He focuses attention on a critical point that can easily be missed by reporters or others who are unfamiliar with the scam:
To be sure, the ID movement does not claim an animus against science. Science abusers never do. Rather, the movement seeks to redefine the very nature of science to serve its objectives.
But just like creation scientists of yore, ID hawkers have clear and ever-present religious motivations for denying and attacking evolution. And like creationists of yore, they have failed the only test that matters: They simply are not doing credible science. Instead, they are appropriating scientific-sounding arguments to advance a moral and political agenda, one they hope to force into the public-school system.
That is where the true threat emerges. ID theorists and other creationists don't like what the overwhelming body of science has to tell us about where human beings come from. Their recourse? Trying to interfere with the process by which children are supposed to learn about the best scientific (as opposed to religious) answer that we have to this most fundamental of questions. No matter how many conservative Christian scholars [Bruce] Chapman and the Discovery Institute manage to get on their side, such interference represents the epitome of anti-intellectualism.
Present-day Christian fundamentalism orginated as a reaction to the scientific advances of the 19th century, and to the Darwinian discoveries in biology, in particular. Even in the cruder versions of creationism, its advocates normally do not pose the question as "faith vs. science." But rather, they try to demonstrate that the "faith-based" version is also valid in scientific terms.
And Mooney in the quote above succinctly describes that aspect of the scam: "the movement seeks to redefine the very nature of science to serve its objectives. "
In the following article, he gives us a look at how the anti-science crusade translates itself through institutions: Requiem for an office Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Sept/Oct 2005. The abolition of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) was one of the dubious achievements of the Gingrinch Revolution.
OTA's 24-year body of work encompasses some 750 reports and assessments on topics ranging from acid rain to global climate change to the accuracy of polygraphs. Perhaps because the office vetted these documents so stringently, they have aged quite well. Some, on subjects like bioterrorism, even seem eerily prescient today. Following the anthrax attacks of late 2001, for example, a report prepared on behalf of Democratic Sen. Ernest Hollings of South Carolina noted that OTA had studied the number of spores required to produce inhalation (or pulmonary) anthrax almost a decade earlier. "If this information had been readily available" during the crisis, Hollings's report noted, "it's conceivable that it even could have saved a life." And of course, due in significant part to Gibbons' stewardship, OTA's reports didn't merely address Congress--they spoke to the broader American public as well, in accessible language rather than technocratic code.
This is a decision which Congressional Republicans are by no means convinced that it's time to revisit. The story of the OTA shows the extent to which the Republican Party's close alliance with the Christian Right is making the party increasingly the vehicle of Know-Nothingism. As Mooney puts it:
... the death of OTA must be seen as a pivotal event in a narrative of increasing distrust of science among the American political right that flows directly into the raging controversy today over political abuse of science by the Bush administration. Considerable and important policy thinking has been undertaken regarding how and in what form OTA should be replaced. But until today's political right grapples with its deep and abiding distrust of the nation's scientific community, and the body of learning and expertise that it represents, progress may be impossible.
It's appropriately symbolic that one of the main grievances of the Republicans against OTA was its realistic look at Regan's Star Wars (SDI) program, truly one of the biggest boondoggles of all time - very possibly the biggest. It, too, was and is primarily a scam, a tube to drain tax dollars into the pockets of war profiteers:
OTA's first and most controversial foray [into the Star Wars debate] took the form of a 1984 study authored by physicist Ashton Carter, now a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, warning that "a perfect or near-perfect defense" against nuclear missiles represented an illusory goal that "should not serve as the basis of public expectation or national policy about ballistic missile defense." Carter's report enraged the Pentagon, which asked to have it disowned by the agency. Instead, an OTA expert review confirmed the study's conclusions. Meanwhile, the conservative Heritage Foundation, highly committed to SDI, used the incident as grist for a report charging OTA with political motives and the unauthorized release of classified information. The Heritage study complained at length about Carter's analysis, arguing that the time had come to "reassess" the Office of Technology Assessment--ironic, given that OTA existed, in part, for the purpose of achieving a level of objectivity hardly to be expected from partisan think tanks like Heritage.
But OTA was a barrier in the way of scam science. And so here the material interests represented by business lobbyists and the anti-science inclinations of the Christian Right found common cause:
From today's vantage point, however, amid increasing controversies over the politicization of science and the disregard for expertise, the decision to do away with OTA appears less dumb than calculated. OTA scrupulously avoided making explicit policy recommendations, but its reports did sift through expert disagreements, rule out fringe scientific views, and challenge implausible technological assertions (including those associated with SDI). Gibbons once even described the agency's staff as blessed with "good bulls---detectors." In OTA's absence, however, the new Republican majority could freely call upon its own favorable scientific "experts" and rely upon more questionable and self-interested analyses prepared by lobbyists, think tanks, and interest groups. A 2001 comment by Gingrich, explaining the reason OTA was killed, pretty much said it all: "We constantly found scientists who thought what they were saying was not correct."
Mooney ends his article by quoting Jack Gibbons, a former director of OTA, who attributed the statement to the late Sen. Daniel Moynihan: "We can each have our own opinions, but we cannot each have our own facts."
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