How to Make Sure Children Are Scientifically Illiterate

Let alone how someone who denies all that science could ever graduated with a degree in a scientific field and succeed as a vet!

I'm just waiting for a creationist/IDist lawyer to use John Bacon's argument. "You found the fingerprints of my client in the victim's blood? What's your point? You weren't there, and neither was I, so what are you whining about?"

Maybe Luskin will do it. No, just kidding, IDists/creos don't use their "logic" in real life, they just use it to attack "materialistic science" where it offends them. In fact evolutionary theory would not be possible without the reliance upon scientific thinking by most of society, including puritans and fundamentalists. They have only themselves to blame that science is also used in biological matters.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/b8ykm

Well, the "you weren't there" argument is closely followed by "so what the evidence means is all a matter of interpretation".

Lawyers use this tactic all the time, trying to convince juries that what seems to be damning evidence is just the other side's spin.

Well, the "you weren't there" argument is closely followed by "so what the evidence means is all a matter of interpretation".

Lawyers use this tactic all the time, trying to convince juries that what seems to be damning evidence is just the other side's spin.

"But when we win minor skirmishes, as we did in Kansas, we must remember that the issue is far deeper than this. We must hold our elected school officials to certain basic standards of knowledge about the world. The battle is not against faith, but against ignorance."

Why isn't the battle against ignorance AND faith? What is faith, but willing oneself to believe something to a degree of certainty which exceeds that warranted by the available evidence? And how exactly, is doing *that* ever a good idea, and why should it not be considered a failing rather than as it more commonly seems to be considered, a virtue?

The battle IS against faith, because faith leads directly to ignorance -- to IGNORing evidence. Faith is ALL ABOUT ignoring evidence.

Stand up and smash the facade of faith to pieces in the public eye. Faith needs to be painted as the sheer, complete idiocy that it is.

Comment #119764 Posted by Glen Davidson on August 15, 2006 11:23 AM (e) | kill I'm just waiting for a creationist/IDist lawyer to use John Bacon's argument. "You found the fingerprints of my client in the victim's blood? What's your point? You weren't there, and neither was I, so what are you whining about?"

Comment #119778 Posted by SteveC on August 15, 2006 11:37 AM (e) | kill ... The battle IS against faith, because faith leads directly to ignorance --- to IGNORing evidence. Faith is ALL ABOUT ignoring evidence. Stand up and smash the facade of faith to pieces in the public eye. Faith needs to be painted as the sheer, complete idiocy that it is.

Well, the "you weren't there" argument is closely followed by "so what the evidence means is all a matter of interpretation". Lawyers use this tactic all the time, trying to convince juries that what seems to be damning evidence is just the other side's spin.

From SteveC: Why isn't the battle against ignorance AND faith? What is faith, but willing oneself to believe something to a degree of certainty which exceeds that warranted by the available evidence? And how exactly, is doing *that* ever a good idea, and why should it not be considered a failing rather than as it more commonly seems to be considered, a virtue? The battle IS against faith, because faith leads directly to ignorance --- to IGNORing evidence. Faith is ALL ABOUT ignoring evidence. Stand up and smash the facade of faith to pieces in the public eye. Faith needs to be painted as the sheer, complete idiocy that it is.

"I can separate them," he continued, adding, "My personal views of Scripture have no room in the science classroom."

Translation: his belief in a young Earth is a fraud, which he (quietly) kicks aside when reality demands it. For all practical purposes, he appears (at this time at least) to recognize, "de facto," that his personal belief does not stand up to real science, and is not really "true" in the objective sense in which "F=ma" is true.

Better yet, let's not have this argument again at all.

SteveC wrote:

What is faith, but willing oneself to believe something to a degree of certainty which exceeds that warranted by the available evidence?

There's a very important distinction to be made here, so read the following sentence carefully: "willing oneself to believe something to a degree of certainty which exceeds that warranted by the available evidence" is not the same thing as "willing oneself to believe something that is actually contradicted by the available evidence." (Ditto B. Spitzer's comment.)

Stand up and smash the facade of faith to pieces in the public eye. Faith needs to be painted as the sheer, complete idiocy that it is.

Which faith(s) are you talking about? They're not all identical, you know.

Good comments by B. Spitzer, imo.

If you want a place to discuss such issues, the KCFS forums at http://www.kcfs.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi are open 24/7 also,

Kansas is doing great! But over at Bill's Blog they apparently find the teaching of science to kids to be a laughing matter. It's depressing how science is treated among some people.

http://cedros.globat.com/~thebrites.org/DarwinYouth/index_DS.html

"

Obviously Mr.Bacon has been reading a lot of Ken Ham since this is a "Ham classic" !

"You weren't there, and neither was I, so what are you whining about?"

What is faith, but willing oneself to believe something to a degree of certainty which exceeds that warranted by the available evidence?

For all practical purposes, he appears (at this time at least) to recognize, "de facto," that his personal belief does not stand up to real science, and is not really "true" in the objective sense in which "F=ma" is true.

Yeah right, where they there when God created Earth. Humans were only created at day 7.....

the site is really having issues today.

A few more, beyond just Mark Twain:

Faith, n:
That quality which enables us to believe what we know to be untrue. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), "The Devil's Dictionary"

Faith is an island in the setting sun
But proof, yes proof is the bottom line for everyone.
Paul Simon

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)

The way to see by Faith is to shut the eyes of Reason.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Poor Richard 1758

Faith that is not skeptical of any voice claiming to be the voice of God is not faith, but fanaticism.... When society is faced with fanatics, we need more doubting Thomases, not more true believers.
Rev. Robert M. Herhold

I slept with Faith, and found a corpse in my arms on awaking; I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning.
Aleister Crowley, "The Book Of Lies"

Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits.
Dan Barker

(sigh)

Is it time for another pointless religious war already . . . . ?

I still don't understand whether Sal knows how lousy his arguments are, or whether he really believes them.

No, sorry, designing the simulation itself is not sneaking in intelligent design. No sorry, mutating the simulation itself is not the same thing as genetic mutation to the things IN the simulation. How many times can he make variations on these same lousy arguments and pretend he's explaining something new or insightful?

His problem is that laypeople can grasp these things pretty darn well. The environment exists. It has various features. Populations of reproducing elements exist with heredity. They have wide variations. Put the two together, and the population is going to end up containing information about the environment imprinted onto it by virtue of what gets selected out. Furthermore, the exact particulars of the solutions aren't going to be controlled or directed by the environment, because it isn't the environmental features themselves that created them. The picture isn't that complicated. That information gets added to the population is obvious. You can complain that maybe this information already existed in the environment, but in that case you are just equivocating by defining information to mean something different than what we were looking for in the first place. And under that second definition, he still loses, because the novel forms that emerge aren't specified in the environment at all, and so are again quite easy to see an increase in the information content (it's just that no longer are we talking about information about something, as we were before, but now information about how we can go about acheiving a particular something).

What's left for him to say in the face of that? Nothing. So it's long diatribes about how there are so many engineers on his side, yadda yadda yadda.

