Pain is a paradox. It feels like the most real, objective experience we can have, and yet it can be weirdly malleable. It’s better to think of pain, like memory or vision, not as a simple reflection of the world, but as a strategy we’ve evolved to stay alive. Thinking this way can help make sense of the awful experience of chronic pain, when this urgent signal refers to nothing except a brain caught in its own feedback loops. In my latest column for Discover, I take a look at the latest understanding of pain, and some promising research that uses these insights to search for a new, more rational pain-killer. Check it out.

[Image: Boy With A Rooster by Adriano Cecioni, 1868. Photo from Kate Eliot/Flickr via Creative Commons License]

Much ado was made over the recent news that the Sun’s magnetic activity may be cooling off over the next few years. Can this mean the Earth itself will literally cool off, slipping into an ice age? Some news sites are reporting it that way (of course, the execrable Daily Mail uses the headline "Earth facing a mini-Ice Age ‘within ten years’ due to rare drop in sunspot activity"; which isn’t even within a glancing blow of reality).

The answer — spoiler alert! — is almost certainly "no". I want to make sure that’s clear, because I will bet essentially any amount of money that some climate change denial sites will run with this story and claim that we don’t need to worry about global warming. That’s baloney, and what follows is why. The reasons take a minute to explain, but of course that’s where the cool stuff (haha!) is. So let’s take this one step at a time. And if you have the attention span of an E. coli bacterium, you can skip down to the conclusion section.

[Note: a lot of ...

I’m always on the lookout for questionable science coming from the left–and this Counterpunch article, entitled “Is the Dramatic Increase in Baby Deaths in the US a Result of Fukushima Fallout?”, certainly seems to qualify.

The authors report on an increase in infant mortality across 8 U.S. northwestern cities during April and May. And let’s give them their claim that this is not some fluke.

The authors then leap to the implication that radiation from Fukushima–wafting from 5,000 miles away–is the cause!

And yet no discussion is provided of how much radiation is actually arriving on the shores of the West Coast, or whether it is at dangerous levels; there is simply a recitation of the effects of Chernobyl on children–but Chernobyl created much more radiation, and it was, basically, in the middle of Europe. See my Point of Inquiry episode on this.

I’m sorry, but you can’t start speculating about dead babies without a much stronger basis than this. For a saner discussion of risks to the West Coast, see here, or here.

Goes to show that misuse of science can clearly occur on the left. Bad lefties!

Update: John Hawks’ lab is working in the same area, and he disagrees with the specific results presented here. Always reminds you to be careful about sexy results presented at conference! (someone should do a study!)

So claimed Peter Parham at a Royal Society meeting last week, Human evolution, migration and history revealed by genetics, immunity and infection. You can actually listen to the talk by pulling down the mp3 file. To get the part about human evolution and introgression, jump to 24 minutes in.

Here is the general sketch: It looks like ~50 percent of the HLA Class I alleles in Europeans derive from Neandertals, ~70-80 percent of HLA Class I alleles in East Asians derive from Denisovans, and that and ~90-95 percent of HLA Class I alleles in Papuans derive from Denisovans. If you recall, ~2.5% of the total genome content of non-Africans seems to be Neandertal, while ~5% of the total genome content of Papuans seems to be Denisovan. The total genome content proportions are rough estimates, there may be some wiggle room in there. But you can see that the HLA allele admixture estimates from these ancient Eurasian lineages is greater by an order ...

At The Intersection Chris Mooney points to new research which reiterates that 1) political ideology exhibits some heritability, 2) and, there are associations between political ideology and specific genes. I’ll set #2 aside for now, because this is a classic “more research needed” area at this point. But as I mentioned in the comments the heritability of political ideology is well known and robust. From what I can gather most people assume it’s mediated through personality traits. In the comments Chris asks:

That sounds sensible. What i find amazing is that if the heritability of politics is so robust–and I agree, it would happen via personality–why is this so widely ignored?

There are I think several issues at work. First, many people are not comfortable within imagining that beliefs which they attribute to their conscious rational choice are not only subject to social inculcation, but that may also have an element of genetic disposition. Second, most people have a poor grasp of what heritability implies. Take a look at some of Chris’ commenters. The response is generally in the “not even wrong” class. Finally, what’s the actionable component to this? In other words, what are people going to do ...

