Science Plus Politics Equals Politics

“In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win,” wrote Ayn Rand. And, with considerably more charm, Mark Steyn wrote, “It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog feces and mix ’em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former.”

Nowhere are these axioms more true than in the field of science. Science — that process of hypothesis, observation and experimentation by which humans understand the workings of material things — mixed with just about anything becomes more of that other thing than itself. ...

Likewise, if you mix science with meddling overbearing government, you get meddling overbearing government. Note these recent stories about nutrition. The scientists who help compose the federal nutritional guidelines that govern what goes into subsidized school lunches have finally admitted that eating cholesterol — as in eggs, say — doesn’t actually increase your cholesterol, and skipping breakfast, well known to make people fat, doesn’t make people fat. At the same time, the researcher who once found important evidence for the existence of gluten sensitivity recently proved pretty much beyond a doubt that gluten sensitivity (barring celiac disease) doesn’t actually exist.