"I can separate them," he continued, adding, "My personal views of Scripture have no room in the science classroom."

the site is really having issues today

steve s the site is really having issues today What I've been saying... Heck, even Popper's Ghost agrees with us, and that automatically makes it so, Mr. Sulu!

. As Mark Twain put it so succinctly, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."

What an idiotic definition of faith! Where did that come from? What religion defines faith that way? Certainly not Christianity. That is not the faith that is spoken of in the bible, not even close. Perhaps you are talking of Islam or an eastern religion?

— heddle

A key concern should not be whether Dr. Abrams's religious views have a place in the classroom, but rather how someone whose religious views require a denial of essentially all modern scientific knowledge can be chairman of a state school board.

You guys are all assuming that the best argument can prevail politically. In fact, the most powerful faction will prevail and enforce its opinions on everyone else. Truthiness, not logic, is all that's required.

Over the past few decades the Right has simultaneously revolutionized the curriculum in non-elite K-12 education to a memorize-and-regurgitate model while sneaking in as much Bible-based material as it can get away with. It's easy to rouse the rabble to cut science funding along with art and gym, in favor of social-engineering messages such as DARE and abstinence. Meanwhile, the elite, in their publicly assisted schools such as St. Paul's and Groton, get actual critical-thinking skills and the truth about science. This is a deliberate and clever strategy to make democracy impossible because the broad electorate cannot think, only react.

Meanwhile, in the universities, the lack of opportunity for someone whose family doesn't have the money to support him or her through the first couple of years of grad school virtually ensures that the lower classes will not have any advanced education in the sciences. Scientists, who have mostly been a reactionary force in the universities (as they perceive the left, with its distrust of extraction industries, genetic manipulation, nuclear war, and many other blessings of contemporary science) as the enemy. Only in the last few years has their support of the GOP and its defense-based patronage come to bite them in the butt. The time to oppose the indoctrination of the masses in superstition-based reaction was 20 years ago, but scientists were too busy trying to starve the liberal arts out of existence to perceive that the closing of the American mind threatened them, too.

Consider the widespread resort to quack remedies, often ridiculed on sites like Quackwatch. Sure, it's absurd to resort to herbal teas when advanced medicine is available. For nearly 50 million Americans, almost all employed, medicine is not available, and quack remedies are all they've got. When I was a kid, such seeming miracles as the conquest of polio, together with the widespread feeling that such benefits accrued to nearly all Americans, led to a widespread fascination with science and approval of its aims. The space program also gave Americans a positive view of science.

Today, for many in the masses, medicine is just another way the elite stay prettier and healthier than those who do the hard work they depend on. Biology is speeding us toward a future where an aristocracy will look like Brad and Jen and live to 150, while the unaugmented lower classes will be obviously marked for drudgery by their defective vision, skin problems, all the ails that are normal for humanity now but will be edited out of the genome of the Homo superior. Biology is also heading us toward a future in which the natural species we are used to will disappear in favor of very expensive super-wheat, meat in a petri dish, and a planet doused with insecticides, and the victims of this mad science are utterly powerless to resist. Physicists calmly plot how to make nukes useful again.

In short, for the common person, science means oppression and a horrible (possibly null) future, carried out by an elite of persons with whom they have no contact and who have engineered things so that nobody they know will be admitted to the ivory temple.

For those who are so contemptuous of faith: If the result of science and technology is the extinction of humanity as we know it in a mushroom cloud, might it not be better for people at large if Einstein and Bohr and Oppenheimer had never existed? Isn't it possible they'd be happier under a regime of religious superstition than the brutal "truth" of science, that apparently, inevitably leads to either an unimaginable holocaust or the end of the human species thanks to genetic manipulation that will turn the lucky into supermen?

It's easy to blame the rubes for their ignorance. It's not so easy for scientists to own up to the degree they have allied with those who would foster such ignorance in the name of preserving their war dollars and making sure the lower classes don't threaten their relatively cushy jobs.

The doctrinal differences [between Christianity and Islam] aren't important.

Heddle, if you have time to waste on such trivial matters, why don't you spend some time to answer the many questions that you haven't in the other threads?

The internet knows and remembers all. And the internet remembers that you avoid re-evaluating your empirically disproven comments.

Heddle,

What is your definition of faith, then? If you have any evidence whatsoever to accept the truth of something then doesn't that negate the need for imploring faith?

It's easy to blame the rubes for their ignorance. It's not so easy for scientists to own up to the degree they have allied with those who would foster such ignorance in the name of preserving their war dollars and making sure the lower classes don't threaten their relatively cushy jobs.

Why isn't the battle against ignorance AND faith? What is faith, but willing oneself to believe something to a degree of certainty which exceeds that warranted by the available evidence? And how exactly, is doing *that* ever a good idea, and why should it not be considered a failing rather than as it more commonly seems to be considered, a virtue? The battle IS against faith, because faith leads directly to ignorance --- to IGNORing evidence. Faith is ALL ABOUT ignoring evidence. Stand up and smash the facade of faith to pieces in the public eye. Faith needs to be painted as the sheer, complete idiocy that it is.

LogicalMan,

First and foremost, biblical faith is not "blind faith." Nor is it a synonym for belief. It is much closer in meaning to the word "trust." That is, to live by faith does not just mean "to believe in Jesus as your personallordandsaviour" and it does not mean merely to obey his commands. It means to believe that those commands are good.

That biblical faith is not the "blind faith", that SteveC described, is demonstrable. God has not cursed the faithlessness of those who demanded irrefutable physical evidence. If you are interested, you can read this. It even has an ID connection.

k.e: This is very simple, I think you can grasp it if you try really hard:

Christianity: Jesus is God.
Islam: Jesus is not God.

If I saw Jesus, I would say: "there stands God."
If a Moslem saw Jesus, he would say: "there stands a man, not a god."

See? Not the same god at all!

Are you offended that I claimed Mohammed was a false prophet (that is, a charlatan)? I doubt any thinking Moslem would be offended---they would just think I was wrong. Just like I am not offended that a Moslem does not think Jesus is God.

Which of these describes your view:

1) Mohammed was a true prophet, therefore I am a Moslem. (Sensible)
2) Mohammed was a false prophet, therefore I am not a Moslem. (Sensible)
3) Mohammed was a true prophet, but I am not a Moslem. (Dumb)
4) Mohammed was a false prophet, but still I am a Moslem. (Dumber)

It seems you must choose between intolerance (as you define it) or stupidity.

Heddle you are thicker than a 2 x 4

Who was JC's god?

Heddle you are thicker than a 2 x 4

Who was JC's god?

Heddle - Give it a rest. I swear - You are the smarmiest poster on this site, and IMO your rudeness puts you in line for another good disemvowelling.

You could try to rememember that the other posters are people too, and show them some courtesy or what some call a "Christian" respect. Oh. I see. A Christian respect like in the Inquisition, or the sack of Jerusalem?

However, as the Rev Dr. Lenny would say, Who cares what you think about religion? Why should any of us believe the way you do? Your beliefs are no better than anyone elses.

Go talk to Carol or something.

Heddle - Give it a rest. I swear - You are the smarmiest poster on this site, and IMO your rudeness puts you in line for another good disemvowelling.