If you walk by a European river on a summer’s day, you might get to hear the animal kingdom’s champion vocalist. His song sounds like a train of chirps, and from a metre away, it’s as loud as whirring power tools. The din is all the more incredible because it is produced by an insect just two millimetres in length – the lesser water boatman, Micronecta scholtzi

Micronecta means “small swimmer” and it is aptly named. It’s among the smallest of the several hundred species of water boatmen that row across the bottom of ponds and streams with paddle-shaped legs. The males are the ones that sing, and they often do so in large choruses to attract the silent females. These songs are famously loud. Even though the insect lives underwater, you can hear its call from the riverbank, several metres away.

Now, Jérôme Sueur from the Natural History Museum in Paris has measured Micronecta’s song using underwater microphones. He found that it the small swimmer is a record-breaker. On average, it reaches 79 decibels, about the level of a ringing phone or a cocktail party. But at its peak, ...

by Jon Winsor

In Monday’s piece on Rush Limbaugh, Chris mentions Rush’s confidence—that Limbaugh has psychologically “seized and freezed” on “climategate”, using it for his go-to excuse to end all discussion on climate.

It’s true that Rush is nothing if not confident. But this is partly a matter of what Rush Limbaugh does all day, nearly every day. As Nate Silver pointed out, there are certain demands that the medium of talk radio makes. Uncertainty and shades of grey don’t play well to Rush’s audience, who are often mowing their lawns and channel surfing through stations. So Rush has developed certain professional skills and habits to give his audience what it wants, which isn’t trenchant analysis of a topic, isn’t a discussion informed by reliable sources–Rush is above all an entertainer, as he often reminds us. And it seems he doesn’t feel he owes his audience much more than that.

…Which has me thinking of the conservatives who didn’t think of themselves as entertainers, who probably served as Limbaugh’s inspirations, and who originally worked in the medium of the essay and op-ed, not radio. Recently, a number of columnists have been reflecting on the work of the late Irving Kristol (whose work will be published soon in a new collection of essays). Most of the columns I’ve read make the following two points: 1) that Kristol was immensely influential (and not just an essayist–the word impresario often crops up), and 2) that Kristol continually drew conclusions that oversimplified his subjects—but drew those conclusions in so confident a way, so unacknowledging of other views, that his work seemed designed to simply end productive discussion.

George Scialabba in The Nation is the most scathing on Kristol:

Matisse said he wanted his art to have the effect of a good armchair on a tired businessman. Irving Kristol seems to have wanted his writing to have the effect of a good martini on a beleaguered corporate executive. The executive’s prejudices, widely scorned among the young and the educated (in the 1960s and 70s, that is, when Kristol began offering this therapy), were eloquently reaffirmed; his feelings, wounded by impertinent criticism, were tenderly soothed; his conscience, feeble but occasionally troublesome, was expertly anaesthetized. The executive’s gratitude knew no bounds; in return, he and his foundations showered their faithful servant with the money and favors that made Kristol so prominent a figure in American intellectual life.

…Kristol’s breezy certainty… is a thing to be envied. His ideological comrade Joseph Epstein wrote wonderingly of Kristol’s “commanding tone, supremely confident about subjects that are elsewhere held to be still in the flux of controversy, assuming always that anyone who thinks differently is perverse or inept.”

Kristol’s readers were decidedly not mowing lawns. They were donating to the then-fledgeling conservative foundations. He was also inspiring the next generation of conservative figures (like Limbaugh). Schialabba calls Kristol, despite his shortcomings (or perhaps because of them), “one of the most influential minds of his generation.”

Of course, you could argue that the job of someone writing for the Nation is to polemicize, and perhaps even build up some straw men. But we can also quote Karl Rove:

Karl Rove… called Mr. Kristol an “intellectual entrepreneur who helped energize several generations of public policy thinkers.” Through editing, writing and speaking, Mr. Kristol “made it a moral imperative to rouse conservatism from mainstream Chamber of Commerce boosterism to a deep immersion in ideas,” said Rove.

Franklin Foer at the New Republic has a similar opinion of Kristol’s influence:

Kristol’s significance to the movement very nearly matches [William F.] Buckley’s. The latter re-launched American conservatism in the 1950s, bringing the disparate forces of reaction and libertarianism under one anti-communist, anti-statist banner. But under Buckley’s leadership the movement remained raw, disorganized, apocalyptic-minded, delusional about the prospects of repealing the New Deal, and poised perennially to suffer Barry Goldwater’s fate. Kristol did more—as an ideologist and an institution builder—to solve the engineering problems that plagued Buckley’s contraption, and to burrow the tunnel through which conservatism entered its triumphal era.

