On politics in science

Accepting Politics In Science: In a WP op-ed piece today, Roger Pielke Jr. argues that we cannot "cleanly separate politics from science." Instead of pursuing the "don't ask, don't tell" approach toward the political leanings of scientists who advise the government, we should come clean and publicly recognize that everyone's political so that the role of politics in such deliberations is not hidden. I applaud and share Dr. Pielke's pragmatism.

Yet I fear that if we lend too much weight to the arguments that "you can't really separate science from politics" or "you can find a study or a statistic to justify any public policy stance" we end up arguing that there is no such thing as objective truth or that it is not possible to discern the truth. We betray the intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment, the movement that helped inspire the founding of this nation and whose echoes ring loud and clear in our founding documents.

If we remove some of the burden on scientists to be professionally (if not personally) politically neutral, we might face public policy that shifts radically in its scientific underpinnings depending on which party controls the governm--oh, wait, already have that. Maybe Pielke's right.