http://www.sciencecodex.com/node/68900/edit?destination=admin%2Fcontent%...
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1767/20131193.short?r...
It's election season and that means you will hear and read lots of reasons why you should vote for one political candidate or another. Even science reasons.
Science media, in the interests of making the American election topical, routinely invoke global warming and evolution acceptance as hot-button science issues. More on the right, for example, deny global warming and evolution. Yet funding for science overall says the Republicans are more pro-science than Democrats. The Obama administration cut funding for R&D again this year while it went up during the Bush years after declines during the Clinton years. President George W. Bush was dismissed as being anti-science but he signed off on doubling the budget of the National Institutes of Health.
Evolution and global warming and the slight differences in acceptance aside, historically the right has been overwhelmingly accepting of science. 40 years ago conservatives were more pro-science than any demographic. Now they are overwhelmingly skeptical of science, followed by moderates who aren't accepting a lot of science either.
What changed? Politicization and population bombs.
As salaries in science academia went up, an odd thing happened; conservatives and Republicans, commonly believed to care the most about money, disappeared. They haven't disappeared in science overall, science in the private sector is as balanced as society, just government-controlled science, the kind that is financed at universities, stopped being representative of America. With that shift left, a loud minority of social authoritarian progressives out to promote their world view became perceived as 'science' and their attacks on conservatives became regarded as representative. As a result, a large chunk of the people science is out to help still trust science, but they don't trust scientists.
This mirrored the left's chronic distrust of science as well; a subset of the left have always believed scientists are out to kill people and efforts to improve food and medicine are the front lines of their culture war against progress. Basically, they filter all science through that world view and trust scientists when it comes to global warming but claim science is out to kill us when it comes to food. It's a la carte science. The lack of diversity in science academia has fed the belief that science cannot be trusted and surveys back that up; at least among the people surveyed, social psychologists found that academics absolutely would prevent someone from getting a job in academia if they knew they were conservatives.
Yet most people are not going to be aware that science lacks diversity. To the bulk of the population, science and scientists are held in high regard, but they are still more skeptical than they were in the past, and Generation X, those who are in their early 30s to early 50s, are more skeptical than anyone. That reason comes down to what has become a trend of scare tactics that have made people jaded about science claims, and we are going to use the example of the population bomb as representative.
In the 1960s, science was going to save the world. We had a culture where vaccines were keeping more children alive than ever, food production was on the rise and government was funding science heavily in the Space Race. Science was a progressive endeavor. Yet the people most against it were people who claimed to be progressives. Rachel Carson, for example, claimed that improvements in agricultural science were giving people cancer. Not misuse of DDT, its actual existence was the problem.
A few years after Rachel Carson wrote the scientifically suspect "Silent Spring", Stanford University Professor Paul Ehrlich dropped an evil bigger cultural bomb, one that said DDT was not going to matter anyway. It was the Population Bomb and its thesis was that all people were going to be starving soon.
After Population Bombs, we got ecological disaster claims due to the Alaska Pipeline and a new Ice Age. Then Dr. John Holdren, now White House Science and Technology Advisor, got together with Ehrlich (and Anne Ehrlich) to write something even scarier; a book called "Ecoscience", in which Holdren predicted a world where government would need to engage in forced sterilization, or a least a capsule implanted in girls when then reach puberty, which might be removed if the girls got official permission to have children. Single mothers would be forced to give up the baby for adoption (and apply for adoption if she wanted to keep the child) or have a mandatory abortion. They also posit how sterilization could be done on a mass scale, like in drinking water. How would that ever pass the Supreme Court? The Commerce Clause ((Article I, Section 8, Clause 3), one of the enumerated powers in the Constitution, they argued, because of general welfare concerns. Not possible? Perhaps, but in 1977 when they wrote their book the Commerce clause had few limits - it had just required colleges to institute racial quotas 2012 was the first year a modern Supreme Court finally found something that the Commerce Clause did not allow; they determined in their ruling on the Affordable Care Act that the Commerce clause could not regulate inactivity, i.e. the government cannot make you buy broccoli or health insurance.
