The public doesn’t need to accept or even understand the implications of “extremist” positions for extremists to have a negative effect. It wasn’t that long ago that a House representative tried to de-fund someone’s grant for pigeon research, on the grounds that it was “wasteful” and had nothing to do with the mission of NIMH. Sarah Palin thinks research on fruit flies is ridiculous, and she was almost Vice President.

Apparently less than half of the population accepts evolution, so it’s not hard to imagine that people could be convinced that animals are just “too different” from people to justify such “wasteful spending.” Animal researchers are just greedy for grants, like those dubious atmospheric scientists trying to scare everybody. It’s easy to demagogue with these sorts of arguments, especially since America’s finances are…really bad. What happens when the dollar is replaced by something else as the world reserve currency and things get even worse?