Why Whine about Discussing Science and Politics?

Why, when I (or any blogger) writes a science blog and we comment on political issues (like the recent and incendiary Planetarium Overhead Projector Gambit), do commenters show up whining about how we should be talking about science ONLY and forget this political stuff?

I am puzzled. To take a simple action that people do every day to illustrate how everything can be political, you can’t spit in some places without it being political. You do so and you have the anti-spit faction complaining that such things should be made illegal because they affect the march of progress and mess up the sidewalks. You have the pro-spit faction complaining that barring spitting in public would ruin the rural character of the town (or village or hamlet or big city or whatever place they call home).  For all I know, you could have the Holy Spit faction whining about how spitting should only be done between one man and one woman or in church or behind closed doors or after six hours of prayer or in conjunction with a donation to the church or whatever it is that helps them think that they are the spiritual arbiters of spitting.  And so it goes.  Everybody has an opinion about how everybody else should spit. And it’s all political. All that from something as simple as getting rid of saliva.

When it comes to science, it’s a whole lot more complex. And, science gets political because it’s part of our culture and society.  Science is a way of understanding the natural world. To do science, you have to ask questions about cause and effect, the physics of an event, the processes that cause things to happen in the natural world.  If you’re asking questions about physics, nobody gets too excited because, let’s face it, to paraphrase Barbie Dolls, “physics is haaarddd…”  But, let physics (or any other science) intersect some belief system or political viewpoint, and suddenly science is evil or good or out of touch or elitist or useful or anti-this or anti-that or pro-this or pro-that, or whatever else that our increasingly pluralistic societies want to say about it.

So, to those who bring their fine whines to the science blogs when it comes to politics, I say the following:  deal with it. Science and politics often cannot be separated, and in fact, at times should not be. If you don’t like to talk about politics and science together, talking about science alone is going to limit the conversations quite a bit.  So, stop complaining about how “politics” is sullying science and look at how the two co-exist and accept that sometimes you have to talk about both when it comes to issues of science and society.