Are you on 'ludes? One believes that Jesus is God, and that he died on the cross and was resurrected. The other that believes he was merely a good teacher who wasn't really crucified. Ergo, they do not profess the same God. One believes that Mohammed was a true prophet, the other believes that he was a charlatan. The differences are rather substantive.

— heddle

Meanwhile, in the universities, the lack of opportunity for someone whose family doesn't have the money to support him or her through the first couple of years of grad school virtually ensures that the lower classes will not have any advanced education in the sciences. Scientists, who have mostly been a reactionary force in the universities (as they perceive the left, with its distrust of extraction industries, genetic manipulation, nuclear war, and many other blessings of contemporary science) as the enemy. Only in the last few years has their support of the GOP and its defense-based patronage come to bite them in the butt. The time to oppose the indoctrination of the masses in superstition-based reaction was 20 years ago, but scientists were too busy trying to starve the liberal arts out of existence to perceive that the closing of the American mind threatened them, too.

Today, for many in the masses, medicine is just another way the elite stay prettier and healthier than those who do the hard work they depend on. Biology is speeding us toward a future where an aristocracy will look like Brad and Jen and live to 150, while the unaugmented lower classes will be obviously marked for drudgery by their defective vision, skin problems, all the ails that are normal for humanity now but will be edited out of the genome of the Homo superior. Biology is also heading us toward a future in which the natural species we are used to will disappear in favor of very expensive super-wheat, meat in a petri dish, and a planet doused with insecticides, and the victims of this mad science are utterly powerless to resist. Physicists calmly plot how to make nukes useful again. In short, for the common person, science means oppression and a horrible (possibly null) future, carried out by an elite of persons with whom they have no contact and who have engineered things so that nobody they know will be admitted to the ivory temple.

For those who are so contemptuous of faith: If the result of science and technology is the extinction of humanity as we know it in a mushroom cloud, might it not be better for people at large if Einstein and Bohr and Oppenheimer had never existed? Isn't it possible they'd be happier under a regime of religious superstition than the brutal "truth" of science, that apparently, inevitably leads to either an unimaginable holocaust or the end of the human species thanks to genetic manipulation that will turn the lucky into supermen? It's easy to blame the rubes for their ignorance. It's not so easy for scientists to own up to the degree they have allied with those who would foster such ignorance in the name of preserving their war dollars and making sure the lower classes don't threaten their relatively cushy jobs.

No, [the differences are] not substantive in the sense we're talking about.

And what sense was that again?

I guess we should start making religious descrimination to prevent such horrible things to happen. I can propose a question for the job interview: - Are you an anti-science, fundamentalist, Bible carrying, backward, irrational, intolerant Darwin denier person? If yes then, well, don't call us. We'll call you. NEXT!

— Mats

Robert O'Brien - I think that the "Who Is Smarmier Than Heddle" discussion should be moved to ATBC...

And what sense was that again?

— Raging Bee

Scientists, who have mostly been a reactionary force in the universities (as they perceive the left, with its distrust of .... nuclear war, and many other blessings of contemporary science) as the enemy.

— Lindsay Eck

We don't require religious tests for public officials. I believe that is written down in some obscure document known as the "US Constitution", or something like that. If anyone is interested, I'm sure a web search would find it.

Religion per se neither qualifies nor disqualifies a person from holding office.

So to talk about a person's religion - or how they would define "faith", or whatever - in respect to his qualifications for public office is more than inappropriate, it is actually dangerous.

The point of Krause's article is not about religion vs. non-religion, but scientific literacy, and, more generally, how much ignorance we in the US are going to allow in our government officials.

Nuclear war is a "blessing"?

— Mephisto

Mephisto wrote: You're deliberately obfuscating the issue. You know that Christianity and Islam are both descended from the ancient Semitic traditions. Both are Abrahamic religions. You share the same god, simply a different interpretation of his nature (whether that be singular and monotheistic, like Judaism and Islam, or trinitarian and monotheistic like Christianity). You don't share different gods in the sense that Christianity and Hinduism share different gods. Of course, you're a fundie so it's no surprise that you don't like Christianity being thrown together with Islam. At least you don't take the Pat Robertson Allah-is-a-moon-god view. ;)

Religion per se neither qualifies nor disqualifies a person from holding office.

We were talking about the nature of faith, which is not substantively different between Islam and Christianity.

"Faith" is a personal attribute, and can vary "substantively" from person to person within a single congregation. One person's faith can also change over time. Do you really think that Pat Robertson's faith is identical in "nature" to that of Pope JP-II or an illiterate Catholic peasant in, say, Bolivia?

Yes, Christians, Jews and Muslims all worship the same God of Abraham -- at least in theory -- but that in itself does not mean that persons of all three faiths see or relate to their God the same way. (If they did, then why have there been so many bloody wars between, and even within, these faiths?)

I guess we should start making religious descrimination to prevent such horrible things to happen.

Hey Heddle, I have a simple question for you . . . . .

If Jesus is God, then when Jesus said on the Cross "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me", uh, who the hell was he talking to? Himself?

On second thought, Heddle, never mind. Nobody cares about your religious opinions anyway. After all, they are no more authoritative than anyone else's. (shrug)

Heddle - Give it a rest. I swear - You are the smarmiest poster on this site, and IMO your rudeness puts you in line for another good disemvowelling.

I disagree.

[Heddle] If Jesus is God, then when Jesus said on the Cross "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me", uh, who the hell was he talking to? Himself?

Yes, Christians, Jews and Muslims all worship the same God of Abraham --- at least in theory --- but that in itself does not mean that persons of all three faiths see or relate to their God the same way.

(If they did, then why have there been so many bloody wars between, and even within, these faiths?)

Here's my main point: In our time, science is less and less conducted in the public interest.

1980s: Public health workers eradicate smallpox. 2000s: Military biologists concoct ever-deadler smallpox.

1950s: FDA, unlike corrupt European equivalents, keeps thalidomide off market. 2000s: FDA so corrupt we look to the British equivalent to see if drugs are safe; Vioxx approval causes 40,000 heart attacks, privatized research company ImClone lies about cancer results to boost stock price.

Faith-based education denies evolution; faith-based FDA denies women contraception.

Today there are few obvious benefits to society from the scientific enterprise, which is largely Defense-funded and whose products range from hastening human extinction via nuclear and biological weapons, to drugs for such imaginary diseases as "restless leg syndrome" which preserve patents by tweaking a molecule (but little progress against cancer, Alzheimer's, etc.), to surveillance devices such as RFID that allow for more oppression and control of the citizens by the government and giant corporations.

As Wilson admitted in Consilience, pursuit of science is itself a sort of faith, the faith that the knowledge found will prove beneficial. Since people in America are horribly scientifically illiterate (to add to their generally poor level of education), belief in scientists and their enterprise, especially when it seems to challenge belief in God, requires faith that the good works of science will benefit humanity. I submit there is little reason to hold such faith.

I used to tutor writing at the MIT Writing Center. At the time, MIT was said to be 80% funded by the Department of Defense. I graded a set of writing exemption exams, where the question posed had to do with whether, as a scientist or engineer, one would refuse to do research that one considered unethical. I was grading the writing, not the ethics. If I were grading the essays according to a scale of moral maturity, nearly everyone would have gotten an F.

