Dan Sarewitz, director of the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at ASU, is a close colleague and frequent collaborator. He is also one of our leading thinkers on science in politics and society. He has an essay in the March-April 2006 issue of American Scientist titled “Liberating Science from Politics.” It is relevant to frequent recent discussions on this blog. Below is an excerpt, but do read the whole thing:

”Wouldn’t it be wonderful if science—and scientists—were taken more seriously in the political process? Wouldn’t democracy be better served? And wouldn’t many difficult problems be more rationally resolved? Take the debates over protecting the environment. It certainly seems that, here, science should be able to cut through political controversy and enable beneficial action. Yet experience mostly shows the opposite: Controversies surrounding environmental problems as diverse as global climate change, genetically modified foods, nuclear energy, biodiversity, air and water pollution, and toxic wastes rarely seem to come to a satisfactory resolution. They are instead characterized by long-term intractability and periodic resurgence of bitter partisan dispute—all in the face of a continual expansion of scientific understanding.

Blame for this unsatisfactory state of affairs is usually assigned to the political process itself, especially to those who use science to advance particular ideological agendas. If only, the complaint goes, those (a) conservatives (b) liberals (c) environmentalists (d) industrialists or (e) ignorant members of the public would understand the facts, or stop manipulating the facts for their own political gain, we could arrive at rational solutions to the problems we face.

Yet this sort of complaint—which I have heard, in one form or another, from innumerable scientists—suffers from a profound misunderstanding of the relation between science and politics. The idea that a set of scientific facts can reconcile political differences and point the way toward a rational solution is fundamentally flawed. The reality is that when political controversy exists, the scientific enterprise is ideally suited to exacerbating disagreement, rather than resolving it.”

Read the whole essay here.