by Steven Poole
It was time to conduct an experiment. I decided to test the hypothesis of ID-by-stealth, and wrote to each member of the Kansas Board. Two of the minority disagreeing with the new draft, Sue Gamble and Bill Wagnon, replied in agreement with my analysis.47 Of the majority who were pushing the new draft, only Kathy Martin replied. She wrote that the new Science Standards document did ‘not support or repudiate Intelligent Design’. ‘Please explain to me,’ Martin requested, ‘why “irreducibly complex” could not be used when referring to scientific data/evidence being studied by scientists.’48 Once I had explained this, she responded a second time, very graciously, to wish me luck in my ‘search for truth’. On 8 November 2005, by a vote of six to four, the board approved the new standards.49
It might be accounted a problem with the God-of-the-gaps argument that, as scientific understanding advances, questions are answered, and so gaps filled in, without reference to God. But this should not dissuade the light-footed creationist, who can simply hop over to another gap. The human eye, an apparently miraculous device for seeing, was once the cherished favourite of those inferring divine design from perceived complexity. By 2004, however, the eye’s evolutionary pathway was remarkably well understood.50 In any such case, the antidote is misdirection and irrepressible forward momentum. Look over here, another gap! When Michael Behe’s own examples of ‘irreducible complexity’, such as the blood-clotting cascade in vertebrates, were convincingly refuted by biologists who pointed out simpler clotting mechanisms and proposed detailed pathways of evolution,51 he simply came up with new ones. Reassuringly, the day when there would be no more gaps to fixate on continued to seem a long way off.
In sum: ‘intelligent design theory’ was remarkably free of explanatory or predictive content, and not even willing officially to speculate on the identity or behaviour of the ‘designer’ that it proposed, instead being negatively parasitical on areas of uncertainty within real science. During the Dover trial, Michael Behe was forced to admit that ID did not fit the definition of ‘science’ given by the National Academy of Sciences, and that his own definition of ‘theory’ as applied to ID was so generous that under it, astrology would also qualify as a scientific theory.52 In general, ID proposed no experiments that would confirm or refute it, and it created no substantial new data, simply adopting a defeatist philosophical position on the same data available to all biologists.53 ID was not in fact a theory at all.
Even this defect, however, was not insurmountable. William Dembski, for one, adopted the remarkably original argument that ID should be taught in schools precisely because it was so poor in content – or, as he put it, not ‘mature’. Only by teaching ID in biology classes, he wrote, could we be assured of having a ‘next generation’ of ‘scholars’ to investigate the topic.54 This was particularly revealing because, if ‘intelligent design’ had really been a controversy within science, it would have already been a rapidly expanding field, as young researchers flocked to fruitful new areas of research to attempt to make their name. Despite more than a decade of publicity, at the end of 2005 this was just not happening. The number of articles endorsing ID in the peer-reviewed scientific literature remained, depending on how you counted, somewhere between vanishingly small and exactly zero.55
Patently, such ‘controversy’ as existed was not a scientific controversy at all. The players in the ID ‘controversy’ were scientists on the one hand, most of whom felt it a poor use of their time to respond to anti-scientific attacks upon their work, and evangelical Christians on the other. ID was not science but crypto-creationism.
