Coburn’s report is wrong and infuriating: that much has been discussed by others elsewhere.  What I think is woefully missing from the conversation is what scientists should do about it.  The consensus as I’ve experienced as a researcher is that (1) ignorant political attacks will not affect our ability to get work done, (2) that it is not our job to help the public understand our work, and that such outreach is unscientific, because it requires us to mischaracterize research.  I think both claims are wrong, and potentially dangerous to the future of science. 

First, political attacks now more than ever present a huge risk to science.  It’s true that Coburn follows a long line of politicians passing judgment over research they refuse to comprehend: Senator William Proxmire’s similarly uninformed Golden Fleece award dates back to the 70s.  Over the decades, political criticism has annoyed scientists, but rarely affected their work or funding; researchers often take this history to mean that such attacks should be shrugged off instead of worried over.  But these are different times: the last decade has seen a tidal shift towards regressive anti-scientism.  Belief in evolution is a strong litmus test for the public’s understanding of science, and the percentage of Americans who roundly reject its premise (instead claiming that God created humans in our present form) is higher now (51%) than it was in 1982 (44%).  In fact, rejection of science is becoming a surreal badge of authenticity among politicians such as Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry. 

All this makes for a dangerous time for scientific progress, and particularly for behavioral and social sciences (in essence, the “human sciences” that focus on people’s experience and actions) including my own field, psychology.  This is because human sciences focus on topics—social networks, emotion, memory, decision-making, race relations—that, to the lay public, sound less scientific than cellular structure or electromagnetic force.  People often feel as though they understand their minds (but not physics) already, and that the study of people and cultures can’t tell them anything new.  Although this belief couldn’t be farther from the truth (more on this later), it is a real and frightening risk to the human sciences.  Indeed, following his report, Coburn proposed completely eliminating NSF’s funding for human sciences, citing just this type of thinking: “…do any of these social studies represent obvious national priorities that deserve a cut of the same pie as astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth science, physics, and oceanography?”  This opinion was echoed by Mo Brooks, the chair of a Congressional panel considering such cuts, who explicitly claimed that the human sciences have yet to prove their worth.