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SUNDAY SCIENCE: DOES KAMALA HARRIS BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION?  
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Daniel Engber
September 12, 2024
The Atlantic
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_ In another election, she might have been asked. _

, Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

 

On a presidential-debate stage 17 years ago, a moderator posed what
was then a kind of gotcha question: “Do you believe in
evolution?”
[[link removed]] he
asked John McCain. The senator froze for a moment before delivering a
“yes.” Then, after several other candidates expressed their
disagreement, he clarified: “I believe in evolution,” he said,
“but I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon and see it at
sunset, that the hand of God is there.”

Not a single synthetic theory that explains the history of life was
floated during Tuesday night’s debate—not even one! In fact, the
moderators hardly asked the candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald
Trump, about any scientific issues whatsoever. It’s 2024, just a
year and change since the formal end of the coronavirus pandemic, and
another global pathogenic threat is already looming
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Also, we’re living through the hottest stretch of years that’s
ever been recorded. Certainly, scientific topics such as these matter
to the public interest at least as much today as they did in previous
elections. Yet aside from Trump’s desultory defense of his
administration's response to COVID—“we got gowns; we got
masks”—pandemic policy was not mentioned, and the subject of
climate change emerged only in the 87th minute of a 90-minute live
event.

Otherwise, our would-be presidents’ thoughts on science policy and
innovation simply didn’t make the cut. They were asked to talk about
the economy, abortion, immigration, and the war in Ukraine, but not
how they would handle the next emerging virus, or what they think
about immunization policy, or why a military operation first deployed
during the Trump administration spread anti-vaccine propaganda
overseas
[[link removed]].
The moderators made no reference to technology at all. They did not
discuss AI. This debate, likely the only one these two candidates will
have, was _un_scientific, through and through.

Not so long ago, topics like these were considered core to the project
of the presidency. If the evolution question could be asked in
2007—if it could even be a litmus test—that’s because the
country was in the midst of a debate
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whether public schools should be allowed, or forced, to teach biblical
accounts of the Creation. Soon after McCain laid out his theory of the
divine canyon-maker, Barack Obama was faced with a similar challenge
at a live CNN event. “If one of your daughters asked you—and maybe
they already have—‘Daddy, did God really create the world in six
days?,’” a moderator asked him, “what would you say?” Obama
gave a waffling reply
[[link removed]]: “My belief is
that the story that the Bible tells about God creating this
magnificent Earth on which we live—that is essentially true, that is
fundamentally true,” he said. “Now, whether it happened exactly as
we might understand it reading the text of the Bible: That, I don’t
presume to know.”

Such questions, however awkward, got at something big: how America
would teach its future citizens to understand the very fact of our
existence, and whether science or religion should be paramount in
public life (or what the balance of the two should really be). During
that campaign cycle, an entire grassroots effort would emerge to
cajole both Obama and McCain into having a full debate on scientific
questions. Those efforts eventually coalesced into the nonpartisan
group Science Debate. Its supporters
[[link removed]] were
numerous and impressive—lots of Nobel laureates, along with several
scientists who ended up as senior members of the Obama administration.
Noting that science formed “the basis of some of the thorniest
public policy issues in recent history,” two of the group’s key
organizers, Lawrence Krauss and Chris Mooney, wrote
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the _Los Angeles Times_ that fall that “a presidential debate on
science would help voters determine who among the candidates is up to
the task of dealing with whatever comes next.”

However gamely the candidates would answer questions on phylogeny and
the Big Bang, they did not agree that scientific topics deserved a
nationally televised debate. But Obama and McCain did give written
answers
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a set of 14 questions, laying out their attitudes on matters such as
how to foster innovation, protect the oceans, manage stem-cell
research, and, yes, guard against the next pandemic. In 2012, the
major candidates again submitted statements in response to Science
Debate. (And again, pandemics made the list of topics for discussion:
“I will empower the private sector to pursue the breakthroughs that
will equip society” to prevent them, Mitt Romney wrote.)

By 2016, Science Debate had to press its case, enlisting a group
of adorable children
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whether they would share their views on “fixing our climate,”
“the dying honeybees,” and “wobots and jobs,” among other
matters of national importance. They got some written answers, in the
end, not just from Trump and Hillary Clinton, but also from Gary
Johnson and Jill Stein. Ironically, this time around, the pandemic
question was downplayed, but the candidates did give answers on the
matter of scientific integrity. “Science is science and facts are
facts,” Trump wrote at the time. “My administration will ensure
that there will be total transparency and accountability without
political bias.”

Trump would not exactly be locked into an ironclad adherence to
empirical reality; a few years later, he was literally redrawing his
administration’s hurricane forecasts
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as if to bend the very atmosphere in service of his pride. Of course
the statements Science Debate had elicited were never binding, and
Trump (or whoever on his campaign actually wrote those answers) may
well have lied about the fact of whether he believes that facts are
facts. But they symbolized a way of thinking, or at least the pretense
of a frame of mind. As a scientist might say, they were data. And even
if the answers weren’t always enlightening, they got plenty of
attention, which is noteworthy in itself. Not so long ago, a
presidential candidate would or could be held accountable, at least to
some extent, for their views on ocean health, the internet,
vaccination, or cosmology.

In 2020, a dozen years after it began, Science Debate ran aground.
Both candidates that year refused to answer any of its questions. Even
Joe Biden, who campaigned explicitly on the promise of a scientific
restoration—his victory speech would promise
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marshal the forces of science and the forces of hope in the great
battles of our time”—could not be bothered to engage
[[link removed]]. COVID was still
raging, and the candidates did discuss pandemic policy (as well as
climate change) during their regular debates. “We got the gowns. We
got the masks,” Trump said
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then, almost exactly as he did this week. But at the same time, in the
fall of our most recent election—when science was so clearly tied to
urgent policy conundrums, when acting on the data (whatever that
entailed) was both tricky and divisive, and when public-health
measures could lead to riotous protest—our potential presidents were
also moving on from the very notion that science policy, in the
broader sense, ought to be thrashed out.

Science Debate, which was eventually folded into the National Science
Policy Network [[link removed]], now
has more diffuse goals about engaging candidates at all levels to
answer a science-policy questionnaire. It hasn't shown any signs of
seriously trying to extract answers from the presidential candidates
in 2024. The website where the project started, ScienceDebate2008.com,
is a sketchy Russian news site
[[link removed]]. (Among its posted
stories are “There Is No Place to Store Sugar in Russia,” by a
“graduate student,” and “How to Exchange Currency in Kharkov at
a Favorable Rate.”) ScienceDebate.com has also gone offline, and the
group’s social-media presence even in this election year has been
almost nonexistent.

This week’s debate added another note of confirmation: A long
stretch of treating science like it matters, for America and for
presidential politics, has reached its end.

_DANIEL ENGBER [[link removed]] is
a senior editor at The Atlantic._

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Asteroid Impact May Have Turned Ants into Fungus Farmers 66 Million
Years Ago
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By Ariana Remmel
Science Magazine
Cataclysm that killed dinosaurs and shook up life on Earth likely
paved the way for this mutually beneficial relationship
October 3, 2024

* Science
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* Evolution
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* elections
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* Climate Change
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* science policy
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* debates
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