Opinions

Science, and therefore our home, is under attack

Science is under fire.

Evolution, the fundamental principle of biology upon which all of our understanding of genetics, medicine, microbiology, and ecology is based, is being challenged by some extremist groups willing to go so far as to construct "museums" and theme parks showcasing their beliefs. Though their eventual goal is for their agenda to be included in school curricula, these crackerjacks are the tip of the iceberg. The truly troubling matter is the passive majority insisting that a small cadre of people with absolutely no evidence to support their claims whatsoever have just as legitimate an argument as millions of scientists with an arsenal of evidence dating back to the mid-19th century. The ill-founded statement, "Teach the Controversy" legitimizes their beliefs.

There is no controversy.

We finished this fight long ago. One of America's finest orators, thrice-failed presidential candidate, and America's Patron Saint of the Losing Side, William Jennings Bryan, railed furiously against evolution during the Scopes Trial opposite Clarence Darrow. Though they won the case, anti-evolutionists went the way of the dinosaur by the time Sputnik went up, with the National Defense Education Act and the repeal of the Butler Law sending creation-based biology textbooks to the boiler room with the rest of the rubbish.

Science is based upon some pretty simple principles -- establishing a hypothesis, defining variables and control, developing a test that can generate reproducible results, analyzing the results to make a conclusion, and publishing your research to allow others to independently verify your findings. This method is simple, logical, and elegant. When I do research, I spend many hours reading peer-reviewed journal articles, and searching not just for evidence supporting my claims, but also for evidence which contradicts them. The true measure of a skeptic is having the integrity to doubt one's own beliefs, no matter how firm, and be willing to accept solid evidence supporting another conclusion. Some parts of research may be tedious, but the realization that you've expanded human knowledge in your chosen field is exceptionally rewarding.

Humanity's greatest heroes are not on the battlefield or in movies; they're the quirky researchers in lab coats, furrowing brows at some strange and unexpected results before following them to the next Nobel Prize. Many of you are alive today because of the efforts of Alex Fleming and Marie Curie, but science is under attack in the United States, and it may lead to not only irreparable economic damage, but also to frankly cataclysmic harm to our home.

Our economy is now more than ever based upon developments and research in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Nowhere is this more obvious than the North Slope, and when the oil runs dry, Alaska will have to do what is presently unthinkable — replace it with follow-on, hopefully sustainable industries based upon high technology and scientific knowledge. Alaskan children must be prepared to do whatever job, research, and innovation is necessary to continue to prosper. If they do not have the training required or the ability to think critically about such matters, then Alaska shall be truly doomed to become an arctic version of Detroit.

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Long before I left for Afghanistan, my Aunt Lyn sent me to summer camp at the local Audubon refuge. There I was introduced to the world around me by University of Massachusetts interns and naturalists, who passed on a love for ecology and a wide-eyed curiosity about how everything worked. This bloomed under the guidance of my teachers in the years to follow. Later, my genetics and cell biology professors showed me the massive databases that the National Science Foundation and other scientific organizations had compiled from sequenced genomes, forming an incredibly accurate phylogenetic tree leading back to a singularity at the base, called the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). Someone may find and sequence LUCA one day. That's why science exists — to give us the ability to find out who we are and where we came from.

Education is not solely the domain of the educator, nor are schools the only learning environments. It is the duty of every family member to encourage and prepare children for the world by making the home a learning environment.

While I was in Afghanistan, we spent a lot of our time working hand-in-hand with the farmers and doctors of USAID. We would bring them nearly everywhere we went because my commanders knew that it was the diplomat among warriors who would truly win that fight by helping the Afghan people to help themselves. But occasionally when a USAID worker would offer to give classes on advanced irrigation, one of the elders would stand up and denounce everything we said because he needed to "prove us wrong" to maintain influence over his village. He would argue utter nonsense, and the villagers would just nod and accept whatever he said because most of the time he was the only one among them who could read. If you want to know why Afghanistan is so jacked up, that's it in a nutshell.

