When Scientists Attack

Those apolitical, just-the-facts scientists have decided they need a PAC:

WHEN CRITICS BEMOAN the politicization of science, they usually point a bitter finger at the Bush administration. Their condemnation should actually be aimed in the opposite direction. Increasingly, it is the scientists themselves--or better stated the leaders of the science sector--who are devolving science from the apolitical pursuit of knowledge into a distinctly ideological enterprise.

The creation of a new 527 advocacy PAC called Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA) is the latest example of this phenomenon. SEA claims to be entering the political fray because the nation's leaders "systematically ignore scientific evidence and analysis, put ideological interests ahead of scientific truths, suppress valid scientific evidence and harass and threaten scientists for speaking honestly about their research." But most of the problems SEA identifies on its website as supposedly threatening science are actually disputes about ethics, philosophy, or social theory--areas of human concern that are not within the scientific realm.

Ethics, philosophy, and social theory, of course, being habitually pooh-poohed by materialists as irrelevant artifacts of chemical processes.