I meant to say that if you believe a scientific claim to be legitimate, there should/are going to be implications of that on other parts of your worldview. When we misjudge what the implications of a belief are, we can believe it while simultaneously rejecting something it implies. (That's what reductio ad absurdum's are for.)
We also tend to overestimate how much parts of our worldview support each other, or as this quote says:
If you were taught that elves caused rain, every time it rained, you'd see the proof of elves.
I was under the impression that GPS was such a technology.
GPS requires corrections for general relativity, it's somewhat of a stretch to say that implies the big bang.
I also don't see much room for reasonably believing in evolutionary medicine without accepting macro-evolution
Well, according to the wikipedia entry for evolutionary medicine the key concepts are:
- Trade-offs: changes that could make an organism less vulnerable to disease can lead to a decrease in fitness due to effects on other traits.
- Pathogens evolve rapidly and respond quickly to human intervention.
- Some symptoms are useful defenses.
- Because cultural and demographic changes are more rapid than biological evolution, humans are often mismatched to modern environments.
- Human phylogenetic history leaves a legacy of biological constraint.
- Cancer is the result of somatic evolution.
- Humans have not stopped evolving.
- All phenotypes are products of gene-environment interaction and are often shaped by developmental calibration.
These all involve at most micro-evolution and the observation that humans are well designed for an ancestral environment, neither of which YEC's reject to my knowledge.
In a geology course I took in undergrad, I was under the impression that successfully locating fossil fuels that can be used for production purposes requires understanding the mechanics of how fossils form and how long the organic material has to be fossilized, which explicitly requires deep time. Young Earth Creationism cannot be used as a model for providing the world's oil, and our professor made sure that we understood those implications.
Paper by the Cultural Cognition Project: The culturally polarizing effect of the "anti-science trope" on vaccine risk perceptions
This is a great paper (indeed, I think many at LW would find the whole site enjoyable). I'll try to summarize it here.
Background: The pro/anti vaccine debate has been hot recently. Many pro-vaccine people often say, "The science is strong, the benefits are obvious, the risks are negligible; if you're anti-vaccine then you're anti-science".
Methods: They showed experimental subjects an article basically saying the above.
Results: When reading such an article, a large number of people did not trust vaccines more, but rather, trusted the American Academy of Pediatrics less.
My thoughts: I will strive to avoid labeling anybody as being "anti-science" or "simply or willfully ignorant of current research", etc., even when speaking of hypothetical 3rd parties on my facebook wall. This holds for evolution, global warming, vaccines, etc.
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Also included in the article: references to other research that shows that evolution and global warming debates have already polarized people into distrusting scientists, and evidence that people are not yet polarized over the vaccine issue.
If you intend to read the article yourself: I found it difficult to understand how the authors divided participants into the 4 quadrants (α, ß, etc.) I will quote my friend, who explained it for me:
I was helped by following the link to where they first introduce that model.
The people in the top left (α) worry about risks to public safety, such as global warming. The people in the bottom right (δ) worry about socially deviant behaviors, such as could be caused by the legalization of marijuana.
People in the top right (β) worry about both public safety risks and deviant behaviors, and people in the bottom left (γ) don't really worry about either.