BewaConsensus Science

Welcome back from vacation, TangoMan, I trust you had a good time. I would
love to reply in detail to many of your posts, but, as I have mentioned
before, I am severely disadvantaged in the time department :-). I addition,
I feel sleezy not being able to provide all the references you do in support
of my own statements, due to the same issue.

However (my favorite word):

>
> > I'm not claiming good science is being done, just that science
> > isn't somehow threatened by total political corruption.
>
>Oh yeah! Check this out.
>
>Politics in the lab hits US scientific integrity
>http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0106/p11s02-coop.html?entryBottomStory
>
> > There are robust self correcting mechanisms that are still
> > working. Individual problems don't threaten the whole.
>
>Yes, I agree with you here. When science is conducted and advocacy
>is not required, then the process works. Mostly.
>
>There are problems with peer-review, as any working scientists can>
>TangoMan
>

Having read the article from the Christian Scientist Monitior, I it occured
to me that the checks and balances are, in fact working. The article itself
rang somewhat alarmist, as such articles are wont to do, perhaps even being
designed as such (ya think?). Such an adminstrative purge also occured
during the Clinton/Gore administration, during which the less than rigorous
politicized environmental sciences gained a great deal of their strength,
and arguably became burdened to a much greater extent with the
aforementioned qualities. A reverse purge (of a sorts) by the Bush
administration can be viewed as a reactoin to this, a balance if you will,
with some fresh politicizations of its own (like abortion). The checks and
balances of science are in place I think, and the politiks will always try
to subvert them to their own agendas. However, science has no inherent
temporal resolution, or if it does, there are many and diverse ones in
operation all the time. Politiks has unwittingly become just such a one, I
think, due to the fact that its own resolution is in a four year lock step.

In short, though the current events may alarm us, it seems that stepping
back form the time lline a bit and observing history, one can be confident
that the science will stay the course. Compare it to a graph of the markets
:-), and will look the same: ups and downs, with no apparent rhyme or reason
without scale, but gaining these qualtities when one chooses to look at the
larger scales to reveal the inevitable upward movement of the long term
numbers.

In my own opinion, I would like to see science dominate the poilicy making
world, if only for the reason that it provides more reason to the results,
instead of mob rules democracy, or just plain decision making from ignorance
which provides a great deal of friciton to our goals of becoming a space
race. What a waste of time and energy the politiking of science is! If only
there were a way to distill the essence of the latter...

Val