Science Voting

The UK just had a general election during which there was an interesting attempt to create a pro science voting block by the Campaign for Science andEngineering in the UK (Case) and some science communicators. I don't know all the details of this since I live in Germany, I'm still largely blog unaware and don't even have a twitter account.

Nonetheless I noticed the scivote campaign backed by Case and that Brian Cox (whose style of popular physics communication is admittedly not always to my tastes) has been doing very good work raising public awareness of the funding crisis within physics, while Martin Robbins has been evaluating the various parties' science policies and Ben Goldacre has pushed for electing pro science MPs. Sadly this ended in bitter and dismal failure. Despite it's (lack of) immediate impact in this election it brings up interesting issues. What can or should scientists aim for in politics?

The first minimal possibility is a movement to only promote direct science interests -- i.e. funding, pay and support. For scientists funding, dominates. In the UK there are real dangers here due to the squeeze from recent economic problems. Additionally in my own field of particle physics this squeeze has come following a disastrous merging of funding councils which left particle physics burdened with liabilities from other research areas, and a push that research be justified in terms of immediate economic and social goals. For research into fundamental areas this is difficult as the economic and social benefits are in the long term and we cannot predict what technological applications will come from fundamental understandings of nature which we have not yet obtained. Nonetheless all technological progress is ultimately driven by fundamental research and without it society cannot advance.

Many physicsts have fought hard in this direction and it appears they at least had some success in influencing liberal democrat policy: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/thesword/2010/05/uk-election-lib-dems-plans-for.html.


The second possibility is to push governments to adopt an evidence based approach to policy making, where we clearly differentiate between the objective evidence based facts whhich should come from scientific experts and the values which should be specified by the representatives of the public. The lack of evidence informing UK policy came to prominance following the sacking of Prof David Nutt for offering his scientific opinion on the relative dangers of ecstacy and alcohol, which happened to offend the government and also previous tensions where the government ignored the scientific advice and reclassified cannabis to a class B drug.

Ultimately the framework of this discussion is meaningless since the aim of the drug classification is to rank them in terms of harm, while the true determining factor of whether or not drug laws or changes in penalties can be justified on a basis of protecting people harm needs to consider the effect of the laws themselves. Whether or not they actually reduce harm and if so to what extent. The evidence suggests drug laws fuel markets in addictive drugs, making more, not less, addicts and therefore more harm.

Nonetheless this restricted framework of drug classification based on harm, can be used to illustrate the kind of convolution between values and science I advocate. The harm rankings which were discussed by Nutt are in stark disagreement with current law. However one must be clear that some values go into such rankings because one is comparing different types of risk. How do you compare the risk of developing long term lung cancer with a risk of sudden death or blindness or developing mental health problems? So if we are to properly separate value judgments from the evidence, the scientists should provide quantisation on all the risks, while elected representatives of the people would provide weightings for the qualitatively different risks and the classification would be the result of combining these. This is not really how it currently works though and it is very hard to pick a reasonable set of values which could lead to the current drug classifications, given the science.

Many appear to want to go further still. As a third option a pro science movement might draw conclusions on issues where it seems clear most "normal" sets of values lead to to the same, or relatively similar policies. For example very few scientists would support the funding of homeopathy on the NHS. The technical science issue is whether or not homeopathy works, and it is clear that there is no evidence to believe it does work, many reasons to doubt it could and strong constraints on any impact beyond placebo in some cases. To believe, in spite of this, that homeopathy treatments should be funded by the public either requires a very strange love of giving people sugar pills or a strong belief that placebo benefits justify deceit coupled with an odd favoritsm for homeopathy over spiritual chanting or other equivalent options.

Finally it is clear that some science communicators want to go even further and promote issues where the values are shared by most scientists. For example in both animal rights issues and abortion I think many scientists may share similar opinions on these issues, and they have been cited as science reasons to vote for certain politicians. However there are clearly a wide range of fundamental values held on these issues and there is plenty of scope to use the same evidence, with the same understanding of it and draw dramatically different conclusions. If you fundamentally believe that an animal's life and comfort is of equal importance to a human's you will never support animal testing as a preliminary to human testing to protect humans from potential dangers. No matter how strongly you are aware of the scientific need to do them in order to save or help human lives. Similarly in abortion, while science tells us about the level of awareness and development of the life growing in the mothers womb, what weight you give to his/her life vs the impact on the mothers (and to a lesser extent fathers) life depends fundamentally on how you value it.

I personally really want to see the first and second options promoted. The latter is essentially already how the government is supposed to operate with science advisors, but it is obvious that something is badly broken in the system. If pro science lobby groups are going to pursue option three of taking policy stances against funding homeopathy and other obvious quack practices I am still comfortable as there does appear to be a need to rectify the current situation. I am a little worried though by the possibility of the forth option though, and while I agree with what is presented as the scientific viewpoint in both the animal rights and abortion issues I am well aware it is misleading to present them as uniform positions amongst scientists and feel it could be dishonest to cloak clear value based judgments like that under the name of science advocacy. I also wonder what else might get promoted in this way. I have already blogged on how Richard Dawkins has misrepresented what science can say and would not appreciate more of this.

I am not against science communicators offering their opinions on these issues or indeed joining political campaigns on them. But promoting issues like this (rather than simply informing the debate with the actual facts) should not be part of any science movement informing people which politicians' policies have the strongest evidence base, seeking to influence the election on this basis. Whether such a movement will ever properly emerge as an effective force still seems an open question though.


Anyway I know I'm new to this movement but .. um ... make me your leader? oh go on...