快猫短视频

IF IT wasn鈥檛 already clear that the Obama administration intends to seek policy advice from scientists, his address to the US National Academy of Sciences last month settled any doubts. 鈥淚 want to be sure that facts are driving scientific decisions 鈥� and not the other way around,鈥� the president told some of the country鈥檚 most accomplished researchers.

This is a vast improvement over his predecessor, who contorted and ignored scientific consensus on too many occasions to list. But advocacy-minded scientists may want to study David Prindle鈥檚 new book on the politics of the late Stephen Jay Gould before hitching their work to political issues.

For Gould, a biologist and gifted science communicator, nearly every scientific issue had political ramifications, argues Prindle, a political scientist at the University of Texas in Austin.

Take, for example, punctuated equilibrium, a theory espoused by Gould and his collaborator Niles Eldredge to explain the rapid appearance of new forms in the fossil record after long periods of tranquillity. Evolutionary change, Gould and Eldredge claimed, happens in discrete spurts in response to dramatic shifts in the environment. The theory challenged conventional notions that evolutionary changes lumber in gradually over deep time.

Is this 鈥渃ommunist biology鈥�, as one graduate student dismissed Gould鈥檚 theories? Punctuated equilibrium鈥檚 view of natural history indeed bears some resemblance to a Marxist view of human history 鈥� one shaped by revolution and upheaval.

鈥淕ould鈥檚 view of evolution and natural history resembles a Marxist view of human history鈥�

Gould never used his theory to endorse Marxist politics, and he warned against casual application of evolutionary ideas. But the palaeontologist did argue that the gradual evolutionary change endorsed by most scientists promotes 鈥渃ontrolling western themes of progress and ranking by intrinsic merit鈥�.

This seemed to undermine human equality, the overriding theme of Gould鈥檚 political views. He warred with biologist Edward O. Wilson over the application of evolution to human behaviour, otherwise known as sociobiology. For Gould, sociobiology implied that cultural inequalities were the result of adaptive behaviours 鈥� a view he found politically untenable. Similarly, he assailed psychologists who claimed that human intelligence was innate or genetically determined.

On religion, Gould used science to bash creationist propaganda and all efforts to have religion taught as science in America鈥檚 public schools. At the same time, he attempted to defuse the conflict between science and religion, famously claiming that they occupy 鈥渘on-overlapping magisteria鈥�. Science addresses the natural world, he said, and religion the moral world.

快猫短视频s interested in politics have a lot to learn from Gould. Their input is a no-brainer on issues where the science is clear, such as the teaching of creationism or intelligent design.

In other cases, however, muddying science and politics may have cost Gould credibility. Punctuated equilibrium never caught on as a new theory of evolutionary change among most scientists. Critics had good scientific reasons for rejecting it, but the link between punctuated equilibrium and liberal politics surely didn鈥檛 help.

Climate scientists, for different reasons, should also guard the intellectual purity of their work. Overwhelming evidence indicates that human carbon emissions are contributing to global climate change. But researchers who use their work to advocate policy risk exposing climate science to political attack.

This does not mean that researchers ought to muzzle their political views or retreat to their laboratories and ivory towers. In some cases, though, scientists might do well to view science and politics through the lens of Gould鈥檚 non-overlapping magisteria.