Science Is What Made America Great
There are a lot of stories we tell ourselves about how the
United States became the greatest, wealthiest, most powerful country in the
world. Stories about the industrialists of the 19th and 20th centuries like
Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford; stories about how the combination
of individual freedom, democracy and capitalism leads to rights and
opportunities not found anywhere else in the world; stories about our military
and moral superiority, and how they've gone hand-in-hand to make America the
savior of the free world. But none of those things made America
great: the industrialists were merely those who succeeded within the American
system, many other countries around the world have the same or greater rights
and opportunities than America does, and our military superiority is a result
of our becoming the most powerful country in the world, not how we got there.
So how did America become great? Through science.
A photograph of the 'dust bowl' in the Texas Panhandle.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Capmo, under a c.c.-by-s.a.-3.0 license.
In the early 20th century, the United States -- despite our
budding industrial and manufacturing progress -- was generally regarded as a
second-tier nation behind the European superpowers. Culturally, scientifically,
militarily and economically, America wasn't even close to the greatest by any
of these common metrics. The combination of the Great Depression and the Dust
Bowl in the 1930s threatened the livelihood of the average American in ways we
had never faced before. And yet, by time World War II ended, the United States
was universally regarded as the world's most powerful. And less than 25 years
after that, we realized the dream of generations of humans: for the first time,
we landed and set foot on a world beyond our own.
How did we make that transformation? Yes, there were
incredibly smart, talented individuals making contributions, there were
innovations and technological advances, and there were lots of living-wage jobs
available to anyone willing to work hard. But what was it that enabled us to
overcome the Dust Bowl and increase agricultural productivity? What was it that
led the United States to develop superior military technology, culminating in
the atomic bomb? And what was it that led to advances in health, medicine,
disease eradication and quality of life? It was our investment in science, and
in particular it was our investment in doing science the right way.
Trofim Lysenko (L), speaking at the Kremlin with Joseph
Stalin (R) looking on in 1935.
Over in the Soviet Union, similar agricultural shortages
occurred in the 1930s, mostly as a result of the forced collectivization
policies as implemented by the Stalinist regime. But rather than following (or
figuring out) the scientific solutions to increased agricultural productivity,
the Soviet agricultural system was put in the hands of Trofim Lysenko, a man
who rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of a discredited theory known as
"soft inheritance." Anti-Mendelian doctrines ran rampant throughout
the Soviet Union -- from textbooks up through government policies -- and
opposition to Lysenkoism was formally outlawed in 1948. Mainstream scientists
only re-emerged after the death of Stalin and the discovery of DNA, but the
damage of anti-science policies was already done.
Mendelian genetics underlie the science of inherited traits,
and are essential to choosing the best agricultural crops. Public domain image
by Wikimedia commons user LadyofHats.
Most of us -- even many scientists -- in America are no
better than this. We have our own biases and predispositions. We know what
conclusions we would prefer, and we latch onto the facts that support our
preferred conclusions. This is not a problem unique to simply a few of us; this
is human nature. According to professor Peter Ditto at UC Irvine, "People
think that they think like scientists. But really they think like lawyers.
Scientists don’t care what the answer is: they look at the data and draw a
conclusion. Lawyers know the conclusion they want to reach, then they
harness a bunch of facts to support that conclusion." Replace
"scientists" with "goodscientists" and you've got
it. It's incredibly hard to do.
Industrialization and mass production have brought many
benefits to humanity, but there continues to be an ongoing environmental cost
that needs to be addressed and dealt with. Public domain image.
Think about what our dreams of the future are. Increased
human longevity? A cure for cancer? Human colonies on Mars? Freedom from hunger,
homelessness, violent crime or the consequences of pollution? Smaller, faster
electronics? Quantum technologies? "Yes, please," to all of them! But
these are not small problems; these are huge problems that require us to band
together as a society and invest in them with the power of our collective
resources. This involves inquiries into the fundamentals of nature; this
necessitates our society investing in basic science, fundamental scientific
research and in making sure that our long-term decisions and policies reflect
those findings, whatever they may be. It can't be a "one-and-done"
thing, either; it needs to be an ongoing investment.
NASA's budget as a percentage of the total federal budget. Image
credit: Wikimedia Commons user 0x0077BE.
If you're serious about making America great again -- and by
"again," I mean greater than it's ever been, and greater than any
country in the world is by any metric -- this is what it'll take. Science is
how we became great in the first place. It's only by doing more and better
science, and by listening to the robust scientific conclusions, whatever they
may say, that we'll have the greatest version of America possible. But we have
to be willing to invest, and we have to be willing to accept and listen to
truths that may range from uncomfortable to disconcerting to outrageous. The
choice is ours: invest in science and improve, or don't. We've borne the
consequences of stagnation from under-investing for many decades now. If we're
serious about making our country (and our world) as great as we possibly can,
it's time to band together, to invest in our future, and -- if we really want
to go the whole way -- to start thinking like scientists whenever we can.
Astrophysicist and author Ethan Siegel is the founder and
primary writer of Starts With A Bang! His books, Treknology and Beyond The Galaxy, are available wherever books
are sold.
Science Is What Made America Great
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أبريل 19, 2018
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