Maybe Reality Really Does Have a Liberal Bias

You may have seen t-shirts or bumper stickers that say, "Reality has a liberal bias." Braggadocio? Apparently not.

A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that in the U.S. only 6% of scientists identify as Republicans. In contrast, 55% identified as Democrats and 32% as independents. This lopsidedness held regardless of whether the scientists were in academia, government, or industry. Ouch.

This imbalance has important implications for reality: If scientists study the nature of reality, and most scientists are "liberal" (i.e. not conservative Republicans), then "reality" is liberally biased.

Does anybody think like this? Yes. Andy Schlafly is the son of conservative activist and Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly. He is the man behind Conservapedia--a Wikipedia for conservatives. He is also behind a project to purge the Bible of liberal bias by preparing a "conservative" translation.

A look at some of the Conservapedia article pages (and their associated talk pages) reveals the extent to which Schlafly sees science as liberal bias.

On black holes:

Like most college majors, physics students repeat what they're taught. If they received good grades, then it becomes even harder for them to question it. But keep in mind that the people doing the teaching are the most liberal group in the world, and they almost never encourage the student to open his mind and think critically for himself.
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Black holes are far too popular in science magazines and liberal publications like the New York Times to "go away" that easily.
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There's a broader point here. Why the big push for black holes by liberals, and big protests against any objection to them? If it turned out empirically that promoting black holes tends to cause people to read the Bible less, would you still push this so much? Certainly there is no practical justification to pushing black holes; no one will ever be helped by them in any way.

On the theory of relativity (here and here):

Despite censorship of dissent about relativity, evidence contrary to the theory is discussed outside of liberal universities.
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Look, there's no denying that physics professors are among the most liberal group anywhere, and far more liberal than the Democratic Party as a whole. Within physics departments, the promoters of relativity are particularly liberal, more so than, for example, material science types. Keep in mind that many of the promoters of the phony man-made global warming are physics professors.
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Relativity is an unproductive liberal favorite that wastes taxpayer money, misleads well-intentioned students and pushes the masses toward relativism.

On global warming:

The myth of dangerous man-made global warming is promoted by liberals and socialists seeking greater government control over the production and use of energy, which is a substantial percentage of the economy.

On evolution:

Given that liberalism is so prevalent in academia, it is not entirely surprising that college graduates are indoctrinated into the evolutionary paradigm via evolutionary propaganda.

Despite the aforementioned lack of evidence for the evolutionary position and the aforementioned counter evidential nature of the evolutionary paradigm, atheists and liberals persist in advocating the evolutionary paradigm.

Unfortunately this kind of collection of anti-science attitudes is not limited to Schlafly. Tom Bethell, a senior editor at The American Spectator and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science has contrarian views on evolution, AIDS, the theory of relativity, climate change...and Shakespeare to boot. In addition to evolution, some of the top people at the Discovery Institute--the big pusher of Intelligent Design--also have contrarian views on AIDS and climate change.

More recently, in the wake of the controversy generated by the CRU emails Rush Limbaugh said about climate change:

I've instinctively known this from the get-go 20 years ago. The whole thing's made up. And the reason I know it is because liberals are behind it. When they're pushing something, folks, it's always bogus.

He feels the same way about H1N1 influenza.

We are the targets of lies, damn lies and science and scientists are rapidly becoming as trustworthy as politicians.

In some ways none of this is surprising. (Well, black holes surprised me.) Evolution and global warming have long been sticking points with the Right, and it has been four years since Chris Mooney published The Republican War on Science.

None of this is to deny that elements of the Left have their own problems with science. But I wonder if we may be entering into a positive feedback loop that will increasingly politicize science and draw it into the culture wars: the Right takes positions contrary to mainstream science, science-friendly citizens reject the Right, the Right takes this as evidence that science is liberally biased, repeat. I hope not, and I hope that more Republicans will speak up for science--which is a strange thing for me to say since according to Andy Schlafly I am liberally biased.

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