In fact, I never met a student at MIT, grad or undergrad, who was concerned with the social implications of how he or she would make a living. The universal attitude was, "I'm not supposed to make policy. I'm a scientist/engineer/architect. The people who hire me make those decisions; I just do what I'm paid to do."

A few years ago, the South African apartheid government was trying to work on a biological agent (I think) that would selectively kill blacks. They didn't succeed, but such a thing is said to be plausible. Suppose the CIA offered a contract to American scientists to develop such an agent that would kill Arabs. How many do you think would refuse?

Given a hypothetical choice between shutting down all research today and continuing the way we're going, the majority (including me) would probably choose to shut it all down. The handful of additional deaths due to cancers we don't cure would be more than offset by the thousands who won't die thanks to our smart bombs and biological agents and napalm. That was the point of my sarcasm about the "blessings" of science.

As for the education issue, back when I was in academia (around 1990) the right set forth in print its plan to revolutionize American education. One seminal document was a collection of essays by Hirsh, putatively about cultural literacy. At the time I was teaching ESL to Asians who had approximately zero acquaintance with Western culture, and I was attracted to the idea of cultural literacy. What Hirsh, D'Souza, Bill Bennett, and others who have since become paragons of rightist thinking laid out as a paradigm was rather frightening: a memorize-and-regurgitate model based on the Great Books of dead white males. Many of us in the humanities tried to oppose such a program, but we got little support from the scientists, who generally held our fuzzy disciplines in contempt and were perfectly happy to see critical thinking on politics, economics, and social issues suppressed. A population of obedient little Do-Bes served the interests of science such as keeping the military-industrial complex well fed and voting for cool but useless boondoggles such as the International Space Station and the Superconducting Supercollider (sorry about that one, guys, but here in Texas we decided we needed our schools to have libraries more than we needed a big dig for physics geeks).

Now the non-elite schools have been successfully dumbed down and, guess what! The unthinking little yes people can't think critically about anything, including science!

If you want to win them back, you'll have to do a lot more of what's being done on this board. Furthermore, you'll have to start asking hard questions such as, "Does my work serve the good of humankind, or just my own morbid curiosity?"

If people didn't have religion they'd find some other excuse to kill each other.

If you want to win them back, you'll have to do a lot more of what's being done on this board. Furthermore, you'll have to start asking hard questions such as, "Does my work serve the good of humankind, or just my own morbid curiosity?"

— Lindsay Eck

Here's my main point: In our time, science is less and less conducted in the public interest.

— Lindsey Eck

1980s: Public health workers eradicate smallpox. 2000s: Military biologists concoct ever-deadler smallpox.

— Lindsey Eck

1950s: FDA, unlike corrupt European equivalents, keeps thalidomide off market. 2000s: FDA so corrupt we look to the British equivalent to see if drugs are safe; Vioxx approval causes 40,000 heart attacks, privatized research company ImClone lies about cancer results to boost stock price.

— Lindsey Eck

Faith-based education denies evolution; faith-based FDA denies women contraception.

— Lindsey Eck

Today there are few obvious benefits to society from the scientific enterprise,...

— Lindsey Eck

...(but little progress against cancer, Alzheimer's, etc.),

— Lindsey Eck

As Wilson admitted in Consilience, pursuit of science is itself a sort of faith, the faith that the knowledge found will prove beneficial. Since people in America are horribly scientifically illiterate (to add to their generally poor level of education), belief in scientists and their enterprise, especially when it seems to challenge belief in God, requires faith that the good works of science will benefit humanity. I submit there is little reason to hold such faith.

— Lindsey Eck

In fact, I never met a student at MIT, grad or undergrad, who was concerned with the social implications of how he or she would make a living. The universal attitude was, "I'm not supposed to make policy. I'm a scientist/engineer/architect. The people who hire me make those decisions; I just do what I'm paid to do."

— Lindsey Eck

Given a hypothetical choice between shutting down all research today and continuing the way we're going, the majority (including me) would probably choose to shut it all down.

— Lindsey Eck

The handful of additional deaths due to cancers we don't cure would be more than offset by the thousands who won't die thanks to our smart bombs and biological agents and napalm. That was the point of my sarcasm about the "blessings" of science.

— Lindsey Eck

{snip a long bit}Now the non-elite schools have been successfully dumbed down and, guess what! The unthinking little yes people can't think critically about anything, including science!

— Lindsey Eck

If people didn't have religion they'd find some other excuse to kill each other.

Michael Sutkus II - Thanks for taking the time to post. You make a whole lot of sense, and I appreciate it.

Christian schizophrenics think they can hear the voice of God or Jesus. Iranian Muslim schizophrenics become president of Iran.

Of all the uninformed, bigoted, religion-bashing statements I've read on this blog, this one has got to be the least coherent. In a hurry, norm, or just too tired?

And how many "Iranian Muslim schizophrenics" become president of Iran? That's an odd plural-to-singular segue. Or does the president of Iran have multiple personalities, each of them schizophrenic?

I agree with with you Raging B.

Except the bit about the Iranian President.

Lindsey Eck wrote:

Here's my main point: In our time, science is less and less conducted in the public interest.

Oh well, at least you've admitted that your "main point" had nothing to do with proving creationism, disproving evolution, or "teaching" the "controversy." Intended or not, that's a rare bit of honesty from the ID camp.

And how many "Iranian Muslim schizophrenics" become president of Iran? That's an odd plural-to-singular segue.

Michael Sutkus II - Thanks for taking the time to post. You make a whole lot of sense, and I appreciate it.

Here's my main point: In our time, science is less and less conducted in the public interest. 1980s: Public health workers eradicate smallpox. 2000s: Military biologists concoct ever-deadlier smallpox.

1950s: FDA, unlike corrupt European equivalents, keeps thalidomide off market. 2000s: FDA so corrupt we look to the British equivalent to see if drugs are safe; Vioxx approval causes 40,000 heart attacks, privatized research company ImClone lies about cancer results to boost stock price. Faith-based education denies evolution; faith-based FDA denies women contraception.

Today there are few obvious benefits to society from the scientific enterprise, which is largely Defense-funded and whose products range from hastening human extinction via nuclear and biological weapons, to drugs for such imaginary diseases as "restless leg syndrome" which preserve patents by tweaking a molecule (but little progress against cancer, Alzheimer's, etc.), to surveillance devices such as RFID that allow for more oppression and control of the citizens by the government and giant corporations.

As Wilson admitted in Consilience, pursuit of science is itself a sort of faith, the faith that the knowledge found will prove beneficial. Since people in America are horribly scientifically illiterate (to add to their generally poor level of education), belief in scientists and their enterprise, especially when it seems to challenge belief in God, requires faith that the good works of science will benefit humanity. I submit there is little reason to hold such faith.

I used to tutor writing at the MIT Writing Center. At the time, MIT was said to be 80% funded by the Department of Defense. I graded a set of writing exemption exams, where the question posed had to do with whether, as a scientist or engineer, one would refuse to do research that one considered unethical. I was grading the writing, not the ethics. If I were grading the essays according to a scale of moral maturity, nearly everyone would have gotten an F. In fact, I never met a student at MIT, grad or undergrad, who was concerned with the social implications of how he or she would make a living. The universal attitude was, "I'm not supposed to make policy. I'm a scientist/engineer/architect. The people who hire me make those decisions; I just do what I'm paid to do."

