What Science?

OK, one more bash at electioneering.

One of my contentions is that the Republicans will have a hard time pivoting back to sanity any time soon, and thus are likely to start with a major handicap in 2016, because the party’s next generation of leadership has all grown up in the extremist era.  So to get to prominence they have all said outrageous things. They may even believe those outrageous things. So they are tainted with loony ideas that position them well to run in the Republican primary race, but which will hamper them mightily in the general election.

Take, for example, this week’s stunning evasion by Marc Rubio who is already off and running for 2016. In an interview, much ridiculed in the blogosphere, he avoided a straight answer when asked how old he though the earth is. No the interviewer was not a geology fanatic. This question is one of those that allow us to tease out a candidate’s general attitude towards science. Creationists and other oddballs are all likely to avoid the question, or are likely to flaunt their faith based ignorance. Either way their anti-science posit ion can be flushed out. Rubio’s flustered response that he’s a not a science guy and that the theologians are still arguing over the answer anyway speaks volumes.

Rubio has tried to position himself among the Republican true believers. Ever since the GOP cobbled together its current mosaic of anti-social libertarians, white supremacists, angry old white people, and religious extremists, any aspiring presidential candidate has had to deny the validity of most accepted science. They do this under the lazy but effective guise of giving equal time to different opinions – American voters like the idea of giving everyone a voice in such things. So the notion that people can differ on questions like the age of the earth has become a touchstone of the right. By elevating blind faith to equal status with settled science the right has managed to attract religious extremists and act as a bulwark against the supposed anti-religious, atheistic tendencies of the left.

Once it set out down this path, to attract a solid voting bloc, the Republican party has been unable to wriggle free of the anti-science sentiment of the evangelical Christians of its rabid base. Indeed the problem has become worse through the decades. The GOP is now a party that rejects science. At grass roots levels all around the country the GOP has tried to rid textbooks of evolution and, increasingly, references to earth science, tectonics, and anything that might contradict the bible.

While it is laughable to condemn oneself to willful ignorance, it is wicked to condemn children similarly. Especially in a world where science and technology play such a key role in dictating the trajectory of economic development. So, for Rubio to try to squirm his way from the question by claiming that science wasn’t that important to the economy so his inability to recall that earth is 4.54 billion years old was a trivial matter to be laughed off speaks volumes.

For the record, here is what he thinks about the potential conflict between what a child could learn in an evangelical home and in science class at school. According to Rubio:

The “crux” of the disagreement [between creationists and evolution being taught in school], is “whether what a parent teaches their children at home should be mocked and derided and undone at the public school level. It goes to the fundamental core of who is ultimately, primarily responsible for the upbringing of children. Is it your public education system or is it your parents? … And for me, personally, I don’t want a school system that teaches kids that what they’re learning at home is wrong.”

So, he is an extremist product of the contemporary Republican party. As are, for the record, Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie, both of whom have flirted heavily with creationists to get votes.

Caveat emptor in 2016. The Republican attack on science continues. Their preference for ignorance in the search for ideological purity ought to sicken us all.