This is why politicians shouldn't choose what science projects get funded: John McCain puts his science ignorance on display by knocking a population genetic study on bears he knows nothing about. All he knows is that it was bears, DNA, and 3 million dollars. (Link is to Sean's post at Cosmic Variance, where he takes on the specific issue more in depth. And yes I know that on some major projects there is direct legislative intervention, and in massive financial commitments - much more than $3 million - it's appropriate. But in most day-to-day research, peer-review plays the main role in allocating money.) What is it with our culture that politicians think they can score points by pretending to know they can identify worthwhile science just at a glance? I suppose McCain also thinks it was a waste of millions of dollars to sequence the opossum and platypus genomes - who cares about a platypus, right? One reason it can be so tricky for a layperson to distinguish good science from bad is that in most fields, you address big scientific questions by picking a narrow, tractable system. While some physicists can directly study objects of fundamental importance (an electron is an electron is an electron), most physicists, biologists, earth scientists, etc. pick some specific thing - worm genital development, yeast sugar metabolism, cilia assembly in algae (just to pick a few from genetics) as a model system to study an important question. In this case, understanding the grizzly population in Montana is important both for the sake of the grizzlies, and to understand the larger health of the ecosystem in the area. It's unlikely that a random presidential candidate, hauled in off the street, will know good science from bad just by looking at the project title and the price tag. We shouldn't expect presidential candidates to always distinguish good science from bad, but they should know to keep their traps shut when they don't know the difference. The bear study was deemed scientifically worthwhile by the scientists at the US Geological Survey. It's true there was some Congressional meddling, with Montana's delegation (representing the state where the study was carried out) adding money to a project that had already been approved by scientists who could judge the merit of the project. McCain says his point is really about earmarks and not scientific merit but that's not what his ad on "wasteful government spending" says: "$3 million to study the DNA of bears in Montana - outrageous!"