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?
It's all Abraham Lincoln's fault. He should have just let the Confederacy become it's own country. Then we wouldn't have all those rednecks in the USA.
Having a discussion about the moral and ethical problems involved with embryonic stem cell research is hardly attacking science. Besides, what is mostly being silenced is the scientific fact that adult stem cell therapy works and is in use while embryonic stem cell research has not lead to one single therapy to date.
While you can make such and argument, I do not think it holds water. Do you think that this website would be so popular if everyone was becoming anti-intellectual?
You bet.
Can you please prove (using science, of course) science? I mean, for something that uncovers The Truth, surely it can demonstrate that it, itself, is The Truth.
Now, I imagine that just about everyone reading this is thinking: "This is just a perfect example of all the anti-science BS that's going around." You keep telling yourself that. And while you're at it, say that God is invalid because he can't be proven. And that proving science is BS.
The real problem, as I see it, is not that America is becoming anti-science, it's that science is becoming anti-anything-else. Science is a handy tool that we can use to better understand what we observe, and then (optionally) use that understanding to some end. It does not provide The Truth and never will, though it _can_ give The Scientific Truth, and that's usually good enough. Too many people are losing sight of that and are proclaiming science is God/The Truth, and anything else is blasphemy.
Sorry for my ignorance, but I fail to understand how Evolutionary Biology should even take any part in the name "Science". It continues to look solely upon the past and plausible past events, rather than upon there here-and-now with which the rest of Science is concerned. Can somebody please tell me specifically how studying past events will ever help quench anything but our own curiosity? What does Evolutionary Biology do to help our understanding of Nature as we see it?
Maybe it is my definition of science that needs an overhaul. I was always convinced that curiosity was only the passion behind science, not the purpose. That its vital purpose is to discover and outline the laws of Nature, thereby allowing us to engineer new ways to exploit those laws to make things a little more liveable. I just don't see any Science-Engineering connection to Evolutionary Biology...
> There are quite a few people in the world who attack Christians for being ignorant of science, then go
> and attack Christianity without having made any attempt to understand it. Providentially, I'm both a
> physicist and a Christian.
Understand it? there is no simple "understanding of it" that is possible. This is clearly demonstrated by the facts that:
1. so many "followers of the book" are quite eager to kill one another over differrences in their interpretation of it
2. so many christian religious schools spend so much of their time learning how to interpret minor parts of the bible in order to support their particular sect
3. there is any value in graduate studies in christian theology - if the book was "understandable" and not subject to so much interpretation then it would read like a printer repair manual.
Back to your post:
> as is clearly shown by Peter's dream in Acts.
Beyond the question of whether or not the thousands of christian, jewish, and islamic sects would agree with you in your interpretation...please, if there is a god that is omnipotent and omniscient I would sincerely hope that he would communicate a little more clearly than via one person's dreams from 2,000 years ago. Heck, it sounds like something out of a Diskworld novel.
The Truth is, America has a history of negating change. Early in the medieval era, The church had established that the world was the centre of the universe and galileo was locked up because he said 'it revolves around sun'. Americans and British faught to stop this 'new' thinking, which seemed 'un-acceptable'. Now we are finaly at a time when we can disprove most of evolution theory. It is true, there is evolution within species, but to say that at one point, the monkey has a baby that looks like a human being, and by some freak chance of nature he survives and all others die out, because apparently having no hair and a brain helps alot. Evolutionists go a bit too far by saying 'everything we have today is a random chance'. The 11 constants of the universe, the mass of the proton, the mass of the electron, is all just random chance. Plank's constant just by some roll of the dice happens to be that number that the entire universe adheres to. Some how it doesn't make sense when you think about this fact that had the mass of the electron been even off by 0.00000000000000000001 grams, the Universe wouldn't exist. So is everything some random chance?. Thats just typical american thinking 'we can't explain it, so we'd say it just is'. We accept now that there was a big bang that created the universe, what caused the big bang then?. Letsay it 'just happened', why? and where did the energy come from?. 'We don't know yet, but someday we would' hehe. Just look around, you guys, we already have an explanaition, live with it until its proven wrong. To say 'it just is'.. is not just unscientific, its what a lay man would say. At the time of charls darwin maybe it made sense that everything is the same, but now, after knowing soo much about human biology and the biology of all other creatures on our planet, and astronomical facts about how everything happened, its time to 're-think' the entire theory.
You believe in mutations & natural selection but not evolution?
You're even more fucked up that the Intelligent Design loonies. Please re-read the party line: ID is a theory of evolution.
It has to be - evolution was proven in the 19th century - the only thing left to argue about is the mechanism.
Only a young earth creationist could deny evolution.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Having said that, I do think there's a difference in the motivations of the corporate donors. I think many of the larger donations to Clinton's Democratic Party were seen as a kind of insurance. In contrast, the donations to BushCo are seen as investments. (And remember that Dubya's #1 investor was that master of shaky investments, Enron.) There are still some traces of philosophic differences between the parties, but they are almost totally eclipsed behind the big money now. In that scenario, the "best" way for the Democrats to "win" is to become bigger gangsters than BushCo. The "win" in quotes because the country loses in almost every case.
I also think your praise of Reagan is misdirected. His main contribution to the present mess was to demonstrate that a bogus puppet can be a "successful" President. However, I admit that he is quite different from Dubya. Reagan was essentially incapable of lying. Whatever he saw on the teleprompter was the truth to him, and no problem if it was diametrically opposed to yesterday's "truth". This was natural from his background as an actor, even for the B grade. While Dubya is pretty dumb, sometimes he knows he's lying, and then he gets all fumble-mouthed.
My belief about the real root of the problem is that it came from "free" radio broadcasts. The explosive growth of the advertising industry was not about creating better educated citizens and voters. It was about manipulating suckers, and ultimately has created a nation where 30% of the voters are easily manipulated by Karl Rove and his ilk, and 40% are too disgusted (or manipulated into passivity?) to even bother voting.
As it applies to the main topic, the signficance of the anti-science fanatics is that they are a "cheap" block of votes. Just agree with them on their key issue, and you get that block of votes. Later on you can make excuses about why you couldn't deliver *all* of the promised craziness, though that may not matter as long as the fanatics believe the opposition disagrees.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.