Science in the age of Obama will be even more politicized than it is now…. and it is already very politically driven. There are a great many questions that are probably answerable with suitable research, and many of these questions are just to un-PC to even be asked, let alone funded. John Derbyshire has a provocative article on this point, and here are some key graphs:
[W]e are passing from the Age of Physics to the Age of Biology. It is not quite the case that nothing is happening in physics, but certainly there is nothing like the excitement of the early 20th century. Physics seems, in fact, to have got itself into a cul-de-sac, obsessing over theories so mathematically abstruse that nobody even knows how to test them.
The life sciences, by contrast, are blooming, with major new results coming in all the time from genetics, zoology, demography, biochemistry, neuroscience, psychometrics, and other “hot” disciplines. The physics building may be hushed and dark while its inhabitants mentally wrestle with 26-dimensional manifolds, but over at biology the joint is jumpin’.
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Whether it will go on jumpin’ may depend on the result of November’s election. There is a widespread feeling in the human sciences — particularly in genetics, population genetics, evolutionary biology, and neurophysiology — that the next five to ten years will see some sensational discoveries. Unfortunately those discoveries will have metaphysical implications more disturbing than were those of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, and Dirac may have seriously upset our ideas about matter and energy, but at least they left our psyches and our political principles intact.
Those items may not remain intact much longer. The conceptual revolution among human-sciences researchers has in fact already taken place. This is not widely understood because (a) news outlets are very reluctant to report it, (b) powerful political forces have an interest in suppressing it, and (c) researchers prefer getting on quietly with their work to having their windows broken by mobs of angry protestors.
Continue reading “If you don’t want to know, don’t ask”
