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Perplexed comments on Qualia Soup, a rationalist and a skilled You Tube jockey - Less Wrong
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Comments (53)
Because that's what it is. As far as I can tell it was mostly due to overreaction of scientific establishment that baffled the moderately religious (here including even the previous Pope, who didn't have any problem with evolution as such, only with people using it to oppose their beliefs) have religious nutjobs managed to get the moderates on board and reach so much influence here.
Compare it with the minefield of tribal beliefs textbooks of modern history have to navigate in - you can't get away with just a few footnotes, nearly every sentence runs risk of gravely offending someone! So they compromised to get the most important bits across.
I don't this it would be right to ignore this, as this unreasonable siege mentality is a major impediment to fixing science.
I agree that there is a harmful "siege mentality" in the frenzy to defend the theory of Evolution from religiously-motivated challenges. Nevertheless, the main organized proponents of Intelligent Design (the Discovery Institute) are not just trying to add a footnote to the textbooks, have a victory party, and then retire. They have an explicit and not-particularly-concealed plan to overthrow secularism in the US.
But I'm with Jack. Lets not get into a discussion of ID or creationism. I'd like to hear the ideas about reforming science. Incidentally, one important reform is already underway. Open access publishing. Often with watered-down review standards. Einstein's famous papers on relativity, brownian motion, and the photoelectric effect would be published on arXiv and discussed in the physics blogs even more quickly in the present milieu than the time to get them printed and distributed in the relaxed days of 1905.
A second reform is increased interest in punishing scientific fraud. (The wrist-slap in the Hauser case being an exception, I hope.)
Science reform issues resemble politics while at the same time not mapping onto the traditional ideological spectrum and staying close to our areas of expertise here. Maybe we should try to tackle this before making the jump into politics some people want us to.
Without having done a ton of research reforming the way science gets funded looks like the most important piece of the puzzle.