Making Pretty Pictures

Most of us grew up believing that science, if nothing else, was immune from politics. To be frank, that was a stupid belief. Belief should be reserved for religion, not for human affairs. In human affairs, it should be a general rule (as it was for the Founders of our republic), that skepticism should always accompany trust.

Well, wake up guys, because the major science and medical journals have been fooling you for years. And what appeared to be a trickle when I first wrote on it in 1999 has become a torrent...Science Journals Delivering Political Science,by Michael Fumento, Town Hall, 2/23/2006

Michael Fumento of the Hudson Institute, writing at Townhall.com yesterday, suggests that tsunami come in varieties comprising something other than water. This one may have more casualties than the one last year.

Consider a report by three environmentalist authors back in 1988 in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), analyzing male-female birth ratios between 1970 and 1990. The authors found male births declining, and predictably blamed man-made chemicals. Yet public data going back to 1940 showed gender ratios are always changing, for no obvious reason. Years that disproved their thesis were simply sliced out....Science Journals Delivering Political Science, continued....

And I remember Global Cooling in the 1970's. Remember the Robert Altman movie where the whole world had turned into Greenland in mid-winter?

right after Hurricane Katrina. Activists – including those in white lab coats – saw a grand opportunity to tie the exceptionally violent hurricane season to global warming. A study in Science declared, 'A large increase was seen in the number and proportion of hurricanes reaching categories 4 and 5.' But again, the researchers simply cut off their data at 1970, although public statistics go back to 1850. As with the gender ratio study, using the full data set would have reversed the conclusion....Science Journals Delivering Political Science, continued....

Michael Crichton, author of State of Fear (see review by Ronald Bailey in Reason Online), a vivid punchout aimed at global warming "evidence," has published article after article about this kind of selective editing of scientific studies, including the whole study under question to demonstrate his point. Time after time, transparently political objectives have been used to justify reversing -- let me repeat that -- reversing the conclusions of scientific reports. The worst, he suggests, are those re-interpretations of data on the use of DDT, which, he goes to say, have probably caused the deaths of more than twenty million people in Africa and other areas affected by tsetse flies bearing malaria. For those averse to mathematics, that's 100 times as many people who died in the tsunami of last year, based, Crichton claims with great veracity, on a deliberate, political interpretation of data on DDT and the environment. In fact, it's three times as many as died in the Holocaust in Europe in the 1940s.

The Founders would have had little trouble with this kind of thing. They would have advocated a broad and open hearing of all sides of disputes. The idea was that, in open, public exposure, political cant would be exposed and the truth revealed. They called this broad and open hearing a free press operating under the principal of free speech -- i.e., it is better to hear it all than to select what it is permitted to say. Unfortunately, the notion of a free press has changed somewhat in the intervening two hundred and seventeen years. We don't have an official Censor, as plagued the England of Queen Elizabeth the First, but we do have the collective censorship of interest groups, advertisers, government agencies (including the Justice Department), and politically indoctrinated editorial boards, all of whom make claims for excluding facts that violate what they believe to be politically correct views of an issue.

The Founders, it is interesting to note -- something the new members of the Supreme Court might think about, didn't include pictorial representation in their idea of a broad and open hearing in a free press. They would probably have found the Danish cartoons of recent note offensive at the least, but to them, as to any advocates of a free society, suppressing those parts of research that violate one's sense of what is politically correct would have been regarded as an astounding violation of their notion of a free republic, a veritable return to the days of George the Third.

Luther