But where science meets journalism and politics, funny things happen

From NY Times Unsettles Some Science by Walter Russell Mead.

These stories have something in common: they involve study of a very complex system. The human body is so complicated, with so many feedback mechanisms and independent variables at work, that it is often extremely hard to answer seemingly simple questions. Simple systems are easier for scientists to analyze; complex ones are much harder.

Journalists generally don’t appreciate or care about the difference. And over-eager policy jocks don’t want to take the fine points and uncertainties into account. They want action and they want it now.

[snip]

But where science meets journalism and politics, funny things happen, distinctions get blurred, and the tentative findings of scientists turn into iron laws. This is almost always a cause of bad policy. Coercive social policies based on tentative analyses of complex systems are justified much more rarely than activists think.