The Bronze Medal

A few days before I started writing this book, I happened to be watching a debate on CNN in which Mike Huckabee was asked about his belief (or lack thereof) in evolution. He shrugged off the question with an dismissive jab of humor. “It’s interesting that that question would even be asked of someone running for president,” he said. “I’m not planning on writing the curriculum for an 8th grade science book. I’m asking for the opportunity to be president of the United States.”

It was a funny line, but the joke only worked in a specific intellectual context. For the statement to make sense, you had to assume that that “science” was some kind of specialized intellectual field, about which political leaders needn’t know anything to do their business. Imagine a candidate dismissing a question about his foreign policy experience by saying he was running for president and not writing an International Affairs textbook. The joke wouldn’t make sense, because we assume that foreign policy expertise is a central qualification for the Chief Executive. But science? That’s for the guys in lab coats.

So one of things I hoped to do with Invention of Air was to remind people that when our leaders take these anti-science positions, or when they happily plead ignorance about some of the most important issues of our time - our energy use, global warming, genomics, all the revolutions unleashed by computer science — they’re not just being anti-intellectual. They’re also being un-American. The people who founded this country were serious science geeks. We should be celebrating this fact, not running away from it.

— Steven Johnson, writing in the Huffington Post in 2009. Relevant to the current crop of Republican Presidential hopefuls rushing to declare their rejection of Evolutionary Theory.

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