A few years ago, the South African apartheid government was trying to work on a biological agent (I think) that would selectively kill blacks. They didn't succeed, but such a thing is said to be plausible. Suppose the CIA offered a contract to American scientists to develop such an agent that would kill Arabs. How many do you think would refuse?

Given a hypothetical choice between shutting down all research today and continuing the way we're going, the majority (including me) would probably choose to shut it all down. The handful of additional deaths due to cancers we don't cure would be more than offset by the thousands who won't die thanks to our smart bombs and biological agents and napalm. That was the point of my sarcasm about the "blessings" of science.

As for the education issue, back when I was in academia (around 1990) the right set forth in print its plan to revolutionize American education. One seminal document was a collection of essays by Hirsh, putatively about cultural literacy. At the time I was teaching ESL to Asians who had approximately zero acquaintance with Western culture, and I was attracted to the idea of cultural literacy. What Hirsh, D'Souza, Bill Bennett, and others who have since become paragons of rightist thinking laid out as a paradigm was rather frightening: a memorize-and-regurgitate model based on the Great Books of dead white males. Many of us in the humanities tried to oppose such a program, but we got little support from the scientists, who generally held our fuzzy disciplines in contempt and were perfectly happy to see critical thinking on politics, economics, and social issues suppressed. A population of obedient little Do-Bes served the interests of science such as keeping the military-industrial complex well fed and voting for cool but useless boondoggles such as the International Space Station and the Superconducting Supercollider (sorry about that one, guys, but here in Texas we decided we needed our schools to have libraries more than we needed a big dig for physics geeks).

Now the non-elite schools have been successfully dumbed down and, guess what! The unthinking little yes people can't think critically about anything, including science! If you want to win them back, you'll have to do a lot more of what's being done on this board. Furthermore, you'll have to start asking hard questions such as, "Does my work serve the good of humankind, or just my own morbid curiosity?"

I totally agree, and what he said is much more nicely and much less sarcastically put than what I have to say, but I still have to get in my two cents.

I would like to see a reference to the agent you say apartheid was working on because I think it is BS.

http://tinyurl.com/opoh9 Here's Robert Lattimer from Ohio giving the game away. We must teach the "controversy" because supernatural causes exist!

Here's Robert Lattimer from Ohio giving the game away. We must teach the "controversy" because supernatural causes exist!

Michael Suttkus wrote: "Science isn't performed in anyone's interest. It's an expansion of knowledge. Knowledge is power and power is always dangerous. It's not science that's the problem, it's people willing to use the power it grants poorly."

This is precisely where you and I disagree. It's pretty easy to see that research on energy independence has a different political import than developing battlefield robots. Or at least it should be. This pretense to the impartiality of science is a convenient stance, but if you work for Lincoln Lab, or Sandia National Laboratory, or Los Alamos you are furthering American militarism whether you choose to deny it or not. Similarly, choosing to work on genetic modification of plants to resist herbicides, which serves a future of dousing fields with chemicals and may make organic farming impossible. Researchers may keep their conscience clear by telling themselves science is neutral, but this thread is about public perception of science and whether scientific or religious authority should prevail in setting curriculum for the public schools. If you want to win this one, you need to win the war of public perception.

"I guess it would be better that the less deadly form of small pox were still around (that modern medicine eradicated through vaccination) than that a more deadly form of the virus that has engineered and so far never used. That way the unvaccinated population would still be dying regularly from the previous, less deadly form of the virus."

You miss my point. Science in the 1960s, along with the secular viewpoint, enjoyed overwhelming popular support. The main reason was that the social benefits of research were obvious. I submit that the economic structure of scientific enterprise has changed. Over the past few decades it's become possible for university researchers to become rich through patents. I'm not sure of the details, but I'm quite sure that in the Reagan era the rules changed. Now we have the appalling situation that supposedly the only persons qualified to work for the NIH are those with heinous conflicts of interest. If that's really true, we need a crash program to train publically minded people who can work for the NIH without conflict. But I don't believe it's really true. It's just that people now perceive science as a road to riches, and they'll be damned if they'll give up their split-level in Arlington in the name of integrity.

"Even drugs like Vioxx are obvious examples of benefit, mishandled." That's kind of dubious; many have opined that Vioxx is no more effective than aspirin, but drug companies can't make a profit off aspirin, so they pushed this unnecessary and dangerous drug on the public. "Merck pulled the drug when dangers appeared." What I heard reported was that Merck suppressed their own studies that showed the danger was real. If that's not the case, why are they losing lawsuits over heart-attack deaths?

JDog chimes in: "How can you not see the contradiction here. First the FDA is not like corrupt European equivalents, and then so corrupt." You must not have read the dates. When I was a kid, the FDA was admired the world over for its integrity. Now it's despised for its whoredom.

"As stated by Michael earlier science does not require any faith whatsoever." Well, E.O. Wilson thinks so. Surely it requires a faith, or worldview if you prefer, that increased knowledge is a good in itself. There is a long tradition in normative ethics of challenging this stance, so it's not exactly a universal belief. "Successful practice of the scientific enterprise should AVOID any such rosy thinking." So, you would pursue a line of inquiry out of curiosity, no matter where it led, even if the results were horrible? Exactly my point. Some lines of inquiry are not worth pursuing, such as making deadlier anthrax, and many are being pursued at tremendous waste of resources to the detriment of others that are badly needed, such as energy independence and alternatives to factory farming.

JDog: "I would like to see a reference to the agent you say apartheid was working on because I think it is BS. And I most certainly don't think that the US would make let alone use an agent that selectively kills Arabs. (And by the way the majority of Muslims in the world are not Arab.)"

Is the Washington Post good enough? This took about 30 seconds of research on the Web:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64518-2003Apr20?language=printer

Admittedly this is one guy's claim and may not be true. But I don't think we have to look very far to find similar misconduct on the part of the U.S.: spraying anonymous people with viruses and that kind of thing. But keep on denying that there's any ethical import to what you do. Just don't expect the public to prefer your ideas to those of fundamentalist Christianity. After all, the preachers have some sense of ethical responsibility, however misguided. And I've even studied a bit of Arabic so I'm quite aware most Muslims are not Arab. But we're not at war with Indonesia or Turkey, are we.

"The list goes on and on, but I suppose it would be better we didn't know these things so we could go back to the days where the average life expectancy was thirty." You've entirely missed the point of my timelines. Life expectancy wasn't 30 back in the sixties when science was lionized in the public mind.

It's been reported in many mainstream news sources that innovation in pharmacology has drastically slowed down. I'm not making this up. Neither am I making up the fact of hostility between scientists and the liberal arts. Go dig up Snow's The Two Cultures. Or was he deluded by his parochial academic experience and his impressions cannot be generalized?