On the quality of Kristol’s work, Foer writes:

For better or for worse, he would make his case by issuing categorical judgments, without expending much effort to provide bolstering evidence. Nathan Glazer titled his contribution to one Festschrift “A Man Without Footnotes.” At his best, this liberated Kristol to render broad judgments about history, politics, and life—the timeless questions of philosophy, which genuinely animated him…

But he also played the part of the counter-establishment pundit, the ideological provocateur, and in that role his pronouncements feel significantly less monumental. As he assumed his place as the “godfather” of a movement, bromides increasingly displaced his fine judgments, and his essays lost the vitality that came with his struggle to define a new politics. His thinking calcified into aphorism, and the aphorisms were often caricatures of ideas designed to rally the troops. He felt comfortable quipping, “It is the selfimposed assignment of neoconservatism to explain to the American people why they are right, and to the intellectuals why they are wrong.”

The part about “without footnotes” seems crucial (most of Glazer’s essay can be found here). Yuval Levin’s attack on Chris’s work a few years ago cried out for footnotes. Reading Levin’s essay I found myself asking something like, “He seems supremely confident. But strangely, there are absolutely no science references. Isn’t he even going to drop Bjorn Lomberg’s name?” Or with George Will’s disastrous op-ed, I found myself asking, “just what are those ‘20 Internet reference links’”? These kinds of referenceless assertions seem similar to Rush Limbaugh’s “exchange” with NH resident Michael Hillinger, where there was no good faith attempt to publicly justify a case, just a flat assertion and a cut to a commercial.

Of course, the phrase “without footnotes” is mostly figurative here. No one expects a newspaper columnist to literally use footnotes. But still, footnotes exist for a reason. They are like the grade school math teacher who requires her students to “show your work,” partly to make sure students aren’t just giving someone else’s answers, but partly because mistakes can be instructive. When you see how someone came to a wrong conclusion, there’s often something to learn.

Being “without footnotes,” or not being forthcoming with sources of information, can be a sign that you’re not playing the same good faith game as everyone else. You’re not willing to lay down your marker on the table and have it discussed. It seems to show a lack of respect for values that a country founded on Enlightenment principles should hold dear. And Kristol certainly wasn’t holding up those values when he at one point called talk-radio populism “the ‘last, best hope’ of contemporary conservatism.”

It’s Japan week on NCBI ROFL! All week long we will be featuring the funniest research related to the Land of the Rising Sun. Enjoy!

“The aim of the present study was to develop a preliminary version of the Food Craving Inventory for Japanese (FCI-J) and to investigate the phenomenon of food craving among Japanese females. One hundred and eighty-five female college students completed newly developed FCI-J. Factor analysis yielded conceptual factors that were interpreted as sweets, snacks, western foods, sushi, and rice. Test-retest and internal consistency analyses indicated a good reliability for both total score and score of subscales. In addition, results showed that the FCI-J has a good content, concurrent, construct, and discriminant validity. It is noteworthy that “rice craving” may be characteristic among Asian rice consuming countries, and that there are considerable “sushi cravers” in Japan. These findings suggested that the craving for some kind of food is influenced by the tradition of food products and cultures.”

Photo: flickr/ Kirti Poddar

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Garlic: a sensory pleasure or a social nuisance?
Discoblog:

Here’s the announcement:

And: Science journalist Chris Mooney explains the psychological factors behind science denial and how our pre-existing beliefs affect our capacity for logic. Author Benjamin Skinner speaks to us about his work exposing the world of modern-day slavery, and Jon Meacham delivers an “In Perspective” essay on the West Virginia coal mining disaster and the need for a national energy plan.

Check your local listings for details.

What’s the News: A number of recent studies have suggested that brain scans could be used to diagnose autism. Virginia Hughes investigated these claims in a report for the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. While some researchers feel these tests could soon be ready for the clinic, she found, others feel that relying on the scans for diagnosis is at least premature, and perhaps entirely misguided. Some important points in her report:

How the Would-Be Autism Tests Work:

The studies have focused on a variety of possible indicators of autism and used several types of scans: measuring activation of brain regions as people do or experience particular things; examining neural anatomy; tracing connectivity between parts of the brain; and analyzing the electrical activity produced by neurons firing.
All the scans, however, have one central goal: picking out reliable, predictive differences between the brains of children with autism and unaffected children.

The Shortcomings:

For the scans to be useful in diagnosis, they have to be able to distinguish children with autism not only from healthy children but from children with other conditions who have similar symptoms, such as trouble with language ...