Utterly alien concept? Think again.

Look at footage of our elected officials — reveling in their ignorance, and using their inability to understand a scientific concept as an argument against it. They abuse their oversight power as a weapon against scientists who would dare threaten their agenda. Look at the news — are you going to independently confirm any of the claims there? It's highly likely that you won't, and certain news outlets rely upon that to survive. Unfortunately for the world, these entities have taken scientific skepticism and twisted it to their own purpose, using it to cast doubt on anything they disagree with, and effectively turning a logical discussion into one of political rhetoric.

In many discussions on these topics, it takes me no time at all to produce evidence supporting my position, and it is commonly countered with a hyperlink to an ultra-rightwing Op/Ed website filled with pop-up ads screaming "HELP DEFEAT OBAMA'S LIBERAL AGENDA." Skepticism is good, and any true skeptic relishes the chance to discover the truth, but a failed politician ranting on an Internet television channel referencing an "expert" with only a B.A. in journalism and no scientific experience is not a skeptic. That's a lunatic.

Science has no politics. Understand that, and you will understand why many researchers choose to provide only data, and stay out of the layperson's policy debate. However, like Fred Powledge said in his March 2009 article in the journal BioScience, I believe it is the duty of every person educated in the scientific endeavor to inform and educate the public, as well as enter the debate over such issues as climate change. The stakes are too high to allow the voices of an angry ignorant few and their paid lapdogs to dominate the discussion with voices magnified by political patronage and mountainous heaps of, as the Supreme Court calls it, "speech."

So-called skeptics of climate change are only able to hold their own against empirical evidence because the American people's scientific literacy has atrophied such that they can no longer identify junk science and half-truths for what they are. From 2000 to 2008, the Bush Administration restricted the designation of endangered species, the Clean Water Act, and the National Science Foundation's grant programs. The administration also prohibited any funding from being used for research into anthropogenic (meaning human-caused) climate change, and have been accused of conducting outright censorship of papers supporting the same. However, under Bush, NSF's funding increased dramatically, contrary to trends identified under Democratic administrations. Neither party may be considered friendly toward science.

First of the unfounded assertions by climate change deniers is that the scientific community is showing uncertainty through changing the name from global warming to climate change. The reason is simple; the terms mean the exact same thing. One of the first principles taught in 10th grade Chemistry is that when heat is added to a system, the system warms and becomes more unstable. When molecules in the atmosphere have more energy and move faster, gradients become steeper, and weather becomes more extreme to both ends.

The second faulty notion is that the planet undergoes cycles, and that this warming trend is just one of them. Since 1950, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen from 280 parts per million to 400 ppm. Were it a natural occurrence, such a massive carbon shift would take place over millennia. The third and most grievous of their bogus claims regard the ice caps. Deniers claim that both caps are expanding, and that precise satellite measurements taken over the last twenty years are falsified. A quick search of UAA's library produced ten recent documents supporting the contrary, and these have been included in my list of references, which is attached above in the "Related" section, and linked here.

If your beliefs are important to you, I get that, so are mine, but don't let them blind you. Don't let anyone shouting at the top of their lungs, or hurling insults tell you what to think. Above all, please teach and inspire your children in the home, and don't allow their minds to be hijacked by the voices of a lunatic fringe. To do otherwise would damn them to a life of ignorance and poverty.

Bryan Box is a veteran of the 173rd Airborne Brigade and is currently using his Post-9/11 GI Bill at UAA to earn a B.S. in biology with dual minors in physics and chemistry — a gift from the American people for which he is truly grateful.

The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.

Bryan Box

Bryan Box is a veteran of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. When not studying as a Biological Sciences major at the University of Alaska Anchorage, or fulfilling his duties as vice president of Student Veterans of UAA, he spends his time writing and experimenting with advanced agricultural techniques.

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