"I'm terribly sorry you had to deal with a bunch of smart snot-nosed kids out of High School." At the time, I was enrolled in the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Students there (I didn't know many in the sciences, but I assume it applies across all disciplines) had a much different attitude: They believed they were future leaders and expected to have money and power. (Most, unlike me, have in fact achieved such, but that's not sour grapes, partly a matter of personal choice.) And most were intensely concerned with the ethical implications of how that money and power were to be earned and deployed. MIT, the flagship university of American science and technology, was full of students with an amoral attitude. And 50% were grad students, hardly "snot-nosed kids out of high school." Many had high-paid and important summer jobs and were interviewing for positions of authority. At the time Sununu was the President's Chief of Staff, an MIT grad, yet it didn't seem the students foresaw similar positions of authority in their own future. They were planning to be yes-men and -women in a way that was totally opposite to the Harvard ethos.

"I for one wasn't exposed to one bit of Hirsh, D'Souza, etc... in college." Neither was I. I read their material as a lecturer. But the results of their program are all over the public schools. Unfortunately the latest incarnation involves biblical indoctrination, but a regime of indoctrination should have sent up red flags long ago. Now it may be too late. And no surprise you, as a scientist, had your head in the sand about this issue, because it wasn't affecting your discipline yet. Again, precisely my point.

"There has never been a lack of ignorance and there probably never will be." So, should we be trying to combat it, or not? I must say, JDog, your post in particular had little to back it up. I illustrated each of my assertions with at least an anecdote. Mostly you've either misunderstood my point, which was that science has been corrupted in the recent generation, not that science is inherently a bad thing, or you've simply stated that you haven't seen examples of the trends I'm reporting on. Fine, keep up your denial, but you won't convince anyone in politics to change education policy that way.

"I am really astonished that you don't see the irony in a person who sits in an air-conditioned house, at a computer hooked up to the internet writing diatribes about the evils of technology." Actually, it's a trailer in a very rural area, but I do have AC (the house where I spend my weekends with my SO does not) and, yes, the Internet. The personal computer was a rare use of technology to empower individuals, something we could use a lot more of. I'm no Luddite. I want responsible, humanistic use of technology. Again, when I was growing up it was hard for the most reactionary person to deny the benefits of science and technology. Nowadays I'm not so sure. I think it's quite likely the human race will be extincted by nuclear and biological weapons that will eventually be deployed based on the hysterical instincts seen on a tiny scale in the recent Lebanese war. If these munitions were not manufactured, they could not be deployed. There seem to be thousands willing to take Defense dollars for every member of the Union of Concerned Scientists. I sure as hell hope I'm wrong. But if you want the public to support science education, the field is going to have to improve its image overall. Sure, most scientists are ethical and conscientious. Most priests don't molest children, either. But the Roman Church has a problem with widespread pedophilia which has tarnished its image, and the scientific enterprise in the U.S. (and, e.g., Korea) has an increasing and well documented problem of faked results, suppressed data, financial corruption, and collaboration with the very worst forces in government and business. If you can't overcome that bad image, the public will turn away as they have been.

Finally, Raging Bee wrote: "Oh well, at least you've admitted that your 'main point' had nothing to do with proving creationism, disproving evolution, or 'teaching' the 'controversy.' Intended or not, that's a rare bit of honesty from the ID camp." I would hope it's obvious that I'm not in the "ID camp"; indeed, I did my small part in organizing a letter-writing campaign, ultimately successful, to keep ID out of textbooks in Texas a few years ago. But thanks for demonstrating how easily a humanistic critique of science from the Left can be misinterpreted as an enemy attack from the Right. Maybe if you were less to perceive critics as enemies you'd get further in politics.

One more thing:

There are various assertions here that technology has improved lifespan, cured diseases, brought good things to humanity. Very true.

Based on those assertions, we are supposed to believe that technology will continue to benefit humankind. I'm sorry, but there's considerable evidence that technology, as it's being practiced today, is likely to lead to massive slaughter via nuclear and biological weapons, massive extinction of natural species in favor of genetically engineered mutants, or the end of humankind as we know it due to genetic manipulation to create a race of transhumans who will differ so much from us that our entire history, culture, and literature will become moot.

If you believe otherwise, that science will always produce a net good because it's done so in the past, then that's a faith. A more rational approach would recognize, as they say in the mutual-fund industry, that "past performance is no guarantee of future results."

This is precisely where you and I disagree. It's pretty easy to see that research on energy independence has a different political import than developing battlefield robots. Or at least it should be. This pretense to the impartiality of science is a convenient stance, but if you work for Lincoln Lab, or Sandia National Laboratory, or Los Alamos you are furthering American militarism whether you choose to deny it or not.

I'm sorry, but there's considerable evidence that technology, as it's being practiced today, is likely to lead to massive slaughter via nuclear and biological weapons, massive extinction of natural species in favor of genetically engineered mutants, or the end of humankind as we know it due to genetic manipulation to create a race of transhumans who will differ so much from us that our entire history, culture, and literature will become moot.

Oh, and one final comment. Forget about the highly intelligent but misguided MIT students, I never once considered my less illustrious (American or Asian) students at a small, mediocre liberal-arts college in Texas "snot-nosed kids." Presumably, if you're employed at a university, you have students that you hold in similar contempt. An unwelcome distraction from your valuable work of research, perhaps? The fact that you would snub the young in such terms speaks volumes. You probably hold the same attitude toward the Great Unwashed, and they know people like you hold them in contempt, so they're willing to ally with religious leaders (whose rhetoric they may not really believe) to cut you out of power anyway they can. And then you're surprised, and even more contemptuous. Without empathy there is no success in politics. Clinton understood this, and more or less succeeded despite intense opposition. Bush doesn't get it, and as a result lost formerly overwhelming support. You don't need empathy to conduct science, but you do to succeed in public policy. And that's my bottom line.

www.corneroak.com

Lenny Frank wrote:

"No, it's HUMANS who are likely to do all those things.

Technology is, well, technology. It just sits there, stupid and unmoving, until HUMANS do something with it.

Want to stop all those things from happening? Then work on the humans who do them."

Gosh, you folks are literal-minded. Obviously technology is a human construct. I submit that humans should be pursuing technologies that benefit the greater good. My perception is that the bulk of resources is going to projects that do the opposite. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but I've seen little evidence and a lot of semantics from those on the other side. Let's throw it open to the scientists: What are you working on and in what way does it benefit the public good? If you say, "I dunno, I'm just motivated by curiosity," then that's the attitude I'm complaining about. Einstein, Szilard, and Fermi all were intensely aware of the ethical implications of their work. Teller was an amoral bastard, however brilliant. If science excuses him because of his brilliance, history and the public do not. If you want to affect politcs (such as educational policy) you have to realize that people will judge the scientific enterprise on its results to society, however you want to protest that research is ethically neutral.

As for the cervical-cancer vaccine, its profit-driven development has been attacked in The American Prospect:

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=11842

I disagree with much of this article, but it shows how much resentment and suspicion is out there regarding research as it's conducted today, even in a moderate, center-left journal not given to hyperbole.

"What are you working on and in what way does it benefit the public good?" - Lindsey Eck

Well, Lindsey, I'm working on ways to reduce the net emission of green-house gasses from agricultural crops.

What do you do to "benefit the public good"?