Update: Stephen Dubner emailed me, and pointed me to this much longer segment which has a lot of Bryan Caplan. So it seems like the omission that I perceived was more of an issue with the production and editing process and constraints of the Marketplace segment than anything else.

End Update

I play a lot of podcasts during the day as I go about my business on my iPod shuffle. One of them is Marketplace, which has a regular Freakonomics Radio segment, where Stephen Dubner “freaks” you out with incredible facts and analysis, often with a helping hand from Steven Levitt. With all due respect to Dubner and Levitt, this still has very pre-Lehman feel. Economics has “solved” the workings of the explicit market, so why not move on to other areas which are ripe for conquest by the “logic of life?”

In any case this week’s episode kind of ticked me off just a little. It started off with the observation that college educated women apparently put 22 hours weekly into childcare today, vs. 13 hours in the 1980s. I guess fewer latchkey kids and more “helicopter parents?” Dubner basically indicates that the reasoning ...

One of the things I love about nearby galaxies is the incredible amount of detail we can get when we aim our best telescopes at them. For proof, I offer this amazingly intricate Hubble portrait of Centaurus A:

Isn’t that breathtaking? [Click to galactinate and see it in magnificent detail.]

Cen A (as those of us in the know call it) is pretty close by as galaxies go, a mere 11 million light years distant. For scale, our own galaxy is 100,000 light years across, and Andromeda, the closest big spiral galaxy, is a hair under 3 million light years away.

Cen A is a bit of a mess. It’s an elliptical galaxy, which are usually giant cotton balls in space. Calm, quiet, and sedate, they generally possess very little gas and dust and don’t form stars.

Obviously, Cen A hasn’t been keeping up with the neighborhood association rulebook.

In its defense, Cen A apparently suffered a recent collision with another galaxy, absorbing the intruder’s stars, gas, and dust. As you can see in the image here, the dust cuts across the bigger elliptical galaxy’s middle like a Texas cowboy’s belt, but ...

For every expectant father who’s ever wished they, too, could feel a fetus kicking their bladder, science now has an answer. Researchers in Japan have put together a suit packed with balloons, sensors, and warm water so you can feel what it’s like to be pregnant.

The suit, called Mommy Tummy, mimics kicking with a system of 45 balloons that inflate and deflate, and movement sensors and accelerometers pick up on the wearer’s activities, so the “fetus,” represented by a four-liter bag of warm water, can respond to exercise or sudden movements with redoubled kicking. Vibrating actuators produce the illusion of wiggling, as New Scientist describes:

When two vibrating sources placed a distance apart move at the same time, it triggers a sensation in between the two points. So by varying vibrating pairs over time, the simulated fetus seems to squirm.

And, in a cool but somewhat unrealistic move, the scientists have hooked the suit up to a screen, so you can watch a simulation of the fetus’ response while you stroke your stomach or walk around. For the thrill-seekers out there, a 9-month pregnancy can be recapitulated in two minutes, or it can be spread out over a longer period for a ...

I figured the recent post on conservatives and the amygdala, and liberals and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), wasn’t controversial enough. So why not go farther and discuss recent research that ties our political views to our genes?

I point you to the following paper: Peter K. Hatemi et al (there is a long list of als), “A Genome-Wide Analysis of Liberal and Conservative Political Attitudes,” recently published (2011) in the Journal of Politics. A PDF of the paper can be found here. And here is the abstract:

The assumption that the transmission of social behaviors and political preferences is purely cultural has been challenged repeatedly over the last 40 years by the combined evidence of large studies of adult twins and their relatives, adoption studies, and twins reared apart. Variance components and path modeling analyses using data from extended families quanti?ed the overall genetic in?uence on political attitudes, but few studies have attempted to localize the parts of the genome which accounted for the heritability estimates found for political preferences. Here, we present the ?rst genome-wide analysis of Conservative-Liberal attitudes from a sample of 13,000 respondents whose DNA was collected in conjunction with a 50-item sociopolitical attitude questionnaire. Several signi?cant linkage peaks were identi?ed and potential candidate genes discussed.

The technology used, “genome-wide linkage,” is one that the authors say was used to locate the BRACA1 and BRACA2 genes linked to breast cancer…. Basically, all the subjects (13,201) had completed the aforementioned political attitudes questionnaire and had given blood. Then there was an attempt to find chromosomal regions with polymorphisms–i.e., these regions vary in people–where the variance correlated with political views.

The rather amazing result–for any of us who stops to think about the incredibly vast distance between the genes we are born with and our political attitudes as adults–was that three regions were found to be linked in a way that was “significant” (one reaching the most stringent test of it) and one was linked in a way that was “suggestive.” (The technical stuff on all of this is in the paper.)