Yet, by continuing to abuse the word ‘controversy’, as well as other terms such as ‘theory’ and ‘science’ itself, the IDers remained in the ascendant. Astrophysicist Lawrence M. Krauss observed, with a kind of admiration: ‘They’ve really in many ways won the public-relations battle with a brilliant slogan, which is “Teach the controversy”. Because it implies that there is a controversy. When in fact in science, in the scientific literature, there’s no controversy. But by saying that they’ve managed to convince the public that somehow it’s a debate between two ideas that are virtually equal, when in fact they’re not.’56 And so in August 2005, George W. Bush endorsed the neocreationists’ claim that there was indeed a ‘debate’: ‘Both sides ought to be properly taught […] so people can understand what the debate is about. I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought.’ To this, ABC presenter Ted Koppel responded, with perfectly pitched irony: ‘Well … yes. But not all schools of thought deserve the same level of attention.’57
The Dover trial judge eventually ruled against the IDers, but they had won in Kansas, making the score 1-1 for 2005. Bush’s blessing was a crucial victory for the strategy we might call Manufacturing Dissent. It works like this: shout loudly enough, and get enough publicity, and you can sow confusion and the illusion of controversy where there was none before. ID, remember, stands for intelligent design. But initials are versatile things. ID also stands for ideological dissatisfaction. And implicit deism. And intellectual dishonesty.
Sound science
Just as the ‘Discovery Institute’ was a scientific-sounding verbal cloak for religious fundamentalists, a base from which to promote the imaginary ‘controversy’ about evolution, so the supposed ‘controversy’ about global warming was stoked by industry lobby groups with crudely Unspeak names. The Global Climate Coalition, the Information Council on the Environment, and the Greening Earth Society were all PR fronts for US coal and utility companies, and campaigned against environmental regulation. There was even something called the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, funded by oil, chemical, car, and tobacco companies.58 The phrase ‘sound science’ itself was a clever piece of Republican propaganda, common in discussions about stem-cell research, employee health, and food safety as well as global warming. It too had been recommended by the Luntz memo: ‘Sound science must be our guide.’
The purpose of the slogan ‘sound science’ was to instil fear and distrust of science. The adjective ‘sound’ inevitably conjured a picture precisely of another, unsound kind of science. And so those scientists who made up the planetary consensus on global warming were by definition ‘unsound’: reckless mad professors advancing an alarmist ideology. ‘Sound science’, on the other hand, described the views of the handful of sceptics who agreed with policy.
The real nature of ‘sound science’ could be deduced again from Luntz: while claiming that ‘sound science must be our guide’, he also wrote: ‘The best solutions to environmental challenges are common sense solutions.’ But ‘common sense’ is the opposite of science. Any appeal to ‘common sense’ recommends a complacent acceptance of the intuitions and prejudices of the general public. If those intuitions and prejudices were sufficient to understand the world, there would be no need for a cadre of trained and specialised scientists at all. There is nothing commonsensical, for example, about the fact that light can behave both as a wave and as a particle. Common sense told us that the earth was flat. If you decide what is ‘sound science’ by testing it against ‘common sense’, then sound science is just anti-science.
A curious defence of ‘common sense’ published by a science journalist in the New York Times considered contemporary quantum gravity and superstring theory, and noted that their claims were currently untestable. With the air of a QED, the author concluded complacently: ‘Common sense thus persuades me that these avenues of speculation will turn out to be dead ends.’59 If only, the reader will have sighed, theoretical physicists the world over were as sensible as this man. But in assuming easily that what was currently untestable would remain untestable, and declaring that ‘common sense’ therefore told him that zany-sounding theories were ‘dead ends’, the writer was just confirming that common sense was anti-science: for the implication was that superstring and quantum-gravity theorists should just give up on their projects. Actually, many powerful theories have only been tested by experiment lon
g after their inception. The idea of the Greek philosopher Democritus that all matter was made up of atoms, for example, was not testable in the fifth century BC, but that does not mean it was a ‘dead end’. Shutting down investigation on the basis of a ‘common sense’ hunch is not a reliable route to lasting understanding.
