It takes little more than a quick perusal of the Weekly World News, or one episode of The X-Files, to realize that the American public hungers for divine or supernatural intervention. We want to believe in something that can’t quite be explained by science. We yearn for miracles.
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Even the miracle-loving organization that has waged the longest-running war on science has called a truce. Two months ago, Pope John Paul II announced that the theory of evolution can coexist peacefully with the concept of divine creation. That followed the Vatican’s 1992 admission (after 359 years) that it had been wrong in persecuting Galileo for announcing that the earth is not at the center of the universe. Today the Catholic Church, ever on the lookout for new souls in need of salvation, is even supporting its own astronomical research program. At the same time, Congress feels free to flout scientific findings with impunity, quashing any research that threatens to disagree with the agendas of wealthy PACs. The pope’s conversion was one of the few bright spots in a year whose headlines otherwise showcased the uneasy meeting of science, politics, and the general public.
The House of Representatives passes a budget bill cutting $625 million from nonmilitary science programs, especially from research on the atmosphere and global climate change. During the appropriations process, Representative Dana Rohrabacher, chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, declares that funding research on global climate change is “throwing money down a rat hole.”
Seeking to reinstill the traditional values celebrated at the infamous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, Tennessee state legislators propose a law mandating fines for any teacher who instructs students that evolution is anything more than a theory.
The International Joint Commission, a U.S. and Canadian task force responsible for overseeing water-quality issues in the Great Lakes, releases a survey of major institutions that conduct regional pollution research. The 31 institutions that responded report that cutbacks in federal, state, and local funding will result in total budget declines of between 23 and 53 percent. The number of researchers funded by the groups, and hence the amount of research conducted, will decline by about half.
U.S. Ecology, a company that wants to build a nuclear waste dump in the desert of southeastern California, threatens to sue two scientists commissioned by the federal government to study the safety of the proposed dump. Because the government is prohibited by law from indemnifying contractors, the two scientists stop work, at least for now, on their study.
