[Vision2020] Sarah Palin's War on Science

[Saundra Lund]

http://slate.com/id/2203120

 

Sarah Palin's War on Science

The GOP ticket's appalling contempt for knowledge and learning.

By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Oct. 27, 2008, at 11:43 AM ET

In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and
intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go
like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit,
and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber
becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible
that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday,
when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced
<http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/10/24/palin_details_special
_needs_po.html?hpid=topnews>  wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research,
adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this
research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid
you not." 

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan
<http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1933/morgan-bio.html>
won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of
chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of
this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly.
Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource,
since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a
very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This
makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh
to talk about her signature "issue" of disability and special needs, she
might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a
Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North
Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any
financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent.
It's especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make
such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after
the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.

In this case, it could be argued, Palin was not just being a fool in her own
right but was following a demagogic lead set by the man who appointed her as
his running mate. Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste
and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly
witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of
grizzly bears in Montana was derided as "unbelievable." As an excellent
article <http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=mccains-beef-with-bears>  in
the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to
enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of
numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by
setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples
from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a
laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of
understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in
the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do
was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a "paternity" or
"criminal" issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating.
(Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind
with DNA.)

With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more
sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We
never get a chance to <http://www.slate.com/id/2202642/>  ask her in detail
about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in
schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise
of "teaching the argument," as if there was an argument), and so it is at
least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies
were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of
research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as
sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it,
would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God.
Gov. Palin also says that she doesn't think humans are responsible for
global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her
co-religionists, she is a "premillenial dispensationalist"-in other words,
someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the
natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.

Videos <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPmjQ_daNSQ&feature=related>  taken
in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla, Alaska, which she used to attend,
show her nodding as a preacher says that Alaska will be "one of the refuge
states in the Last Days." For the uninitiated, this is a reference to a
crackpot belief, widely held among those who brood on the "End Times," that
some parts of the world will end at different times from others, and Alaska
will be a big draw as the heavens darken on account of its wide open spaces.
An article
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/25/us/politics/25faith.html?partner=permalin
k&exprod=permalink>  by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times gives further
gruesome details of the extreme Pentecostalism with which Palin has been
associated in the past (perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a
political career became more attractive). High points, also available on
YouTube, show her being "anointed
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwkb9_zB2Pg> " by an African bishop who
claims to cast out witches. The term used in the trade for this hysterical
superstitious nonsense is "spiritual warfare," in which true Christian
soldiers are trained to fight demons. Palin has spoken at "spiritual
warfare" events as recently as June. And only last week the chiller from
Wasilla spoke of "prayer warriors" in a radio
<http://www.citizenlink.org/clspecialalert/A000008476.cfm>  interview with
James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said that he and his lovely wife,
Shirley, had convened a prayer meeting to beseech that "God's perfect will
be done on Nov. 4."

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed
within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a
proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not
anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are
secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of
spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic
bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty
to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is
Not Great
<http://www.amazon.com/God-Not-Great-Religion-Everything/dp/0446579807/> .

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