Steve Silberman on US Republicans
"Republicans don’t like science and scientists because they are sources of data that are independent of GOP-approved propaganda mills like Fox News."
- Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes
Those pesky scientists are at it again - and they're not just messing around with fruit flies in Paris, France. Silberman, a reporter for Wired and other outlets, has highlighted on his blog concerns about recent Congressional criticism of the US National Science Foundation.
According to Silberman, the hefty report, published by Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, had a number of issues with the giant funding body, but seemed most incensed by the use of taxpayer's money to bolster projects that, from their titles, sounded trivial: investigations into sick crustaceans, online dating patterns, gender patterns in toy use and the like. As with most scientific studies, it is usually quite difficult to understand the rationale from a brief description, and many studies ridiculed in this manner turn out to have important implications. Silberman goes on to speculate why scientists are so very irritating to the Republicans, concluding that their main sin is their propensity to disagree with the party line on certain issues such as climate change - and to be unafraid to do so.