Contra Chris Mooney , SCIENCE & REPUBLICANS once exchanged bodily fluids quite happily ...

Michael Marshall

In the 1930s, when FDR and the Democrats were racking up their impressive majorities ,about the only place the twosome couldn't catch flies was in college towns ---- they voted Republican.

Yep.

Science - conservative Modernist/Progressive Science - was very popular with the not-yet-angry-wealthy-white-guys back then.

For it had demonstrated, from the example of Nature, that it was natural and inevitable for the big and the powerful to vanquish the small and the weak - and those red letter passages in the New Testament be damned.

(I mean had this Jesus guy ever even so much as run a single lab experiment ??)

Conservatism is the business of relishing certitudes in an uncertain world and Science, Modernist Science, sure delivered some beauts.

But after 1945, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, scientists - the younger ones particularly - started having their doubts and by the late 1970s they were coming on to replace the dying and retiring modernists in science's positions of power.

The certitudes of modernist science had actually been proven wrong almost as soon as they were publicly uttered but these failings were downplayed and buried--- until the post war post modern generation found the courage to speak up.

As scientists showed the world to be even more uncertain than any lay person imagined possible, the conservative personality left the ship of science in droves.

What college town today votes Republican? - the idea seems absurd.

In which case, Chris Mooney is right and I am wrong.

But look it up - they did once.

In spades....