Last Tuesday's edition of the Wall Street Journal featured an op-ed by Gary Saul Morson titled "Partisan Science in America". Among the topics discussed are the origins of COVID-19, Dr. Fauci's pronouncements about masks and "attacks...on science", and climate change. While DTLR does not take a position on the "lab leak" theory, which is discussed at the center of Morson's piece, in my view the rest of the article is on point. Though Morson is a professor of Slavic languages and literature, according to Wikipedia he is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and had a youthful interest in physics. Much of what he writes here is accurate, though sadly not well understood even by scientists themselves.
Here are some of the best lines of the piece:
If science is treated as a solid block, each part of which is as indubitable as all the others, then science has been misunderstood. Science always contains some propositions less firmly grounded than others: on the frontier, newly discovered, based on experiments not readily replicated.
and,
Some scientific statements prove false: that's how science works. Those who claim that to doubt any part of the consensus is to be "antiscience" or "a denier" are themselves being antiscientific.
and,
To doubt a scientist is not to doubt science. Quite the contrary, personal authority is precisely what science dispenses with, as much as possible....To be sure, nonscientists often have to trust scientists to inform them what the science has discovered. But that is all the more reason that scientists bear the responsibility of not letting political or other nonscientific criteria affect their explication.
and finally,
If scientists expect their statements to be trusted, they must themselves be trustworthy in making them. One had better be scrupulously honest before asking people to surrender their own judgment and simply believe what they are told. Scientists should be especially careful not to misrepresent political or policy judgments as being scientific. And they must protest vigorously and loudly when other influential people claim to speak in the name of science while misrepresenting it.
I've heard multiple politicians say "I believe in science". Anyone who makes such a statement has no understanding of the scientific process, as the first quote above alludes to. This kind of talk pollutes our collective ability to think critically about science and science policy.
