{"id":1199,"date":"2013-01-05T23:34:47","date_gmt":"2013-01-06T07:34:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/?p=1199"},"modified":"2013-01-05T23:52:30","modified_gmt":"2013-01-06T07:52:30","slug":"industrial-money-and-religious-foot-soldiers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/2013\/01\/industrial-money-and-religious-foot-soldiers\/","title":{"rendered":"Industrial money and religious foot soldiers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Shawn Otto makes several interesting historical observations in the November 2012 Scientific American article, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article.cfm?id=antiscience-beliefs-jeopardize-us-democracy&amp;page=3\">America&#8217;s Science Problem<\/a>&#8220;. First:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The steady flow of federal funding [for science after WWII] had an unanticipated side effect. Scientists no longer needed to reach out to the public or participate in the civic conversation to raise money for research. [&#8230;] University tenure systems&#8230; provided strong disincentives to public outreach, and scientists came to view civics and political involvement as a professional liability.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Second: While scientists were disappearing from public view, their growing knowledge of\u00a0technological problems (such as DDT poisoning) increasingly &#8220;led to\u00a0new health and environmental regulatory science. The growing restrictions drove the older industries&#8230; to protect their business interests by opposing new regulations.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It turned out that a powerful way to undermine environmental regulations\u00a0was to deny the legitimacy of environmental science. This stance aligned industrialists with &#8220;religious fundamentalists who opposed the teaching of evolution&#8221; and were skeptical of science more broadly.\u00a0Together, &#8220;industrial money and religious foot soldiers&#8221; not only proved effective in blocking regulations, but also &#8220;gave fundamentalism renewed power in the public debate.&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>This antiregulatory-antiscience alliance largely defines the political parties today and helps to explain why, according to a 2009 survey, 9 out of 10 scientists who identified with a major political party said they were Democrats.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Shawn Otto makes several interesting historical observations in the November 2012 Scientific American article, &#8220;America&#8217;s Science Problem&#8220;. First: The steady flow of federal funding [for science after WWII] had an unanticipated side effect. Scientists no longer needed to reach out to the public or participate in the civic conversation to raise money for research. [&#8230;] &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/2013\/01\/industrial-money-and-religious-foot-soldiers\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Industrial money and religious foot soldiers&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1199"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1207,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199\/revisions\/1207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}