SCIENCE , not conservatives or moderates or liberals, has changed since 1973

Michael Marshall

A study of almost 40 years of public polling data has set the print-o-sphere and the blog-o-sphere aTwitter.

Gordon Gauchat published his study in the April 2012 issue of The American Sociological Review.

He says that after the 1973 Oil Crisis, people started to change how they viewed Science.

I disagree - totally.

Science is not the reified entity that scientists like to claim it is - universal, eternal, unchanging : sort of God-Without-The-Beard .

It is a human social system and as subject to change as any other human collectivity.

Scientists and hence Science changed after 1973 for two major reasons.

First, scientists in powerful positions but born in the modernist era started to retire and die.

Secondly, the scientists born after Hiroshima and Auschwitz who gradually came to positions of power within industry and academia no longer believed in the tenets of modernity, or at least no longer believed them as strongly as their elders.

Yes, liberals/lefties/greens also started to abandon the old modernist science and embrace the new post modern commensality science while religious conservatives, in reaction , joined old line modernists in defending the old time scientific religion all the stronger .

Enemy of my enemy must be my friend is the name of that  scientific theory.

There are two very different types of Science and scientists out there --- we need to be always very clear which ones we are talking about...