By Glynn Wilson –

PHILADELPHIA, Pa. — When Benjamin Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society in 1743, 33 years before he signed the Declaration of Independence as a member of the Continental Congress, he recognized the need for an organization that would bring together the brightest thinkers of the day to share their scientific experiments and findings.

He named the organization for the common term at the time for the study of science: “natural philosophy.”

Franklin died in 1790, one year after Congress ratified the United States Constitution and 19 years before Charles Darwin was born in 1809. So we can’t know what he thought of the theory of evolution and natural selection.

But it is not hard to imagine what he would have thought of people and politicians like Donald Trump who deny that scientific knowledge is important.

He would probably have thought of something funny to say, although increasingly, I am not finding it particularly funny.

If you want to know what Trump thinks, all you have to do is a Twitter search. CNN did it last year and found 106 tweets in which Trump mentions “global warming” and 36 in which he used the phrase “climate change.”

Back in 2012, he said something that would have gotten him banned from YouTube and Facebook like the conspiracy media nut Alex Jones: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

Talk about “fake news.”

In 2013, he said: “We should be focused on magnificently clean and healthy air and not distracted by the expensive hoax that is global warming!”

“Give me clean, beautiful and healthy air – not the same old climate change (global warming) bullshit! I am tired of hearing this nonsense,” he tweeted in 2014.

In 2015, as if “belief” in science was the same as “belief” in religion, Trump said: “I’m not a believer in man-made global warming.”

Of course Trump also thinks the New York Times is a “failing newspaper,” and clearly he never read it in the first place. Like most of the 100 IQ or below uneducated people who voted for him and still support his presidency, he gets all his news from cable television, mainly the right-wing, nationalistic, partisan Fox News network, which studies now show makes people less informed about facts and reality than not paying attention to news at all. Now that’s a sad fact.

“Well, I think the climate change is just a very, very expensive form of tax,” Trump said in 2016, after he started running for president. He didn’t know the difference between scientific research on disasters resulting from a warming planet and taxes, yet people voted for him in droves.

Why? Because above all, they were not going to vote for “her,” a.k.a. “crooked Hillary Clinton.”

In a recent Sunday magazine, the Times published a long, depressing piece concluding that it may be too late to save planet Earth, at least for human life.

Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

But of course Trump wouldn’t dare read it. His staff would not have the guts to show it to him. And if Fox News mentions it at all, it will be made fun of as “liberal” propaganda designed to get Democrats elected — as if everything that happens on the planet has to do with partisan politics. That’s the picture painted by cable news.

Yet most of the liberal Democrats I know seem quite content to depend on TV or Facebook for most of their news, although they watch CNN or MSNBC instead of Fox.

As I visited Independence Square, Independence Hall and the American Philosophical Society Museum on the property this past week, something that might only make it on local TV news in Philly, I wondered what Franklin would have thought of the 20th century invention of television. And as one of the early newspaper publishers in this new country back when, I wonder what he would think of television news and the near death of the newspaper as a source of news everywhere but New York and Washington?

Not that television is all bad. After making it back to DC from Philly this week, I watched a NOVA scientific documentary on public television about the Making of North America that draws on Darwin’s theory and shows how life evolved here over millions and billions of years.

Making North America: Paleontologist Kirk Johnson explores how the continent was shaped — and how it shaped us.

Somehow I don’t think Trump or any of his acolytes even know there is a public television channel, or if they know about it at all, they probably consider it liberal propaganda too, promoting myths we don’t need. I mean we already have the biggest myth of them all, an old book that tells us all we need to know about life and earth, the damn Christian Bible, full of questionable history and ill-informed opinions that would have to be labeled “editorials” in any 20th century objective newspaper.

Of course many newspapers are partially to blame for public ignorance, since many of them made healthy profits from church ads by promoting religion with entire sections for decades. The religious point of view of the world was treated as equal to the scientific view, in the interest of publishing “both sides.”

Couple that with low voter turnout numbers in the U.S. and I guess it is not that hard to understand why someone like Trump could win an election for president.

So if enough people are not going to get off the couch to act in the interest of saving themselves by practicing the nearly sacred right to vote here, it may be too late. But before we all drown in the rising seas or burn in the fires and die, you might want to put together the budget to visit the museum and see the exhibit called “In Franklin’s Footsteps” that shows how APS members have continued Franklin’s Enlightenment mission since 1743.

Franklin’s original charge for members was to pursue “all philosophical Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things, tend to increase the Power of Man over Matter, and multiply the Conveniences or Pleasures of Life.”

Highlights in the exhibition include Franklin’s library chair, an original journal from the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Charles Darwin’s handwritten title page of On the Origin of Species, Neil Armstrong’s annotated and signed copy of the moon landing transcript, and more.

According to the official public information on the organization, members “continue to discuss challenging topics with recent meeting symposiums on climate change, the nature of democracy, and the future of higher education.”

In a recent presentation, climate scientist Warren M. Washington highlighted the importance of explorer Elisha Kent Kane’s meteorological data collected in Greenland from 1853 to 1855.

“This type of historical record allows scientists like Washington to track long-term climate trends,” the group says on it’s website.

Anthropologist and paleobiologist Nina Jablonski’s label accompanies the handwritten title page to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, noting that while Darwin only mentioned humans once in his book, he provided the theoretical framework for understanding human evolution.

“I hope visitors will be surprised with the variety of historical objects and topics represented in this exhibition — everything from Franklin to the moon — and that they will come away with some memorable stories about our members,” APS Museum Director Merrill Mason says.

Since the exhibition can only hold a small fraction of the society’s 13 million treasures, visitors are able to explore the collections more deeply via a touch-screen kiosk on everything from Early American History, the History of Science, Natural History, even Native American History.

Special events complement the themes of the exhibition, including a series of lectures on “Useful Knowledge 101” that cover unexpected yet practical topics on everything from the ecology of Philadelphia to the history of beer. Now that’s a topic worthy of discussion at City Tavern.

If you just can’t make it in person before we all end up under water or burned in a California wildfire, check out the APS website. Tell them you heard about it here first, and don’t forget to help save an American press online with a small donation today.

What do you think Franklin would have said about Trump’s ‘War on Science?’ The comment section is open below.

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