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<p class=MsoPlainText><a href="http://slate.com/id/2203120">http://slate.com/id/2203120</a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Sarah
Palin's War on Science<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:4.5pt'><b><span style='font-family:
"Arial","sans-serif";color:#666666'>The GOP ticket's appalling contempt for
knowledge and learning.<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class=MsoPlainText><span style='font-size:11.0pt;color:windowtext'>By
Christopher Hitchens</span><span style='font-size:11.0pt;color:#CC0000'><br>
</span><span style='font-size:11.0pt'>Posted Monday, Oct. 27, 2008, at 11:43 AM
ET</span><span style='font-size:11.0pt;color:#CC0000'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/10/24/palin_details_special_needs_po.html?hpid=topnews"
target="_blank">denounced</a> 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." <o:p></o:p></p>
<p>It was in 1933 that <a
href="http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1933/morgan-bio.html"
target="_blank">Thomas Hunt Morgan</a> 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<em> Drosophila melanogaster</em>,
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
<em>Drosophila</em>-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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=mccains-beef-with-bears"
target="_blank">excellent article</a> in the Feb. 8, 2008, <em>Scientific
American</em> 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.)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.slate.com/id/2202642/" target="_blank">never get a chance to
ask her</a> 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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPmjQ_daNSQ&feature=related"
target="_blank">Videos</a> 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 <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/25/us/politics/25faith.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink"
target="_blank">article</a> by Laurie Goodstein in the <em>New York Times</em><strong><i>
</i></strong>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 "<a
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwkb9_zB2Pg" target="_blank">anointed</a>"
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 <a
href="http://www.citizenlink.org/clspecialalert/A000008476.cfm" target="_blank">radio
interview</a> 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."<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>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.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoPlainText><em><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Christopher
Hitchens is a columnist for </span></em>Vanity Fair<em><span style='font-family:
"Arial","sans-serif"'> and the author of </span></em><a
href="http://www.amazon.com/God-Not-Great-Religion-Everything/dp/0446579807/"
target="_blank">God Is Not Great</a><em><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>.</span></em><o:p></o:p></p>
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