In my experience they are self-righteous and judgmental. “Are you going to put that onion skin in the garbage disposal? Don’t you compost”, “You eat meat? Don’t you know their methane destroys the ozone layer”?. I had a friend that smoked dope around her daughter but went non-linear when her daughter’s friend had a pizza delivered: “Don’t you know there is poison in factory food”? Trying to go out to eat with these moron’s is a real pain: do you have gluten free pizza?, can you tell me every ingredient in the mole’ sauce?, is the wine organic? Mention anything about popular culture and it’s “I don’t own a TV”. Well you don’t own a shaver for you underarms or deodorant soap either.
I agree. New Agers aren’t so aggressively proselytising and **DanBlather’s **examples (per the last post) are mostly personal and can be avoided by just not hanging around with them. Creationists are more interested in forcing their views (by governmental means if possible) upon people.
However, recently New Agers have developed commonality with the anti-vax, anti-meat, anti-flouride etc movement, but I think that movement has only become influential when it has bled over from New Agers to soccer mums. I think New Agers are too vagued out to be worth worrying about, compared to Creationists who actually seem capably of active lobbying.
This is like concluding that breathing is only important to people who are being threatened with asphyxiation, because you have noticed that they are the only people who talk about their need to breathe.
One thing that I don’t think has been pointed out—though I’ve done a bit of skimming, so I could be wrong—is that any scientist who denies evolution shows that they’re willing to disregard the results of scientific inquiry and experimentation simply because they don’t like what the results say. Once you’ve established that that’s an acceptable thing to do, you can do it with any results. Case in point: the “controversy” over climate change.
Evolution denial is scientific and intellectual dishonesty and that is a fast track to a new dark age.
Oooh, I like dat!
Untrue. The fact that the organisms are similar in some ways because important mechanisms are conserved and different in other ways because of how they’ve evolved, is HUGE to what we do. Understanding exactly how systems have evolved and what will work on both rats and humans (and also importantly, what won’t) is a vital aspect of what we do.
Without looking at the gene sequences, comparing conserved bits of genese, investigating cell phenotypes to determine how they have evolved differently in humans, and looking at the physical and electrophysiological data to see what the similarities and differences are in the systems, all we’re doing is coming up with experiments to treat rat spinal cord injury, which no one gives a rat’s ass (heh) about.
/edit: That being said, people can convince themselves of anything. I do believe that someone can follow the idea of evolution and use that in their work, and still pretend it’s not real outside of work. People are crazy like that. It just makes them self-deceiving douchebags. You can convince yourself that your TV works by magic, too, if you call electricity “magic” and say it works by the same rules as electricity (in which you don’t believe).
Your edit sums up my idea. If you are convinced that the earth flat you can still travel by plane wondering how they manage to get anywhere if they “assume” that the earth is round. The “God-wants-it-to-look-like-that” argument is unbeatable in some senses. You can even use evolution as “method” that neatly describes reality if it is false. You need blidfolds the size of Jupiter, but you could.
Just for the record, again, I fully believe in and teach evolution at school.
If you were more enlightened you would realize that by hating New Agers you are just hating yourself because we are all manifestations of the one Advaita Vedanta.
So why do you hate yourself?
Ah. I didn’t get that from your response. I thought you meant we could use rats as models just because their neurons resemble those of humans (which wouldn’t work because they aren’t entirely similar), not that you would have to accept all of the “rules” of doing comparative research with a baseline knowledge of evolution and work within them, just calling it a different name.
The idea that people grab scientific ideas, act like they aren’t what they are, and use them without acknowledging where they really came from, does infuriate me. It’s like insisting that someone only got better from an illness because of God’s will, even as you watch them suck down the effective treatment. Gah.
Oooh, the Advaita Vedanta looks fresh today.
Because part of me is New Ager.
There’s something about an Advaita Vedanta man …
Does anybody else keep hearing “asafoetida” in their heads when they read that?
I didn’t previously know that word, but that’s a good one.
Clearly, you’ve never had my ex-boyfriend’s chana masala. More’s the pity.