The Bush administration's desire to manipulate science for the sake of conservative, religious ideology is a losing proposition. It will produce shoddy, unreliable results that won't deserve the label 'science' while undermining any rational substance to their ideology itself. There are many examples of nations perverting science this way, all bad examples.

The Economist reports on the revelations that Hwan Woo-suk, the venerated South Korean researcher who has been revealed as more of a fraud:

[N]ationalism and science are uneasy bedfellows. Dr Hwang’s downfall was set in train by his elevation by the South Korean government into an emblem of his country’s emergence as a scientific power. That both flattered him and demanded the next great breakthrough from his laboratory. In the end, he came up with a fatally flawed piece of research that has now been disowned by collaborators

The most famous example of deluded scientific nationalism was Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet geneticist. Or, rather, a non-geneticist. Lysenko was flattered and financed by Stalin because he claimed that an organism could pass on to its offspring characteristics it acquired in its lifetime. That fitted well with Marxist ideology about the mutability of nature, but wrecked the Soviet Union’s crop-improvement programme.

The reverse phenomenon, of discounting something because of its source, applies too. Before the second world war, many of Germany’s finest physicists were Jewish. That did not please the Nazis, whose actions persuaded those physicists that their best interests lay elsewhere. It also led the Nazis to refuse to incorporate “Jewish science” into their pure-bred Aryan reality. Which was, perhaps, just as well, for much of the exiled talent ended up on the Manhattan project while Germany’s own atomic-bomb programme was stymied.

Science operates on the basis of very particular values which often have no place in the average ideology. Science requires that we follow facts and experiments wherever they lead, even if they lead us to abandon long-held assumptions and beliefs. Most ideologies, on the other hand, value holding on to beliefs and assumptions in the face of any and all challenges. This is true of nationalist ideologies, political ideologies, and especially religious ideologies.

Science cannot be twisted to the service of nationalist, political, or religious ideologies without undermining the ability to science to do what it does best, which is provide a better understanding of the world around us. The world cares nothing for our ideologies. Our ability to decipher it cannot be linked to nationalists aspirations. Our ability to learn from it cannot be limited by religious doctrines.

As a human endeavor, science will inevitably be plagued with problems like fraud, but science is also set up to discover and correct such problems. Remaining independent of political and religious ideologies is part of what the self-correcting process in science requires. Those who seek to link science to their personal ideologies are, therefore, enemies of science, truth, and reality.

 

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