AS NOVEMBER 4 approaches, the possibility of a John McCain presidency, which only a few weeks ago seemed likely, seems to be waning. According to FiveThirtyEight.com, a website which crunches the poll numbers in order to project the outcome of the election, McCain’s chances of seizing the White House have dropped from evens after the party conventions to less than one in 12 as I write.
So far so good – and the quality of the statistical analysis on the site really is good: rather than regurgitating the received wisdom of the political press corps, which has proved to be wrong so many times in this race, the site carries sophisticated statistical analysis of opinion polling rather than the unsubstantiated assertions we are used to seeing from the pundits. Rather than being run by a hack, its editor is an analyst who made his name predicting the results of baseball games. The site’s projections during the primary season were better than anything in the mainstream media, so don’t laugh at the site’s background.
But even a one in 12 chance of President McCain is not negligible. And it brings with it the alarmingly plausible prospect of Sarah Palin inheriting the top job. It’s not just that, at 72, McCain would take office at a greater age than any president in history – he has also had malignant melanoma four times. His chances of dying before the end of his second term in office, a widely reported calculation by a firm of Atlanta actuaries suggests, are about one in four.
Age or previous ill health shouldn’t automatically disqualify anyone from the presidency, but it does place an extra duty of care on the process of choosing a running mate. Some of Palin’s shortcomings have had plenty of column inches. The British press has devoted many condescending reports to her hockey mom persona, her gastronomic penchant for mooseburgers, and her doggone-darn-it-you-betcha-filled speeches, rather forgetting that this folksy campaigning style is a common feature in American presidential politics going back well over a century. They have also taken plenty of time to cover the unpleasant aspersions she has been casting over the Democratic ticket, the seething paranoia she has whipped up at political rallies she has addressed, and her moronic answers to foreign and economic policy questions in interviews.
Those interviews, and the ignorance they betray, give a far more worrying insight into the beliefs of the woman who could one day be president than her campaigning style, no matter how alien aspects of it seem to our eyes. Her lack of interest in and understanding of economic issues is a matter of record, as is her tenuous grasp of foreign policy. Her anti-science views have had rather less attention.
On the two big scientific issues which divide America, Palin falls squarely and proudly on the side of ignorance. Global warming? Not man-made, she says. And creationism should be taught in schools – presumably in the time saved by clearing contraception and abortion off the sex education curriculum.
When you look at the roster of those who deny climate change, you begin to see the intellectual company Palin keeps. Oil company executives, the crazier elements of the Republican Party (interestingly, not including McCain) and, the closest they get to a scientific heavyweight, Michael Crichton – author of Jurassic Park. Her views don’t imply stupidity, but they do suggest an alarming lack of curiosity and a tendency to repeat uncritically whatever she is told.
Plenty of science is hard to understand for lay people. Talk of atoms and quarks, genes and alleles is outside our comfort zone – we’re not familiar with the words, and they refer to things we have never seen or experienced with our own eyes. But climate science isn’t like that. The detailed predictions are hugely complex, but the basic idea of greenhouse gas build-up in the atmosphere leading to gently rising temperatures over decades really isn’t hard to grasp. A layperson who denies climate change is, ipso facto, ignorant of how science works: history shows that when dominant theories are debunked, it is virtually always by scientists noticing tiny anomalies that turn out to undermine the foundations of a theory – not by loudmouth politicians who don’t want to believe they’re true.
The same goes for supporting intelligent design being taught in schools. The problem isn’t just that Palin appears to believe that life on Earth was created by God, but also her suggestion that children should be taught the “debate” in science classes. There is no debate to be taught – unless you equate pseudo-scientific nonsense with some of the most successful sets of theories in the history of science. Schools don’t exist to teach kids that ignorance is as good as knowledge. And again, if our current understanding of the history of life is replaced by a better theory one day, it won’t be because a Bible-bashing politician didn’t like the old theory, but because careful scientific detective work will have uncovered the theory’s shortcomings.
So even if the baseball analyst’s statistics say the hockey-mom candidate is unlikely to make it to the top, I won’t be counting chickens until all the votes are counted. After all, if you believe global warming and evolution are hoaxes, why let something like statistics get in your way?