What could this mean? Well, as the authors write:

As we identified four regions of interest, and one that meets the strictest criteria, our ?ndings are consistent with what might be expected if the genetic component of variation in Conservatism-Liberalism resembles any other polygenic human trait, for which the genetic resemblance between relatives can only be resolved reliably into the effects of a large number of genes with small effects that typically cannot be identi?ed by linkage.

In other words, no gene is acting directly to determine our political views–there is no “liberal” or “conservative” gene–but there might be a combination of genes acting together that somehow predispose us to have particular politics, presumably through their role in influencing our brains and thus our personalities or social behaviors. Indeed, the most promising gene regions turned up in the study all involved “NMDA and glutamate related receptors.” The authors couldn’t resist speculating here:

Thought organization, information processing, capacity for abstract thought, learning, and performance are related to blockage of NMDA. Of particular interest to political ideology is the relationship between NMDA and performance on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). The WCST is a neuropsychological test of the ability to display flexibility in the face of changing schedules of reinforcement. By definition Conservatism and Liberalism have much to do with flexibility of opinion in the face of a changing world.

These are highly exploratory results. The scientists can’t even say that they identified, for sure, a single the genetic pathway that influences our political views. But at the same time, the genome wide fishing expedition didn’t turn up empty. They caught some things that will definitely be subjected to further research.

What’s the big picture? Here are the authors again:

To ?nd a signi?cant linkage region that may implicate certain genetic markers is not to say that a particular gene determines a particular behavior. Nor do our results advocate that genes have some greater effects than that of the environment. This is certainly not the case. Rather, we are starting from two opposite ends of a very complex process: DNA, somewhere near the very basic matter of what living organisms are made of on one end; and an expressed complex behavior (political ideology) on the other. Behavior is the ?nal end product of all that goes in and out of what it is to be human, interacting in a complex and changing environment during one’s lifecycle (e.g., puberty, menopause, etc.). We have barely begun to understand what goes on in between those two spaces, which makes this area of research exciting, while also inspiring caution. The understanding that we cannot yet accurately map how genes in?uence brain processes and biological mechanisms which in turn interact with our upbringing, social life, personal experience, the weather, diet, etc, to somehow be expressed in part as a ConservativeLiberal orientation, is the exact reason that genomewide analyses are valuable and necessary for political science. Human behavior emerges from the interaction and interplay of genes, socialization and environmental stimuli, working through ontogenetic neurobiological processes embedded in an evolutionary framework (Dobzhansky 1973). So far as the data suggest, a theory and method which includes genetic in?uences, no matter how large or small, accounts for portions of Conservative-Liberal orientations that environment-only models do not.

I truly find this amazing. But, if this is what the science says for now, there is only one thing to do: more science.

Many implants like this pacemaker can receive
and transmit wireless signals

What’s the News: Topping the list of things you don’t want hacked is your heart. And with 300,000 medical devices such as pacemakers and drug pumps implanted each year, many of which can be controlled through wireless signals, that might soon be a real risk for patients to consider. 

To prevent such attacks, researchers from MIT and UMass Amherst are developing a jamming device that can be worn as a necklace or watch and keeps implants from receiving orders from unauthorized senders. The team will present their experiments with defibrillators [pdf], with off-the-shelf radio transmitters playing the role of the shield, at the SIGCOMM conference in Toronto.

How the Heck:

Many medical implants send data about how a patient is doing directly to the doctor via radio transmission. And doctors can tweak implants’ performance by sending instructions like “Release more of that drug” or “Beat faster.”
The team’s device, called a shield, would intercept such instructions and, if they were encrypted using the key available only to the patient’s doctor, send them along to the implant, while unauthorized messages—which might go something like ”Provide a lethal shock to the heart”— wouldn’t be passed on. The implant’s own messages would in turn be encrypted and sent onto the doctor. The team found ...

Yesterday, the Moon passed into the Earth’s shadow for the longest lunar eclipse in many years. Unfortunately for me, North America had its back turned to the event, but folks in South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia had a great view. Tim Bates, in Adelaide, took this fantastic series of pictures of the Moon in and out of totality:

He took one picture every three minutes or so and combined them into this composite. It reminds me strongly of the lunar eclipse we did get to see here in the States last December. He posted a nice picture showing a series of close-ups, too.

