Nature's endorsement of Obama, the scientific enterprise, and community organizing.

I didn't get a chance to post about Rules for Radicals this week - the time that would have been spent on that went to knocking on doors and making phone calls for the Get Out The Vote effort here in the Florida Panhandle instead. It will happen next week, after the election. I promise.

I might not have time for in-depth writing on the topic, but that doesn't mean it's far from my mind. It certainly wasn't when I read the journal Nature's endorsement of Obama. (This appears to be the first time in it's 139 year history that Nature has made such an endorsement, by the way.) One paragraph particularly caught my eye:

But science is bound by, and committed to, a set of normative values -- values that have application to political questions. Placing a disinterested view of the world as it is ahead of our views of how it should be; recognizing that ideas should be tested in as systematic a way as possible; appreciating that there are experts whose views and criticisms need to be taken seriously: these are all attributes of good science that can be usefully applied when making decisions about the world of which science is but a part. Writ larger, the core values of science are those of open debate within a free society that have come down to us from the Enlightenment in many forms, not the least of which is the constitution of the United States.

If you read that, then go back and look through some of the quotes I used in last week's look at Alinsky's community organizing guide, I think you'll see one of the reasons that I think community organizing and science might really work well together.