If timing is everything, Chris Mooney's The Republican War On Science has reached some kind of pinnacle.

His argument — that the Bush administration ignores, subverts, twists and misrepresents science to conform to its political goals — is coincident with President Bush's saying that Intelligent Design should be taught, with the Republican leader of the Senate invoking the ire of his party colleagues by changing his mind about embryonic stem cell research, and with the revelation that a White House staffer with no scientific credentials sanitized a report on global warming so as not to offend the energy industry — immediately prior to leaving the White House for a job with an oil company.

None of which is to say that politics and science have traditionally enjoyed an arms-length relationship. A cynic would say that science and politics are inherently at odds: Science is about determining facts; politics is about the selective use and abuse of them.

We have a rich tradition of science being manipulated to support causes on both the left and the right. Mooney acknowledges this, with qualification, noting that "in politicized fights involving science, it is rare to find liberals entirely innocent of abuses. But they are almost never as guilty as the right."

In The Republican War on Science, a book that is as carefully constructed as a laboratory experiment, Mooney argues that the right's assault on science has converged in the Bush administration from two different routes: businesses seeking to avoid regulation and evangelical Christians seeking to impose it.

For businesses, that means, among other things, squelching anything that suggests humans are responsible for global warming, that mercury emissions from power plants are hazardous to health, that secondhand smoke is injurious and that fast food and soft drinks contribute to obesity.

"The triumphs of the environmental and consumer movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the attendant expansion of the federal regulatory state, spurred on the business community's political counteraction. . . . Rules by new agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration necessarily required a firm scientific basis, and these bodies accordingly overflowed with technical experts specializing in science and risk assessment. Yet this, in turn, created a strong incentive for companies subject to potentially costly regulation to sponsor their own contrary science, a powerful technique for blocking or refuting proposed agency actions."

Evangelicals' interests also have scientific implications: They have found a friend in the Bush White House across a host of issues, including abortion, evolution, embryonic stem cell research and sex education.

As articulated by the Discovery Institute, a proponent of "Intelligent Design," "modern science has had 'devastating' cultural consequences, such as the denial of objective moral standards and the undermining of religious belief" and should be replaced "with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

Mooney catalogs the tools the Bush administration uses to thwart unfriendly scientific findings:

• Demand further research and dismantle scientific bodies such as the Office of Technology Assessment.



• Change the language (Republican strategist Frank Luntz is credited with changing "global warming" to the more benign-sounding "climate change.").

• Cut off funding.



• Use scientific outliers (contrarians, such as the minority of scientists who don't believe humans have an effect on climate change) to sow doubt in public forums instead of more rigorous, peer-reviewed scientific ones.

• Use industry to fund studies to contradict the results of studies they don't like ("manufacture uncertainty," Mooney calls it).

• Vet the heads of scientific and regulatory agencies along political criteria.



• Demand strict scientific proof when it comes to something you don't want (such as reducing carbon dioxide emissions), but don't ask for scientific proof when it comes to something you support (such as ballistic missile defense).

Where did all of this begin?



Mooney, a former editor with The American Prospect who specializes in the relation of science and politics, argues that Republican antagonism toward science today began with Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California.

"Reagan's self-appointed state board of education had pushed to weaken the teaching of evolution and endorsed creationism. . . .

The Reagan administration's sympathies with creationism signaled a new development for the Republican Party and conservatism more generally. From this moment forward, many of the party's leaders willingly distorted or even denied the bedrock scientific theory of evolution, and encouraged pseudoscientific thinking, to satisfy a traditionalist religious constituency."

Science was in disfavor because what it said wasn't what the Reagan administration wanted to hear. "We know what we want to do," said budget director David Stockman, speaking of scientists, "and they'll only give us contrary advice."

But it is not so much Mooney's case-by-case examples of how Republicans have manipulated science that ultimately defines the real importance of The Republican War On Science. The book forces the reader to reconsider the fundamental role of science and the processes it uses to try to understand the world, and to appreciate the consequences of subsuming science to political expedience.

Mooney challenges the reader to ask just how important unvarnished science is to us, no matter what our political predilections.

How we answer that question will determine much more important things than who's in the White House.