Science is and will be political

Yesterday, Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols chastised Scientific American for their rare decision to endorse a presidential candidate, in which they make the case to their readers to cast votes for Kamala Harris against Donald Trump. This is the second time they’ve done this — the first was endorsing Joe Biden in 2020.

Nichols said a lot of things in his article, but his bottom line is that matters of policy — taxes, health care, reproductive rights, climate policy, etc., topics that are "standard-issue left-liberal" issues, in his words — are unrelated to science:

Although science and data play their role in debates around such issues, most of the policy choices they present are not specifically scientific questions: In the end, almost all political questions are about values—and how voters think about risks and rewards. Science cannot answer those questions; it can only tell us about the likely consequences of our choices.

This is a catastrophically silly thing to say. Not only does science play an absolutely central role around any of these debates — if climate change, to pick one off the top of the pile, isn't a scientific issue at its core, then what is?  — but the practice of science is political in and of itself. The choice of what to study, how to improve the world, and what to delve into is itself a political statement. The Reagan administration’s choice to refuse to, say, allocate funds to AIDS research, or to even acknowledge the AIDS epidemic, was a political decision wrapped in the denial of what patients, doctors, and scientists were observing plain as day. Telling scientists and science magazines to stay away from politics is like telling accountants or garbage men to stay out of politics. Are budgets about values? Does keeping the streets clean cut to the core of the heart of man? 

I have no idea what "politics" could possibly mean in Nichols’ context. Is it the day jobs of politicians and the universe of consultants, journalists, and scammers that orbit them? By what right do those people have a monopoly on how the rest of the country lives? When a legislator considers extending the child tax credit — a policy that scientific study shows relieves child poverty — where does science end and politics begin? In the context of another issue — abortion — Nichols took to Bluesky to explain.