The phrase ‘sound science’ had been born when the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition was originally set up in 1993. It was created by tobacco firm Philip Morris ‘to fight against the regulation of cigarettes’.60 And the Bush administration’s use of ‘sound science’ continued this tradition. Refusing to enact Clinton’s plan to regulate the levels of arsenic in drinking water to the level used by the European Union, Bush demanded some ‘sound science’, even though the Environmental Protection Agency had already been studying the toxicology of arsenic for seventeen years.61 The Department of Health and Human Services appealed to ‘sound science’ in denying the findings of a World Health Organization report showing that fast food encouraged obesity.62 A Vice-Presidential panel urged more drilling for oil and gas in Alaska according to the principles of ‘sound science’.63 Twenty American Nobel laureates were among the signatories of a 2004 report which detailed how the Bush administration, while appealing to ‘sound science’, had consistently falsified scientific findings in order to support its own policies.64
Campaigning for the presidency in 2000, Bush had pledged to regulate power plants’ emission of carbon dioxide. Once in office, he declared that he would not do that after all. The White House spokesman explained that Bush was committed to a ‘multi-pollutant strategy’, but that ‘CO2 should not have been included as a pollutant during the campaign. It was a mistake.’65 Carbon dioxide was the major contributory factor to global warming, and yet, the American public were asked to believe, calling it a pollutant had been a ‘mistake’. The legislation that Bush subsequently proposed, giving polluters a free pass on carbon dioxide, was called the Clear Skies Act. This was intended to replace the existing Clean Air Act, rhetorically altering a specific promise about cleanliness to a merely aesthetic vision of clearness. ‘Clear skies’ may still be filled with invisible pollutants. And in fact the provisions of the Clear Skies Act were less onerous to industry than those of the law it replaced.66
Four years later, it was alleged that the chief of staff for the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, Philip A. Cooney, had changed the language of several official reports on climate science so as to soften their conclusions and introduce doubt where there was none.67 Cooney had previously been employed as a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute. The week after the allegations about his actions at the White House hit the news, Cooney resigned. He was immediately given a job by ExxonMobil.68
Perhaps the Bush administration’s stance could be explained by simple political short-termism, in which the profits of the fossil-fuel industry counted for more than vague threats of future devastation. After all, Bush famously took no interest in how he might be regarded by history, because by then, ‘We’ll all be dead.’69 But there was also evidence of a longer-term view within the government, according to which the possibility of catastrophic global warming was accepted, and considered to have a bright side: because it would enhance the global hegemony of the United States. According to a 2003 Pentagon report, ‘the United States could likely survive shortened growing cycles and harsh weather conditions without catastrophic losses. […] Even in this continuous state of emergency the U.S. will be positioned well compared to others. […] the U.S. itself will be relatively better off and with more adaptive capacity.’70 In other words: sure, global warming was going to be bad for everyone, but it was going to be worse for America’s enemies than for itself, so why worry? Best keep this a secret, though: all uses of the term ‘global warming’ were deleted from a 2003 report of the Environmental Protection Agency.71
In 2005, the British television interviewer Trevor McDonald pointed out to George W. Bush that pollution in the US had ‘increased amazingly since 1992’. Bush shot back: ‘That is a totally inaccurate statement.’ McDonald insisted: ‘It’s a UN figure.’ Bush’s response? ‘Well, I just beg to differ with every figure you’ve got.’72 Ingenious: not only do I deny what you have told me, but I will deny everything that you could tell me in future. A perfect illustration of the principle of ‘sound science’.
Energy
Meanwhile, there were tangential contests of Unspeak among those who did not deny the facts of global warming but did disagree on what to do about it. One buzzphrase that arose was ‘sustainable development’, which was used in two very different senses by opposing groups, because it left vague by what metric sustainability might be measured. Environmental groups meant by ‘sustainable’ a holistic approach by which life as we know it might be sustained. Scientists talked about ‘sustainable cities’ to mean cities that would not be destroyed by flooding in the wake of global warming.73 But to others, ‘sustainable’ meant a financial approach by which the oil industry as we know it might be sustained: sustainability was the minimum amount of environmental care that was affordable by those whose activities harmed the environment.74
Another strategy consisted in the wholesale replacement of one vocabulary with another. Talk of the ‘environment’ was considered an irritant to be brushed aside. Thus George W. Bush stated: ‘I believe nuclear power answers a lot of our issues. It certainly answers the environmental issue, and those people who are concerned about whether or not we can continue burning coal.’75 Concern for the environment was just a single ‘issue’: a simple question that could be ‘answered’. More use of nuclear power would reduce carbon emissions, but global warming was not the only way in which humans could harm the environment. Given the problems of transporting and storing radioactive waste that would remain dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps Bush’s ‘answer’ to ‘the environmental issue’ was simply: Fuck the environment.