"This pretense to the impartiality of science is a convenient stance, but if you work for Lincoln Lab, or Sandia National Laboratory, or Los Alamos you are furthering American militarism whether you choose to deny it or not." - Lindsey Eck

If scientists in the US hadn't developed 'the bomb' because they didn't want to risk the US government misusing it, it would have been developed by the Nazi's*. I suspect that they would have used it!

Scientists working at Los Alamos, etc., do so because they think that the US should be able to defend itself as well as it is possible to do so. It's not their fault if the government uses that technology for offensive purposes, is it?

* I hope I didn't 'Godwin' my self?

You miss my point. Science in the 1960s, along with the secular viewpoint, enjoyed overwhelming popular support. The main reason was that the social benefits of research were obvious. I submit that the economic structure of scientific enterprise has changed.

JDog chimes in: "How can you not see the contradiction here. First the FDA is not like corrupt European equivalents, and then so corrupt." You must not have read the dates. When I was a kid, the FDA was admired the world over for its integrity. Now it's despised for its whoredom.

Admittedly this is one guy's claim and may not be true. But I don't think we have to look very far to find similar misconduct on the part of the U.S.: spraying anonymous people with viruses and that kind of thing. But keep on denying that there's any ethical import to what you do. Just don't expect the public to prefer your ideas to those of fundamentalist Christianity. After all, the preachers have some sense of ethical responsibility, however misguided. And I've even studied a bit of Arabic so I'm quite aware most Muslims are not Arab. But we're not at war with Indonesia or Turkey, are we.

"As stated by Michael earlier science does not require any faith whatsoever." Well, E.O. Wilson thinks so. Surely it requires a faith, or worldview if you prefer, that increased knowledge is a good in itself. There is a long tradition in normative ethics of challenging this stance, so it's not exactly a universal belief. "Successful practice of the scientific enterprise should AVOID any such rosy thinking." So, you would pursue a line of inquiry out of curiosity, no matter where it led, even if the results were horrible? Exactly my point. Some lines of inquiry are not worth pursuing, such as making deadlier anthrax, and many are being pursued at tremendous waste of resources to the detriment of others that are badly needed, such as energy independence and alternatives to factory farming.

"I for one wasn't exposed to one bit of Hirsh, D'Souza, etc... in college." Neither was I. I read their material as a lecturer. But the results of their program are all over the public schools. Unfortunately the latest incarnation involves biblical indoctrination, but a regime of indoctrination should have sent up red flags long ago. Now it may be too late. And no surprise you, as a scientist, had your head in the sand about this issue, because it wasn't affecting your discipline yet. Again, precisely my point.

Lindsey, I'm still waiting to hear what you do to "benefit the public good"?

{silence}

Lindsay for my 2c worth I think you are conflating Science Education or the Scientific Method and its test of truth without the superstitious restriction of certain fundamentalist politico religious groups which which is what I am concerned about, with the Scientific Enterprise as practiced by humans.

Are you saying that the education of ethics is falling behind too?

"There has never been a lack of ignorance and there probably never will be." So, should we be trying to combat it, or not? I must say, JDog, your post in particular had little to back it up. I illustrated each of my assertions with at least an anecdote. Mostly you've either misunderstood my point, which was that science has been corrupted in the recent generation, not that science is inherently a bad thing, or you've simply stated that you haven't seen examples of the trends I'm reporting on. Fine, keep up your denial, but you won't convince anyone in politics to change education policy that way.

Oh, and one final comment. Forget about the highly intelligent but misguided MIT students, I never once considered my less illustrious (American or Asian) students at a small, mediocre liberal-arts college in Texas "snot-nosed kids." Presumably, if you're employed at a university, you have students that you hold in similar contempt. An unwelcome distraction from your valuable work of research, perhaps? The fact that you would snub the young in such terms speaks volumes. You probably hold the same attitude toward the Great Unwashed, and they know people like you hold them in contempt, so they're willing to ally with religious leaders (whose rhetoric they may not really believe) to cut you out of power anyway they can. And then you're surprised, and even more contemptuous. Without empathy there is no success in politics. Clinton understood this, and more or less succeeded despite intense opposition. Bush doesn't get it, and as a result lost formerly overwhelming support. You don't need empathy to conduct science, but you do to succeed in public policy. And that's my bottom line.

Hey, the victory in the Kansas school board elections is paying immediate dividends:
http://www.comcast.net/news/national/index.jsp?cat=DOMESTIC&fn=/2006/08/18/458224.html&cvqh=itn_perfectsat.

We could reasonably intuit that we'd see this kind of turn-around, but the promptitudinousness of it is surprising!

Lindsey Eck - You misquote me in your earlier posts.

I think you mean to credit J Biggs.

If you're not more careful with your citations, Ann Coulter's publishers are going to give you a book deal.

Just sop you know, I try to stay short and sweet and keep it light with my comments.
HTH

Posted by Steviepinhead on August 18, 2006 02:14 PM (e) Hey, the victory in the Kansas school board elections is paying immediate dividends: http://www.comcast.net/news/national/index.jsp?c.... We could reasonably intuit that we'd see this kind of turn-around, but the promptitudinousness of it is surprising!

Drat! I knew I should've checked the line, especially when I pulled it from Comcast (I'll blame them this time, and not kludgy PT--or even my inability to learn how to do one of those "shorthand" links that won't get cut off...).

Let's try the msn version:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14407042/.

I'll even check the link from "Preview" this time (assuming I can frickin' get to "Preview"; this is getting to be a lotta work for a tongue-in-cheek comment, especially now that you've trumped me with the chocolate virgin "sighting.")

I submit that humans should be pursuing technologies that benefit the greater good.

I submit that humans should be pursuing technologies that benefit the greater good.

I applaud the person who is working to prevent greenhouse emissions. See, he/she is forthright about the fact that the technology does have a purpose that is not ethically neutral.

I think it's disingenuous to say any technology can be used for good or evil. Where is the good in the super-potent anthrax apparently produced at Fort Detrick (sp?), which was probably the source of the mail-in terrorism that killed several people a few years back. Perhaps it "can be used for good," but I'd rather our money was not being spent on increasing the potency of the world's deadliest microbes. I feel ethical considerations need to be given special attention (fortunately, they were) in instances such as the sequencing of the deadly flu strain of 1918. That info indeed had the potential for great harm or great good, and I think the scientists who proceeded to do the sequencing were vindicated. But they went into it with extreme caution and many qualms. That's much different from saying, we should pursue whatever we feel like (or get paid for), 'cause no research in itself has ethical consequences, only the applications of that research.

Sure, nuclear weapons existed in the 1960s. It was also a time when Kennedy signed the Test Ban Treaty and there was a nonproliferation treaty. Only in the Bush years has it become acceptable to talk about (1) tearing up those treaties and (2) developing new, smaller nukes such as the "bunker buster." I haven't heard a lot of nuclear scientists come forward and say, hey, using tactical nukes on the battlefield is really dumb because it will drive up rates of cancer and birth defects the world over. (At least I think that's what would happen, but I'm not a scientist.)

