Science and democracy
I am currently reading Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, which is, as one might be able to guess from the subtle connotations of the title, somewhat partisan in its analysis of governmental censorship and/or influence upon science in the last thirty years.
It has gotten me thinking about how science is and is not democratic. One of ( Read more... )
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Actually acknowledging that right and wrong, or good and evil, exist as non-relative concepts is what's rather de trop in academia these days.
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Moral relativism holds "that moral or ethical propositions do not reflect absolute and universal moral truths, but instead make claims relative to social, cultural, historical or personal circumstances." These folk suggest that everything is more nuanced than it first appears, and that what's right for them, may not be right for you.
Moral universalism claims that "some system of ethics applies universally, that is to all humans regardless of culture, race, gender, religion, nationality, sexuality, or other distinguishing feature." Of course persons that propound a universal morality generally recommends that their own personal morality is just the universal morality everyone should follow ( ... )
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About the theory of evolution in particular, I have always found it useful to point out that the 'Theory' part is not about whether or not evolution happens; that's been placed pretty firmly into the 'observed fact' column. When we say 'Theory of Evolution' we mean 'theory about how Evolution works,' much the same way as when we talk about the theory of gravity we don't mean gravity is a theory. We mean gravity is an observed fact, and we have a theory about how it works.
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if we get a different word, one that doesn't have the 'Wild-Ass-Unproven-Guess' annotation that 'theory' carries for the average American, we might avoid at least some of those stupid debates.
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*Not constantly, that would be exhausting for both of us. You know what I mean.
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Yeah, but you and Steve both rock ass. As such, you fundamentally get it. Go go well-informed skeptics!
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Arrrrgh! Yes, that particular stupidity is singularly aggravating, especially because it is at its heart promulgated by the heartbroken parents of autistic children who need someone or something to explain the terrible injustice of the disease which has struck their beloved little ones. Just because it's sad doesn't mean it's not stupid.
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I so agree with this, but you got me thinking. How do you have a "accidental" act of genocide. And if you could - would people forgive you for it?
"Sorry about those 10,000,000 people, you see, I put my coffee down on the corner of the desk and then I knocked it over, pulling my keyboard over and then I....
I'm really sorry..."
S
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I MUST get a new 1950s style lab coat - chicks dig scientists with a cool lab coat.
S
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Strangely enough, I was thinking of an accidental genocide when I typed that, namely that which the conquistadors visited unknowingly upon the Aztecs and their client peoples: first-contact pandemic.
Essentially, I seem to recall hearing people say that no matter how bad the Aztecs were, the Europeans visited a ~90% death rate upon everyone with their evil diseases and their smallpox blankets, essentially putting forward the idea of germ warfare centuries before the germ theory of disease. Yes, I know the Mongols supposedly launched bodies over walls to spread disease. No, I don't believe the conquistadors or really anyone else (as I recall, the smallpox blankets story has proven apocryphal) tried to kill the Native Americans en masse deliberately, if nothing else because SOMEONE had to mine all that gold for them!
Not that your joke wasn't funny. I'm thinking now of the "It's a Mistake" video by Men At Work in the early 1980's....
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It wasn't smallpox - the Aztecs had a word for it, they had ALREADY been exposed.
It was a DIFFERENT and LOCAL disease caused by rats living in close contacts during drought years.
When the drought ends, the rats scatter and breed spreading the new plague.
I wrote about it a few months ago - I'll find the post.
Steve
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Anyway, yeah, bad science sucks. But I think what you're usually seeing is non-ideological bad reporting. It's just that if a story is bad in general, you're more likely to notice where it slants to the other side.
F'r'ex, I expect that whenever you hear a story about global warming that overstates the case or the evidence, you have a tendency to mentally filter it--I know I do in similar circumstances. When a reporter says "human activity has caused such-and-such climate change", you mentally add the appropriate qualifiers, like "human activity is very likely to be a significant contributor to such-and-such". But perhaps you don't do it on the other side; e.g. when the "opposing view" spokesman says "there isn't proof of global warming", do you mentally translate it, saying "I'm sure he meant 'there isn't proof of significant human contribution to global warming"? Or do you just say, " ( ... )
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The headline was "Report links global warming, storms", which sure seemed to say that the report had, well, linked global warming to storms.
The first paragraph gives a bit of a warning, though, if you read it carefully:
Scientists say they have found what could be the key to ending a yearlong debate about what is making hurricanes more violent and common -- evidence that human-caused global warming is heating the ocean and providing more fuel for the world's deadliest storms.
That is, the report found evidence that the oceans are warming--which I thought had already been well-established. (Nobody is seriously debating whether global warming has ocurred--the debate is about (a) how much human activity has contributed to it, (b) what the trend in the future will be, and (c) what the consequences will be.)
The next two paragraphs are a stunning non-sequitur:
For the past 13 months, researchers have debated whether humanity is to blame for a surge in hurricanes since the mid-1990s or ( ... )
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