How Many Scientists are Conservatives?
The numbers to your left are a result of a survey conducted by the Pew Research center in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In May 2009, 2,500 scientists were surveyed by Pew about topics ranging from the state of their field, funding, hot button issues like evolution and climate change, and more, but most interesting to me was their political and religious views.
How interesting is it to learn that only 9% of scientists identify themselves as Conservatives and only 6% as Republicans. I was so perplexed by these numbers I asked the Mahalo community to help me find some of these scientists, but so far not much luck.
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The question is how valid was the survey?
The AAAS appears to be a fairly liberal organization, and if the only scientists surveyed were AAAS members, you shouldn’t be surprised by the results. I cannot imagine any libertarian or traditional conservative being a member of a group that want to teach evolution in public schools (fundamentalist republicans don’t like evolution, libertarians don’t like public schools) or advocates global warming as a problem.
I don’t think this is surprising, because most conservatives have a distrust for science, which would discourage them from becoming ones. I’m surprised the numbers were so high.
Not a surprise at all, given that since Ike (and probably Goldwater) Republicans have been in the thrall of the cultural wing of their party, who seem to have plenty of spare time to protest, canvass, and/or vote.
Between that and the liberal reinforcement they get through their education (from K thru PhD), their homogenization in order to get tenure, and their funding mechanism (pleasing patrons for grants, most notably Uncle Sucker), it should be no surprise that they’d be sympathetic to statism.
Of course, if you have all the untainted data, that shouldn’t matter. You can believe the sky is green all you like, but if the raw, unabridged data say it’s blue, then your belief is just religion.
The biggest scandal out of this -gate, for me, is the data and model mangling and/or outright falsification and deletion. That is not science, that is book-burning. It’s the sort of thing that rightly has rational people scoffing when the perpetrators say ‘Trust Me’.