YouTube user Jakub Barabas posted a lovely video of the eclipse as well:

Once the Moon went into full eclipse he increased the exposure time a bit so you can see the red glow on the Moon’s surface, which is difficult to photograph when exposing correctly for the still-brightly-lit surface. The red is due to sunlight passing through Earth’s atmosphere before getting to the Moon; it’s the same reason sunsets are sometimes red.

Did you take some ...

I’ll be on “Think,” an hour-long talk show on Dallas’s public radio station KERA at 2 pm EST, to talk about A Planet of Viruses. Listen live here.

There comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write about female sea monkeys having sex with male sea monkeys from the future, and the troubles that follow.

That time is now.

In many species of animals, males and females have a conflict of evolutionary interests. Males compete with each other for the opportunity to fertilize the eggs of females. Males use all sorts of strategies in these competitions. They fight with each other for territory, they scare off intruding males, they put scrapers into females to dump out the sperm from previous males, and they inject “anti-aphrodiasiacs” to make females unreceptive to other males.

A number of experiments suggest that females have to pay a steep price for these male shenanigans. Anti-aphrodisiacs are toxic to the females, shortening their lifetime. Why would males harm the females that carry their offspring? In many species, males can mate with many females. The long-term health of any one female doesn’t matter–in an evolutionary sense–to the male.

As natural selection favors increasingly deadly male mating strategies, this onslaught opens up the opportunity, in turn, for the evolution of counterstrategies in females. In some species, ...

Designers of prosthetics and artificial organs have for a long time tried to replicate the human body. From the earliest peg legs to some of the most modern robotic limbs, the prosthetic we make looks like the body part that needs replacing. Lose a hand? Dean Kamen’s DEKA arm, aka the “Luke arm,” is a robotic prosthesis that will let you grasp an egg or open a beer. The Luke arm is a cutting edge piece of technology based on a backward idea – let’s replace the thing that went missing by replicating it with metal and motors. Whether it’s an artificial leg or a glass eye, prostheses often seek to reproduce not only the function of the body part, but the form and feel as well.

There are good reasons to want to reproduce form and feel along with function. The first reason is that our original bits and pieces work quite well. The human body as a whole is a natural marvel, let alone the immense complexity and dexterity of our hands, eyes, hearts, and legs. No need to reinvent the wheel, just replicate the natural model you’ve ...

This is the fifth and last in a series of posts elaborating on my recent American Prospect magazine article entitled “The Reality Gap: Now more than Ever, Republicans and Democrats are separated by expertise–and by facts.”

Okay. So now we’ve seen how academia and expertise have shifted left, how counter-expertise has moved in from the right, how this leaves us with a postmodern political culture, but how nevertheless, if you drill down on basic scientific and policy facts, you find Democrats, who are closer to expertise, much more aligned with them. There are exceptions, to be sure. But that’s the picture.

However, the final point is the one that matters most–facts and expertise aren’t helping Democrats, nor is the fact that they have them helping America. Minds aren’t being changed, consensus isn’t being formed (just look at one of the latest comment threads). And among expertise-saturated liberals, there’s a failure to see why this is happening–and even, sometimes, the delusion that rational and fact-based argument is going to solve problems that are really rooted in value differences:

Liberals, to Lakoff, are just different. Science, social science, and research in general support an Enlightenment ethic–finding the best facts so as to improve the world and society and thus advance liberals’ own moral system, which is based on a caring and “nurturant” parent-run family. “So there is a reason in the moral system to like science in general,” Lakoff says. Here also arises a chief liberal weakness, probably amplified by an academic training: constantly trying to use factual and reasoned arguments to make the world better and being amazed to find that even though these arguments are sound, well researched, and supported, they are disregarded or even actively attacked. Too often liberals–we–fail to see how our very credentials, and the habits of argument they impart, set the stage for the postmodern world just as soon as our unending factual dance with conservatives begins….

So do all of us, left and right, care about expertise? Sure, when it suits us. We also usually agree about where expertise lies–when it isn’t contested. “You would certainly be horrified if you found out the guy who was flying your airplane didn’t have a pilot’s license,” Kerry Emanuel says.

Politically, though, we use expertise in service of different agendas–and reason for different reasons. And we don’t all necessarily share the Enlightenment ethic of using science and research to lift us all up into a more caring and progressive society. Indeed, liberals who do share this ethic often don’t seem to understand what’s happening when reasoned, evidence—based arguments fail to have their desired effect–and are countered by flimsy objections or unjust attacks.

We’ve got a lot of science, a lot of experts–and a lot to learn.

Again, you can read the full article here.