False Equivalencies in Framing The Source of ‘The War on Science’

No one said fighting the actual ‘War on Science’ would be easy, especially not with friends like these.

The War on Science

Next week, Post Hill Press and Simon & Schuster will release “The War on Science”, an edited volume led by Lawrence Krauss featuring 39 essays. One of the contributors is Jerry Coyne, an extremely sharp evolutionary biologist (now retired) who has organized a long-running blog entitled “Why Evolution is True”. His book ‘Speciation’ with H. Allen Orr is a classic.

Coyne is also a curmudgeon. I like curmedgeons - usually.

As is apparent from the focus of his recent blog posts, Coyne has decided that the existential threat to science and society is from the ‘left’. Perhaps he believes that the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the foundations of science are an aberration or perhaps a necessary comeuppance. Nonetheless, I hoped that given the political moment, that this new book would address threats across the spectrum of political ideologies and even threats that are not easily framed as culture war issues. The table of contents has not been available which made it harder to anticipate the scope, but Coyne released a tweet and blog post today describing “Our new book on ideological threats to science” with the following synopsis: “[A] group of 39 essays (and more than 39 people) about how science is being corrupted by the Left.”

Okay, then.

Based on the Table of Contents, the synopsis seems apt:

TOC from Krauss’ new edited volume “The War on Science” seems to have missed quite a lot of the fact patterns from the actual war.

The book also raises a profound question: are the essayists truly unable to grapple with the existential threat from the right? Because this book matters – it includes contributors with significant audiences (Gad Saad & Jordan Peterson to name but two) and even a few that have strived consistently to criticize both right and left in defense of free expression (Nicholas Christakis is one such example). But the book’s title and decision to focus 39 of 39 essays on ‘how science is being corrupted by the Left’ is not a case of bad timing. Yes, whatever editorial decisions took place, they were made in 2024. But one would expect that Krauss, in assembling a group of academic authors – some of whom would probably tell you of their commitment to remain balanced – would feel compelled to ensure that any such authoritative effort would cast a wide net. It should not be hard to find counterpoints, not just 1 or 2, but 20+ solid essays out of the group of 39. The threats from the right have hardly emerged unexpectedly.

The Power of Antiscience on the Right

Fifteen years ago, Oreskes and Conway wrote the award-winning ‘Merchants of Doubt’ that described the intentional obfuscation on the harm of tobacco smoke and the threat of global warning as part of coordinated campaigns by industry-affiliated groups and their useful advocates. Was no one available to explore that perspective? Project 2025 already described, in 2024, a game plan for undermining the basic functioning of American science. Michael Mann and Peter Hotez have joined together to write “Science Under Siege” – to be released in September 2025. The forces amassing to undermine science have been in place and strengthening for decades.

Lawrence Krauss – of anyone – should know better.

As context for next week's release, there is another book called 'The War on Science' with the subtitle “Who's Waging it, Why It Matters, and What We Can Do About It” written by Shawn Otto and published back in 2016 by Milkweed Press. I have been reading it in anticipation for this new release as a means to take stock of changes in the landscape of threats as well as how the framing of ‘the war on science’ has evolved. Ironically, Otto's book of the very same name has a foreword by Lawrence Krauss (ooops!).

Otto had this to say early in the book in a section entitled 'The Battle for the Future':

“Politically, the war on science is coming from both left and right. But the antiscience of those on the right – a coalition of fundamentalist churches and corporations largely in the resource extraction, petrochemical and agrochemical industries – has far more dangerous public-policy implications because it’s about forestalling policy based on evidence to protect destructive business models. As well, the right generally has far more money with which to spread disinformation and attack science on a host of issues.”

Otto goes on to describe how the “political left often unwittingly abet the right’s antiscience efforts”. Moving to the present, the choice by Krauss, Coyne, and this coterie of (at least partially aggrieved) essayists to focus exclusively on threats to science from ‘The Left’ is a choice, one that shows a marked lack of intellectual curiosity. Instead of meeting the moment, the choice appears focused on feeding the flames of old culture wars rather than confronting the actual war in progress.

Part of the rules of culture wars is that criticism will be interpreted as affirming the ‘illiberalism’ of the critic. Coyne has already dismissed those who would criticize this book on his blog as ‘The Great Benighted”. So to answer the question: Will I read it? Yes - precisely because many in this group (Coyne, Krauss, Wax, Saad, Peterson + more) have been committed to establishing a community and reinforcing messaging that has laid the groundwork for the present undoing of American leadership in science, research, and higher-education.

Perhaps they consider themselves above the fray. The essayists as a group – and collected in a single volume – are certainly useful, their message (if left uncontested) will drive not just false equivalencies, but continue to advance the rationale for the ideological pursuit of the elimination of America's innovation driven economy. One can imagine that soon the White House’s OSTP will point to this book as an exemplar of precisely why their mission should be accomplished.

Perhaps the essayists might even argue that American leadership has already been undone and needs to be reconstructed. But I find that those who are inclined to “tear it all down” tend to have a rather distorted view of what it is that has been built.

Actual Science is Hard

Most of us in science have spent our careers building science (in theory, models, experiments, and expeditions), supporting programs, and training students both in and out of the classroom. Doing science is hard, it takes time, resources, community, a willingness to fail and a persistence to succeed. The doing of science will not get any easier with friends like these whose committed professional dedication to fanning the flames of one-sided culture war persists even in the face of an existential threat.

America is not a world-leading destination for science? Tell that to the students and scientists from all over the world who have come to America join global teams of discoverers precisely because of our exceptional system of higher education and research and who are now turning elsewhere.

We can't build things using federal funds? Then explain how 99% of FDA approved drugs from 2010-2019 are supported, in part, by NIH funded grants.

For my part, I spent 10+ years working with colleagues to build a new Quantitative Biosciences PhD program, precisely to address a gap in training underserved by university silos. I dedicated multiple years working with students, scientists, and colleagues in support roles behind the scenes responding to the global COVID-19 pandemic. This work spanned my institution, community, state, national, and international response networks. Does this mean I was being partisan or simply trying to leverage expertise to help serve institutions, students, and the public? Clearly higher ed needs reforms of many kinds. But not everything is a culture war and those who don't want to fight culture wars but want to build things might not have the same platforms, but yes – we are fed up – and the public should be too.

I have a point of view, grounded in my academic work, and will continue to leverage it to fight for our potential, here in America, to remain world leaders in the basic doing of science. Just this week, our multidisciplinary Science and Community Impacts Mapping Project released a new preprint describing the core geospatial methodology required to confront talking points that cuts to NIH funded biomedical research have been limited in scope and ‘targeted’ to supposed elite, institutions (hint: they are not). The work takes time to get right and reflects a well-known asymmetry in contesting claims that serve ideological goals that do not require the same level of rigor.

As I have reiterated here: the choice to frame ‘The War on Science’ as emanating wholly from the left is a choice.

Scapegoating may feel satisfying but it tends not to fix things because it is disconnected from data. As scientists know, “Time will tell, and it is the measurements that will tell us" (Jim Peebles, Nobel Prize Physics, 2019). It does not take much work to figure out that this new version of ‘The War on Science’ may be published next week but it is already out of date.

While Krauss’ volume fans the flame of culture wars while hewing to strict ideological rules, the rest of us are going to have to make a choice to speak up now and start to rebuild the foundations of the next 80+ years of American leadership in science.