Slashdot Mirror
Is The U.S. Becoming Anti-Science?
smooth wombat writes "As a follow-up to a recently posted Slashdot article, Reuters UK has an article which poses the question: is the U.S. becoming hostile to science? From the article: 'Among the most significant forces is the rising tide of anti-science sentiment that seems to have its nucleus in Washington but which extends throughout the nation,' said Stanford's Philip Pizzo in a letter posted on the school Web site on October 3. Cornell acting President Hunter Rawlings, in his state of the university address last week, spoke about the challenge to science represented by intelligent design which holds that the theory of evolution accepted by the vast majority of scientists is fatally flawed. Rawlings said the dispute was widening political, social, religious and philosophical rifts in U.S. society. 'When ideological division replaces informed exchange, dogma is the result and education suffers,' he said." What is your take?
that pretty much sums it up.
> I don't see science interfering with religion. I can't think of a time > in this country when science attempted intrude upon a house of worship... Pardon my dust. I accidentally anthropomorphism "science", when what I really meant to refer to was the scientific equivalent of religious fanatics. And yes, they don't enter intrude houses of worship and tell people what to do, but nor do religious fanatics enter places of science and tell people what to do. It's a battle of ideas, and mostly lots of calling people 'stupid'. > The religous right actively tries to interfere with the practice of > science; protesting and passing laws against scientific practices > and teachings they are not approving of - stem cell research, evolution, > abortion (medicine is applied science after all) and so forth. Two of those things (stem cells + abortion) are barely religious, and are actually more like qusi-scientific questions made religious because that served as an effective polarizer (so more support could be gained and such). "Abortion is murder life begins at conception! No it's not, life begins at birth!" There's no religion there, unless you think murder is some stupid religious thing. The only question is when life begins, hardly a religious point. Stem cells follow the same idea. Just like everyone thought Dr. Mengele's experiments on humans were wrong, using humans for their stem cells is wrong if pre-born babies are considered human. Finally evolution. Let's face it, there is very little value in this. Period. What purpose does evolution serve? How does it help the world? The time scales are too large to matter. If humanity was going to create a new species, it'd be through ID (with our I), rather than evolution. In short: It's just a flame war. Nothing to see here. Finally, No, I don't think religion is great. Science is certainly more useful. It's just that it's important to see things as they are, rather than getting all whipped up into a finger pointing frenzy. (Not that you were, it's just the general case, unfortunately.)
Can you think of any useful applications for any aspect of biology? Um...medicine?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized!