Evolution and Global Warming Crossover

The New York Times ran an article today entitled “Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets.” The writer notes how there is a growing tendendy to bundle together these two issues:

Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation’s classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools.

The article then lists bills in four states that have tried to make this connection.

Anyone who grew up—as I did—in an environment in which evolution was constantly called into question will easily recognize the rhetorical strategies of global warming deniers. The project of knocking down an idea involves constant hammering at the notion of the expert. Facts are there, but they are obscured by biased individuals who have given in to group think of one sort or another. Scientists hate God or the modern world or whatever, and so they arrange their facts to fit a false scheme. Deniers would have us to believe that group think is so strong that it makes virtually impossible the discovery of truth. The fact that men and women have devoted their lives to understanding these topics—and come back with something important to say about that topic that others ought to listen to—is dismissed. The expert is untrustworthy.

This language about the expert is present at the beginning of a response to the article from the New York Times that I just cited:

Left wing ideology, the pursuit of government grants and the stifling of scientific dissent work together to hobble progress, reduce freedom and raise costs. Slowly people are going to figure it out.

If I were to say: I know someone who has devoted her life to understanding this aspect of the world, and she says such and such is the case.. well, that person would be dismissed as a product of some form of group think: “Grants are only given to people who agree with the status quo.” This is a doubly useful strategy, as it allows for both the dismissal of scientific ideas and at the same time functions as an explanation for why there’s no fully formed competing theory to explain the fossil record or evidence for warming—”we couldn’t get the grants!”

The evolution debate—to my mind—is of limited historical importance. Whether kids in Kansas grow up believing in evolution is not going to change the world. But the rhetorical strategy launched by deniers of evolution is proving to be devastating outside the bounds of the debate concerning evolution. Someday when the sad history of our response to global warming and fossil fuels is written, the part played by the rhetoric of anti-evolution rhetoricians will be recognized to have played a key role. They will be understood as the ones who prepared the soil and built up the conceptual frame that corporations and other vested interests used to sow doubt about environmental science. The scorched earth intellectual battle against evolution—centered in the United States—may thus prove to have truly global ramifications.

The strategies for the dismissal of expert scientific opinion (and I mean true experts, not talking heads on the teevee) have proved to be useful to those who have a vested interest in denying global warming. The intellectual foundation of this effort was laid as the authority of experts was undermined