How do I make my living? I try not to be too specific on the Internet, with its many anonymous nut cases, but I am in the communications section of a large, non-private institution whose mission is environmental protection. Before that, among other things, I worked in HIV prevention. And I've put my job on the line several times over ethical issues. A few years ago, when I asked a few questions about budget issues that revealed that my supposed budget was being used as a slush fund in what looked to me like Medicaid fraud, I was summarily transferred and given nothing to do for a whole year. (They didn't want to fire me 'cause they knew I had information that might benefit the plaintiff's attorney in a lawsuit where we were on the other side.) Before that, the sequence of events that culminated in my being denied a tenure track (and thus my exit from academia) began when I balked at signing phony certificates of academic recognition for students who didn't deserve them, but whose parents in Asia were the richest of their cohort and might be hoped to give money to the college. (As it turned out, they saw through the phony attempt to flatter them and gave nothing.) I might mention that some of my distaste for academia also springs from grad school, when my adviser was suspended for a year for sexually harassing a grad student and thus I lost a whole year of preparing for a degree which I, in the end, never finished (ABD). The prof continued to work on his research, funded by (who else) the Department of Defense, so it was his students and junior colleagues (one unjustly forced out of Harvard) who paid the price for his folly. So it goes.

I apologize for the harshness of the tone I've taken here, and my impression is that the scientists who contribute to this board are fine people who obviously have an interest in public affairs and education, or you wouldn't be spending your time on these issues. But, as they say, politics ain't beanbag, and (before I sign off, as I'm going to be too busy to contribute further to this discussion anytime soon), let me give some perspective, as a New England Yankee who's been living for nearly two decades in this very red state of Texas.

About 1-1/2 miles from my trailer, Alcoa is digging a huge strip mine in an area that is not really sparsely populated. The entire county opposed this, but all seven county commissioners approved it. No doubt they've got nice consulting jobs waiting for them when they get out. Of course, a strip mine employs few workers, and Alcoa is not headquartered here, so (as usual) there's little benefit to the locals in this project. A U.S. highway, long paid for by our federal taxes, that I drive frequently is being turned into a toll road, again in the face of intense local opposition, owned by a company in Spain that will reap the profits. I haven't been able to verify this, but several people have told me that a misleadingly worded initiative in the last election will allow the government to put meters on private wells and tax us for our own water in the name of "conservation." The real reason is to induce people to hook up to the very expensive Aqua Water Company, another out-of-Texas giant company that intends to do to us what was done to the people of Bolivia---force them to pay for water that used to be theirs. (This was one factor that led to the Indian revolt that toppled the government.) This issue was put on the ballot during a primary election the instigators knew would have sparse turnout, because some 40% of voters sat it out in order to sign petitions for one of the two independent gubernatorial candidates. The pension plan I count on for my retirement was looted by Enron. As for the delightful Merck corporation, its Medco subsidiary decided our prescription drug plan was too expensive, so they shut it down, leaving us with no prescription coverage for over a month, though we continued to pay premiums.

I think you get the picture. Texans, of whatever political stripe, see themselves treated as an economic colony by political, economic, and corporate interests that are located on the coasts. Our own legislature is famously corrupt and laughably ineffective (it meets for 20 weeks every two years) and we're all damn sick of being exploited by people who dump their toxic waste here and dig up the resources, then sneer at us for what a dirty, backward place Texas is.

Very few people really care about evolution either way. Most of the constituents for this issue are simply falling in line behind their preachers. For non-Hispanics, the Southern Baptist denomination is by far the largest and most powerful and, in many of the new subdivisions, a suburban megachurch is not only the sole church that a person can belong to, but the only civic institution of any kind. With their schools, jacuzzis, and similar public facilities on their self-contained campuses, these churches are the only place to meet singles, use the weight room, the only social institution of any kind. (By the way, these are highly affluent neighborhoods I'm talking about. They may be ignorant, but they're upper-middle-class, locally influential, and almost always Republican.)

So people aren't necessarily joining because they endorse the theology, or even because they believe in Christ. But they do know that evolution is popular in the blue states, the places where the people ruining Texas live and where the profits go. So they're happy to join their preachers in supporting an issue that helps stick a thumb in the eye of liberal America, our smug colonial master.

Continue fighting the evolution issue on the merits of the argument. After all, you've got the Constitution on your side. But, at least here in the Bible Belt, your adversaries are really reacting to perceived carpetbagger control of their education, and (though you may well prevent stupid things from getting into the textbooks) you won't really overcome an anti-science attitude among people who can't draw fine distinctions between pure science, applied science, and technology until those people can see the benefits of science to them. As for the less affluent, why should someone with no medical care (and Texas has the highest rate of uninsured) have to spend one tax dollar to support research into a medicine or treatment that person will never be able to access?

So, the struggle is much bigger than you think. Progressives can support, and have supported, science education, but (as that Prospect article shows) they are not very sympathetic to the direction, funding, and uses of research, whether in pharmacology, nuclear physics, genetic modification or, for that matter, mainstream economics. Your political efforts might involve mending fences with the left, whatever that would entail. (One thing I'd like to see: An actual scientist evaluate the claims of widespread birth defects where depleted uranium has been used. There have been a lot of such claims, but are they true? I have no idea, and I haven't seen any discussion by a scientist who could evaluate them.)

As I say, this will probably end the discussion for me. Those who'd like to know me better can visit:

www.corneroak.com

How do I make my living? I try not to be too specific on the Internet, with its many anonymous nut cases,

I think it's disingenuous to say any technology can be used for good or evil. Where is the good in the super-potent anthrax apparently produced at Fort Detrick (sp?), which was probably the source of the mail-in terrorism that killed several people a few years back. Perhaps it "can be used for good," but I'd rather our money was not being spent on increasing the potency of the world's deadliest microbes.

Dear Lindsey,

If your last post had been your first post, I would have agreed with you, for the most part. Thank you for putting in the time to clear up your views. I still disagree that scientific endeavors today are less and less in the public interest, but certainly you have a valid point about the ethical implications of certain research. I believe your arguments fall more in the political realm than the scientific one. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like weapons research stops regardless of who is in control of the government. However, I think it is valid to say that it is better for our government to have the most advanced military technology rather than some other government (possibly one that wants to eradicate us). You seem like a nice person and I am sorry if my sarcasm offended you. Good luck in your endeavors.

And by the way, exposure to gamma radiation for a prolonged period of time is very likely to cause birth defects; for a graphic demonstration of the effects you can watch Chernobyl Heart. The effects of radiation are dependent on the intensity and exposure time.

Alcoa is digging a huge strip mine ..(here).. The entire county opposed this, but all seven county commissioners approved it.

After the flame-war dust-up, I really am curious as to how y'all would answer heddle's last question. If saying Muhammed was a false prophet and thus either a liar or a nuts is intolerant, who do you say Muhammed was? Are most of the commenters here Muslims who believe that Muhammed spoke true Qu'ran from Allah? I am genuinely curious here. What exactly is the tolerant, enlightened thing to believe about Muhammed and his claims to be a prophet sent by God and the instrument of divine revelation?

yeah i dont really know what to say so im just leaving this up here to leave this up here so yeah ....um i have nothing else to say so have a wonderful day everii bodii