(Steven Hayward)
News item: Scientific American magazine has made its first ever endorsement for president. You’ll never guess who they have endorsed. I know the suspense is killing you:
Scientific American has never endorsed a presidential candidate in its 175-year history. This year we are compelled to do so. We do not do this lightly. The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science. . .
It’s time to move Trump out and elect Biden, who has a record of following the data and being guided by science.
Flashback 1: Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin, writing in 2004 in the New York Review of Books: “Most scientists are, at a minimum, liberals, although it is by no means obvious why this should be so. Despite the fact that all of the molecular biologists of my acquaintance are shareholders in or advisers to biotechnology firms, the chief political controversy in the scientific community seems to be whether it is wise to vote for Ralph Nader this time.”
Flashback 2: MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel, as mainstream as they come in this politicized field (Al Gore references his work, and in one of his books Emanuel refers to Sen. James Inhofe as a “scientific illiterate” and climate skeptics as les refusards), offered this warning to his field in 2010: “Scientists are most effective when they provide sound, impartial advice, but their reputation for impartiality is severely compromised by the shocking lack of political diversity among American academics, who suffer from the kind of group-think that develops in cloistered cultures. Until this profound and well-documented intellectual homogeneity changes, scientists will be suspected of constituting a leftist think tank.”
Over to you, Scientific American.
