Of course.
Would you agree that many people who think science needs more funding could use some of their own money to fund it, and that not doing so reduces the amount of advancement?
So what you are saying is that Dawkins should put his money where his mouth is.
Do you feel he hasn’t made a significant enough contribution to science? What does his net worth have to do with his comments?
I don’t agree that individuals funding science with pocket change is necessarily a model we should shoot for.
(Why have a military. Just pay for Uncle Stan’s vest and bullets and buy him a ticket to Afghanistan. Hoo-rah. :D)
Obviously the more money that is spent (up to some point) the better the level of advancement is likely to be. Expecting it to come from wealthy benefactors in lieu of the government seems like a good way to slow things down though.
That’s not the question I asked. And why would it be “pocket change”? You’ve got folks like Elon Musk and Bill Gates out there with a lot more than “pocket change”.
False dichotomy. Especially when you KNOW that the mood of the country is unlikely to change for decades.
If you took 40% of our society, selected more or less at random, and said, “You can’t study biology.” that would certainly slow down our rate of advancement.
Since 40% of our society believes in Creationism, it would be fair to say that our advancement is being retarded by 40% of our minds being excluded from a lot of science because of being poisoned by religion.
Cure for cancer? Maybe not, but it seems certain that some of that 40% may have had a contribution to make.
No, I would not agree about that. Evolution is a tiny portion of what constitutes “science” so that type of extrapolation is, well, unscientific.
I think his conclusion is heavily clouded by his own biases. I think one can make an argument that religion has affected certain fields of science as mentioned upthread, notably stem cell research, but I think it’s misleading to argue that because some avenues of research are lower because of religion, that it necessarily affects the overall advancement of science. Yes, government funding for research isn’t where many would like it to be, but I also think that has a lot more to do with social agenda rather than religious ones.
For example, there aren’t many people opposing climate research because of religious reasons. I know plenty of people that either flat deny it or at least deny that it’s cause by man, but I’ve never heard any of them offer a religious argument to support that.
Instead, I think all it means is that funding that might have gone to things like stem cell research, for which people do resist for religious reasons, gets redirected to other causes. Maybe we don’t make those stem cell advancements, but we still have plenty of other advancements in medicine. NASA is up to all kinds of cool stuff, we love us some space exploration.
The other thing that I think he’s neglecting is that science really doesn’t give a shit what the general population thinks. Social changes require a majority, or at least a strong minority, to be in agreement that something needs to change. As far as science is concerned, most of the non-scientists can think whatever they want, but if there’s new research, new findings, new ideas, whatever, the science community will investigate it and come to a conclusion regardless of what the popular opinion is. And this is exactly why so many Americans can think evolution is nonsense, and yet there’s still plenty of research on it nonetheless.
Because individuals funding something is a windfall. You can’t count on it. To have intelligent disbursement of funds, you need some sort of guiding entity to move things along. And I think what I said answers your question directly. You asked if people not funding it themselves is slowing advancement. I said, more money would help. But it’s silly to expect that model to work very well.
How so?
I don’t agree that it’s silly. In fact, I think it would be very good thing if we had more private funding, because then it takes most of the politics out of it.
Because we can do both. In fact, we already do.
I get that you want to be even-handed, but evolution is pretty fucking important to biological science.
Do you disagree that telling 40% of our citizens chosen more or less at random, “You are unable to study a discipline that requires acceptance of evolution” would slow down the rate of scientific advancement?
What about 50%
99%?
And it would vastly promote monetarily profitable lines of research.
Keeping the politics out of it, wouldn’t be such a factor, if one party didn’t have to kowtow to religion, which is what we’re talking about, right?
Yes, and I said, expecting it to come from wealthy benefactors in lieu of the government is a good way to slow down advancement.
Because lowering the amount of government funding doesn’t mean that private funding will magically rise to replace it.
It is. But you don’t help science by making unscientific claims.
Probably, yes. So what? Religion is part of the American fabric. If you think you can change that, well… good luck. I’m not arguing in favor of religion (believe me, I’m as unreligious as you can get). But I don’t see much point in bitching about something I can’t do anything about. You can change the world or you can change yourself. 
Sure. I know it will take time to remove religion from the forefront of American life.
But that religion is intransigent, doesn’t make Dawkins wrong in this instance. It’s like saying, “Mister Roosevelt would be a much better dancer if not for the polio.” We can’t cure the polio. But we can point out that it’s the problem, and work on a vaccine."
I believe Eisenhower’s speech warning of the military industrial complex is apt to quote here:
*"Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present
and is gravely to be regarded." *
It is a warning that needs to be taken into account, but unfortunately after years of discussions I have noted that that old chestnut is brought not as warning but to seed more doubt than is needed. It is mostly creationists or climate change deniers or just the ones that do want to pander for the ones that already do not trust science the ones that mention it nowadays.
It is interesting to note that as a part of dealing with the Soviet threat and the progress they saw that Russia had in space that Eisenhower and his administration and congress made new standards or education. hey did step on the toes of many deniers of science, those deniers have always tried to turn back the progress that those standards gave us. (And it has to be noted: a lot of the same groups are trying to remove newer standards)
http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/2007/october/scott.html
I don’t know how you quantify something like this, but my fundamentalist cousin is home-schooling her kids, and she’s not going to teach them evolution. So, there’s three kids who are either taken out of the pool of potential biologists, or will have extra baggage to overcome to be biologists. I’m pretty sure she’s a YEC, so the same goes for geology.
Perhaps the demand for biologists and/or geologists is and will always be less than the supply, so this won’t make much of a difference.
To quantify it one has to keep in mind that they will be voters someday…
I have to add that holding back science seems to not cause a lot of harm at the personal level so many then fall into the idea of not caring much, but we are talking here about the cumulative effects for the country and the world if many are not taking science into account.
You think it’s an accident that the group who are climate change deniers are also the group who are most religious? (And I am not denying some religions are fine with science and the facts about climate change.) Since nothing in the Bible says climate change can’t be manmade, their learned aversion to considering the facts when they get away with their beliefs is likely the cause. It is a small step from denying evolution to denying climate change. And not acting affects all of us.
It is possible to learn evolutionary theory at a time other than high school. If someone is good enough at biochemistry to become a full time research scientist they can probably pick up what they missed in high school about evolution over a long weekend.
Plus even parents of home schooled children are able to totally shelter their kids from outside ideas. If the kids grow up with access to the internet or a library if they have an interest in evolution then there is almost nothing the parents can do to stop them from learning about it.
As far as affecting the funding for science here is a list of R&D spending by country. Only South Korea, spends more on R&D per capita. The US spends twice what France and the UK spends per capita. Since Dawkins is British maybe he should find out what primitive superstitions are keeping his country from spending more on science. According to that list the US spends about 40% of the total R&D funding in the world and almost twice what all of Europe spends.
Ben Carson is a creationist, at least on some level, and it doesn’t seem to have prevented him from reaching a very high level of success in medicine. So I still haven’t seen much evidence that what Dawkins is claiming actually happens.
Although it may be the case that Carson would define himself more as an intelligent design advocate, but perhaps for Dawkins (and for the SDMB) that’s the same thing.
Regards,
Shodan