Following up on Saturday's entry about the meme that united the world, I was struck by this piece (via InstaPundit) on how science plays into the debate over female genital mutilation. The gist of the piece is that some scientists may be fudging (or possibly just misunderstanding) research results to show that female genital mutilation is more likely to be harmful to reproduction than the evidence actually indicates. This "politically correct" interpretation of the data is brought forward in the service of the movement to abolish the practice altogether.

So now we have a new meme, much more serious than "Americans are stupid." We'll call this one "FGM harms reproduction." The linked piece suggests that this meme -- like "Americans are stupid" -- has proponents who are more concerned with its usefulness than its truthfulness. I certainly don't know enough about the research to venture an opinion. And while I'm pretty much in favor of any argument against what I consider to be a cruel and dehumanizing ritual, the notion of skewing scientific findings in the service of a greater cause -- even a really noble cause -- is pretty disturbing.

I noted in my earlier essay that passing memes on primarily because they are useful -- without regard to their truth content -- creates major questions about how much valid information is really making its way into blogs, Digg, Wikipedia, and other venues. Of course, everyone expects that a lot of that information will be subjective, partisan, slanted. But when scientific ideas get sticky because of their political expedience, the threshold of risk gets lowered considerably.

The major critique that has been raised against current research in climate change is that it is mostly political ideas wrapped in scientific language. Then again, maybe the critique is politics disguised as science. It's actually kind of hard to tell, and being socially or politically predisposed to see the issue a certain way only makes it harder.

Philip K. Dick wrote that reality is that which, when we stop believing in it, doesn't go away. We expect science to be one of those factors that helps us gauge reality as we go, and thus -- we hope -- avoid getting knocked on our butts by reality when it becomes unavoidable. Unfortunately, science can't serve two masters. The more we use it to produce expedient or otherwise politically useful findings, the less it will be able to tell us about how things really are.

And, you know, we really need to know how things are.