According to his biographer, Adrian Desmond, the 19th Century English biologist T. H. Huxley "professionalized" science by creating the modern scientific caste with its established code of conduct and dedication to objective inquiry.
On the other hand, Huxley became known as "Darwin's bulldog" for his vehement defences of evolution, wrote several polemics against religiosity and famously warned "Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed."
Unforeseen by Huxley, though, was the equal harm done to science when it adopts an ideology. The result is junk science.
Enter Steven Milloy. By day, Milloy is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C. But when special interest lobbyists, government scientists or industry executives, politicians or litigation lawyers attempt to twist science to their own self-serving ends, Milloy transforms into his alter-ego, Junkman.
Milloy chuckles at such hyperbolic descriptions of his work as publisher of the Junk Science Home Page (www.junkscience.com), designated one of the top 50 science web sites of 1998 by Popular Science. But if Milloy is not a superhero, his single-handed effort to preserve scientific objectivity in public policy debates by debunking misleading and alarmist science is heroic.
Science was to settle the great philosophic disputes and provide humans with the facts needed to craft the best solutions, or so Enlightenment scholars promised. As a human endeavour, it was never possible science would keep this covenant. Still, it is disheartening to see the multitude of misuses to which it has been put of late.
Public health advocates are particularly prone to abusing science by ignoring evidence that weakens their claims or by fear-mongering to generate a demand by citizens for political action. "In fact it was the shoddy science being presented as indisputable fact in the environmental tobacco smoke (secondhand smoke) debate that really set me off," Milloy relates.
A statistician, software engineer and securities lawyer, Milloy was doing a non-profit study on the use of risk assessment in public policy in 1992 when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency perpetrated one of the great scientific shams of the decade.
The EPA claimed to have proven that secondhand smoke was causing lung cancer. To reach its conclusion, the EPA ignored all studies of workplace and childhood exposure of non-smokers, since neither showed elevated risks for cancer. Instead, it concentrated only on studies of non-smoking wives whose husbands smoked, and even in these it had to torque the results to show a just marginal correlation between exposure and cancer.
"Then there is the food police," adds Milloy, the people who shriek on about the dangers of genetically modified food, or compare movie theatre popcorn unfavourably with fast food hamburgers, or generate panic over the unfounded contamination of Coke on European store shelves. Often their motive is hostility to profits or hatred of multinationals, or just an evangelical zeal for vegetarianism and animal rights.
For two or more hours a day, above and beyond his work at Cato, Milloy scours dozens of news sources in North America and abroad, critiques research reports and posts his findings to his site.
Cell phones, power lines, pesticides, apples, breast implants, soothers, and intravenous bags have "all been declared hazardous by one group or another based on incomplete science or a subjective interpretation of results," says Milloy., all of which were later declared non-hazardous by panels of respected scientists, but not before tens of billions of economic damage had been done.
"Even the breakfast cereal industry," chides Milloy. "Their claims of the past 20 or 25 years that high-fibre cereals can prevent colorectal cancer are largely groundless," but they keep making them anyway.
Environmentalists are the worst, though. "They lie blatantly," Milloy charges. "What they present as facts are not facts, but Marxist theories or a technophobia like the Unabomber's...Global warming is really nothing more than a push for global government."
With his web site set soon to record its one-millionth visitor since it opened in April 1996, Milloy concedes his supporters and critics "break down pretty much along right and left lines." Reader reviews of his two best-selling books, Silencing Science (1999) and Science Without Sense (1995), at Amazon.com confirm this. All give the books one star of five, or five of five; none falls in between.
But Milloy's critics are wrong. The Junk Science Home Page is full of objective analysis aimed at citizens confused by conflicting scientific claims.
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