"This is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius. . . ."

Over a sheet of notebook paper and a homemade mocha the other day, I realized that I have enough entry ideas to last me through Valentine's Day 2007. It's so bad I don't know what to cover next: John Stossel's conflict of interest with the Palmer Chitester Fund? NCATE's capitulation to NAS and FIRE over the dreaded phrase "social justice"? The fact that the Treasury Department's own statistics show that Bush's tax cuts won't even pay for 10% of the revenue which they will lose the federal government?

But then I thought that maybe I should have a different kind of entry, an entry that might cheer everybody up. So:

2004 was a banner year for science--and for the fortunes of both progressives and moderate Republicans. This is because 2004 saw the publication of two of the most important science articles of the past hundred years. The first was published in the March 27 issue of the Lancet, and was titled "Breast Cancer and Abortion: Collaborative Reanalysis of Data from 53 Epidemiological Studies, including 83,000 Women with Breast Cancer from 16 Countries." The second was published in the December 3 issue of Science and was titled "Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change"--an infinitely sexier title.

Anthropogenic (Human-Caused) Global Warming
The latter article was an analysis by Naomi Orestes of 928 article abstracts from peer-reviewed science journals having to do with the subject of global warming which were published between 1993 and 2003. Of those papers which dealt either directly or indirectly with the causes of global warming, not a single one took issue with the position that recent global warming is caused primarily by human industrial activity. Not one.

No longer could global warming denialists argue that scientists disagreed among themselves about the causes of global warming--not that they really could anyway, after the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science all issued statements and/or reports in favor of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis (all before 2004). It is, however, one thing to be able to say "Look at all these scientific organizations that are on board with the idea of anthropogenic global warming:" it is quite another to be able to add, as progressives and moderate Republicans can now, "and look at how few journal articles the other side has published!"

The ABC Link
The Lancet article, on the other hand, put the nail in the coffin of the idea that abortion increases a woman's risk for breast cancer. The largest study of its type ever performed, it examined (as the title indicates) 83,000 women with breast cancer (holy cow!) from 16 different countries (holy crap!).

This abortion-breast cancer (or ABC) link is not as preposterous as it sounds: women who take a pregancy to full term have a decreased risk of breast cancer, while rats whose pregnancies are terminated have a higher risk for certain kinds of tumors. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, scientists checked into this possible link--and got wildly varying results. Of course, the ABC link has been used again and again by anti-choicers to argue that abortion is a terrible, dangerous, carcinogenic procedure which ought to be outlawed at once--and, as is so often the case with the far right, the empirical data are really beside the point.

Most of the studies which showed an ABC link involved scientists asking women "Do you have breast cancer?" and "Have you ever had an abortion?" The problem, of course, is that people lie about abortion. Further, it may be the case that women who know that the causes of breast cancer are being investigated and who have breast cancer themselves might be more likely to divulge previous abortions than women with no personal stake in the study--a phenomenon known as response bias. In January 1997, the Danish scientist Mads Melbye and his group published a paper in Epidemiology and Community Health which got rid of the response bias problem: since Denmark records all abortions and also has a national cancer registry, Melbye could get data straight from the horse's mouth--data that included records for 10,246 women with breast cancer. Guess what? No response bias, no ABC link. Oh, and I almost forgot: rats don't have breasts.

But the 2004 study in the Lancet did Melbye et al. one better: it wasn't limited to Denmark (data from 16 different countries were involved), and it dealt with more than eight times the number of breast cancer sufferers. The Lancet study covered 53 previous studies on the ABC link, dividing them into two varieties: the "prospective" kind (data on women was collected before the diagnosis of breast cancer, as it was in the Melbye et al. study, thus removing the response bias problem) and the "retrospective" kind (data was collected only after the women were diagnosed with breast cancer, thus making response bias an issue). Sure enough, the only way to support the ABC link empirically is with retrospective studies. The prospective studies--the ones without response bias issues--showed nothing.

"Onward, Christian Soldiers. . . ."
Yeah, 2004 was pretty good, all right: both the evolution-denying, heterosexist, abstinence-only, anti-abortion social conservatives and the hyper-corporatist, planet-raping, poverty-inducing free-market conservatives took body blows from which they will never fully recover. No, there is no confusion about what causes global warming. No, there is no causal link between abortion and breast cancer.

And the best part? This is only the beginning. As time goes on, more and more studies will come out in support of views held by moderate Republicans and progressives and against those held by the far right. Just as no one any longer believes that "miscegenation" between African Americans and European Americans is a troubling soical problem, it is only a matter of time before far-righters are forced to concede their views, for example, about the rapaciousness, mental illness, and pedophilic tendencies of gays and lesbians--or else concede their credibility.

Of course, there will always be free-market fundamentalists and religious fundamentalists who place personal gain and the idea of a Protestant Police State over the facts and over the needs of those less fortunate, regardless of what Jesus says. However, with each tiny square that can be made impassible to hardline conservative pieces, progressives and moderate Republicans gain a square of their own which allows their own pieces more breathing room. And the more such squares the two non-psychotic sides have, the more debate and bipartisan effort can be used to fix the problems that we face as a culture, as a nation, and as a species.