Carl Dyke, in comments to one of Timothy's posts, cites Weber's views about the incomparability of science and politics.

I still think Weber was right when he argued in the essays on science and politics as vocations that the ethics of science (scholarship) and politics are fundamentally incompatible. The scholar’s ethic of getting it right produces an infinite process of approximation and revision. No question is ever settled and discussion is always open. “In science, each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years.”

For the politician the ethic is to get things done now, based on an existential gamble and a sense of commitment to ultimate values or to responsibility in the present. Politicians can’t wait for science to grind through its process. “To take a practical political stand is one thing, and to analyze political structures and party positions is another…. The words one uses in [a political meeting] are not means of scientific analysis but means of canvassing votes and winning over others. They are not plowshares to loosen the soil of contemplative thought; they are swords against the enemies: such words are weapons. It would be an outrage, however, to use words in this fashion in a lecture or in the [classroom].”

Further, Weber says “I am ready to prove from the works of our historians that whenever the man of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases.

Very nearly all of what we hear, read and see is politics, not science. What we get from the media, even new media such as blogs, is almost always politics rather than science, even when the producers are scholars, even scientists. This includes research papers, especially in their conclusions and press releases about them, and the editorial wrappers that journals publish: swords, not plowshares.

This isn't news and there's no fixing it. A sceptical approach to all communication that seeks to cut through the cruft and political deception to find whatever truth and value might lurk inside is simple good sense. For example, an earlier post here, dissected a press release for a study that made grandiose claims for Miscanthus x giganteus as a biofuel feedstock.

"What we've found with Miscanthus is that the amount of biomass generated each year would allow us to produce about 2 1/2 times the amount of ethanol we can produce per acre of corn"

If corn was grown as a cellulosic biofuel feedstock, rather than a grain producer, then different cultivars would be grown, just as they are now when the biomass of the whole plant has value, such as for silage production. Corn is a very versatile plant. The apparent advantages of Miscanthus x giganteus depend on a skewed comparison; apples and asteroids style reasoning. Politics in other words. This becomes all the more apparent when you consider that Miscanthus x giganteus is a wild relative of corn, a cousin so to speak.

A new paper investigates one of the traits of Miscanthus x giganteus that helps it to be productive.

Recently a wild C4 grass related to corn, Miscanthus x giganteus, has been found to be exceptionally productive in cold climates. The Illinois researchers set about trying to discover the basis of this difference, focusing on the four extra chemical reactions that separate C4 from C3 plants.

Each of these reactions is catalyzed by a protein or enzyme. The enzyme for one of these steps, Pyruvate Phosphate Dikinase, or PPDK for short, is made up of two parts. At low temperature these parts have been observed to fall apart, differing from the other three C4 specific enzymes. The researchers examined the DNA sequence of the gene coding for this enzyme in both plants, but could find no difference, nor could they see any difference in the behavior of the enzyme in the test tube. However, they noticed that when leaves of corn were placed in the cold, PPDK slowly disappeared in parallel with the decline in the ability of the leaf to take up carbon dioxide in photosynthesis. When Miscanthus leaves were placed in the cold, they made more PPDK and as they did so, the leaf became able to maintain photosynthesis in the cold conditions. Why?

The researchers cloned the gene for PPDK from both corn and Miscanthus into a bacterium, enabling the isolation of large quantities of this enzyme. The researchers discovered that as the enzyme was concentrated, it became resistant to the cold, thus the difference between the two plants was not the structure of the protein components but rather the amount of protein present.

The findings suggest that modifying corn to synthesize more PPDK during cold weather could allow corn, like Miscanthus, to be cultivated in colder climates and be productive for more months of the year in its current locations. The same approach might even be used with sugar cane, which may be crossed with Miscanthus, making improvement of cold-tolerance by breeding a possibility.

I like that. The political approach is to advocate something - in this case a switch from corn to Miscanthus in support of a biofuel agenda. The scientific approach is to investigate the reasons that Miscanthus grows for more days in a year and in colder regions. The benefits of understanding aren't only academic, or political, since the applications of this knowledge can have impacts far beyond the biofuel agenda. If a cold tolerant sugar cane could be produced it might even make Miscanthus irrelevant. Cold tolerant corn could help with a world wide problem, especially in developing nations where food is in high and rising demand.

There are some efforts in progress to develop perennial grain producing grasses to overcome one of the costly and destructive characteristics of food plants: cultivation. The yearly need to break the soil to plant a crop is an expensive labor and material consuming activity, and it degrades soil. It's a non-trivial objective. A cross of some sort that produced perennial C4 grain producing grasses that are able to produce in a wider range of temperatures would be as revolutionary as earlier efforts that produced shorter grain plants that put more of their energy into seed than stalk.

I find the behavior of environmental advocates to be mystifying. Their regressive approach - leave it alone, go back to the past, don't fool with mother nature, etc. - is contrary to their claimed objectives for living lightly on the planet. Humans have never lived lightly, not yet, but we do have an instruction manual of sorts in the biological wealth distributed among the various organisms that have evolved that can teach us how to more nearly achieve that ideal. We need to hit the books, learn how to live well and long, and apply that knowledge in creative and productive ways. The model to follow isn't the blundering, ineffective subsistence farmer of early civilization it is the true scientist who asks why, who has the scholar’s ethic of getting it right, an infinite process of approximation and revision. It was the proto-scientists among those early subsistence farmers who developed their tool set, and it is them that we should honor and emulate rather than the drudges who cling to those developments as if they had always existed, a gift of the gods that should not be altered. Wrong ethic, wrong explanation, wrong doing.