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HalfMooner
Dingaling

Philippines
15831 Posts

Posted - 07/06/2006 :  04:39:03  Show Profile Send HalfMooner a Private Message
More from PLoS Biology. This essay delves into the subject of fundamentalist political power's damage to science in America, a subject well known to us on the SFN site:
quote:
Scientific Illiteracy and the Partisan Takeover of Biology

Liza Gross

Liza Gross is Science Writer for the Public Library of Science. E-mail: lgross@plos.org

Americans have long been ambivalent about science. Conflicting attitudes toward science are not uncommon among industrialized countries—Canadians, Europeans, and Japanese, for example, also appreciate the benefits of science but worry about potential impacts on society. What sets Americans apart is that their reservations center primarily around religion. And now, as the United States struggles to maintain its undisputed position as world leader in science and technology, religious ideology has spilled over into the public sphere to a degree unmatched in other industrialized societies. Religious groups are turning scientific matters like stem cells and evolution into political issues.

Though some see the growing influence of ideology over scientific issues as a threat to America's standing as global science leader, a leading analyst of public attitudes toward science sees it as an opportunity for increasing scientific literacy. “Even though the scientific community can feel besieged by this anti-science sentiment,” says Jon D. Miller, who directs the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University Medical School, “most people really haven't made up their mind about this issue and, in fact, really haven't even thought about it.” Rather than fretting about the cultural divide—or worse, doing nothing—Miller urges scientists to do their part to bridge the gap.

. . .

[Copyright: © 2006 Liza Gross. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.]
The rest of this paper is here.



Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive.

Edited by - HalfMooner on 07/06/2006 04:45:55

Dude
SFN Die Hard

USA
6891 Posts

Posted - 07/06/2006 :  06:09:58   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send Dude a Private Message
I try to respond to the fundamentalists with the larger audience in mind. Try to make an attempt to demonstrate the case for evolution, rather than respond to the inane babble the hyper-religious throw out.

It isn't easy. All to often I seem to find myself arguing with them about something irrelevant or distracting to the topic.


Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson

"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin

Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth
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filthy
SFN Die Hard

USA
14408 Posts

Posted - 07/06/2006 :  07:13:05   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send filthy a Private Message
Science has the nasty habit of often coming up with that which those in power, and those who wish to be in power, don't like. And so, they will commit any crime, tell any lie, to discredit it. This situation is not helped by the woeful scientific ignorance at the "man-in-the-street" level.

Thus it is, thus it always has been, and I rather doubt that it will ever be any other way.




"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)

"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres


"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude

Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,

and Crypto-Communist!

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