It was better, perhaps, to avoid talk of the ‘environment’ at all, because the word could already be argued to reify a holistic concept of an interconnected biosphere. Still more perilous were concepts such as ‘conservation’: a big no-no, according to the Luntz memo. More politic for a certain audience was the vocabulary of ‘energy’. ‘Energy’ is something everyone likes: it’s positive, it’s get-up-and-go, it’s an almost metaphysical virtue. However, in government phrases such as ‘energy policy’ and ‘energy security’, the term meant one thing only: oil.
[F]or former oilmen like Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, the equation of ‘energy’ with ‘oil’ couldn’t have been more transparent. The United States must ‘explore for energy,’ Cheney asserted. Clearly, the former CEO of Halliburton was not suggesting his colleagues go hunting for sunlight to shine on solar PV panels.76
Former US Department of Energy official Michelle Billig confirmed the point in 2004, when she recommended that ‘the U.S. government should create a national energy council’77 – not to investigate other sources of ‘energy’, but just to be on the lookout for possible interruptions in the global oil supply. Indeed, energy-as-in-oil trumped the woolly lexicon of tree-huggers, as Cheney had made clear in 2001: ‘Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.’78 A ‘sound policy’ is obviously based on ‘sound science’; both of them are superior to mere ‘personal virtue’.
Natural resources
Such viewpoints could nonetheless be given an ethical makeover by appeal to the concept of ‘natural resources’, which at first glance may help to endorse our use of what it denotes. State Department spokesman Adam Ereli claimed in 2005 that the government was concerned ‘to act in ways that secure resources, natural resources, for future generations’.79 US federal spending on environmental matters is counted under the heading ‘Natural resources and environment’:80 ‘natural resources’, among which are counted oil, coal, and gas, the use of which harms the environment, come before the environmen
t itself. Etymologically, a ‘resource’ is something that springs up again. But reserves of fossil fuels are finite, and when the last of them are sucked from the ground there will be no more for millions of years. To describe oil as a ‘resource’, then, covers up the fact of its inevitable exhaustion.
But the concept of ‘natural resources’, first recorded in the writings of the eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith,81 is also Unspeak for a larger idea: that everything in the natural world is there to be used by man, and is valuable only to the extent that it finds a place in the human economy. In the early nineteenth century, areas that were not farmed or built upon, yet might nevertheless be teeming with life, began to be termed ‘waste lands’. The idea of ‘natural resources’ is similar: everything in nature is exploitable; not to exploit it would be a waste. Another US lobby group with a blatantly misleading name, for example, was the American Forest Resource Alliance, which was set up ‘to fight proposed federal laws to protect ancient forests’.82
At least ‘resource’ is less incorrect when applied to forests, since if they are properly managed and replanted, trees will spring up in the place of those removed and turned into coffee tables, or indeed books. On the other hand, forests may just be razed by enthusiastic logging and never grow back, in which case it turns out that they were not automatically a ‘resource’ after all. Similarly, a species of fish that is fished to extinction is quite plainly an ex-resource. This etymological observation might be taken to suggest that the idea of a ‘resource’ implies a duty of proper care, of human beings as stewards rather than owners of the world. Yet as generally used, the notion of a ‘resource’ connotes an almost sacred right to exploitation, with no blowback – a view which may be encouraged by a literal reading of God’s granting ‘dominion’ over all earthly life and the planet itself to Adam and Eve.83