Stein’s attack on science is ad hominem as well as vicious and a profoundly stupid libel. Pharyngula’s PZ Myers seems to have gotten under his skin. Perhaps I might channel Isaac Newton’s precisely calibrated insult when I suggest to Mr. Stein that if Myers and others see reality more clearly than he does, it is because they stand on the shoulders of giants.
Image: Hans Holbein, “Danse Macabre XLV: The Idiot Fool,” 1538. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
