Robert, this is both an insult and a violation of the “no altering text inside quote boxes” rule.
Warning issued. Don’t do it again.
You’re reading more into my post than is there. I never suggested that individuals could match federal funding. However, in the one area where many people have ethical problems funding something federally (embryonic stem cell research), as long as the government isn’t making it illegal for individuals to finance the research, it’s probably a good model to go that route. There are more non-controversial things than the federal government can fund anyway, so use those funds there.
Maybe I’ve not seen him all that much, but those “sometimes” seem to be really rare, and get blow out of proportion because, OMG, someone said something bad about religion. I’ve seen much more stridently anti-religious folks out there than him. Bill Maher, for instance. He made an anti-religion movie. Personally, I like them both, and Dawkins was the first guest on Maher’s show last Friday. The Ancestor’s Tale is one of my all-time favorite books. It’s brilliant.
Also, Dawkins is out pimping a book right now, so maybe a little controversy doesn’t hurt so much…?
What’s the ratio of public and private spending on research? My WAG is that private funding dwarfs public spending.
Great. Religion wasn’t holding back science as much as it might. Should we be thankful? In 2001 Bush banned federal funding to start new embryonic cell lines or conduct research on newly derived embryonic cell lines. Obama over turned it in 2009, allowing scientists to use cells from IVF for study. Do scientists want embryonic cell lines for kicks? Will religiously minded tax payers benefit from advances in medicine curing diabetes, heart disease or parkinsons?
Well, yeah, but that’s because Maher is a horrible human being who gets off on pissing people off. I do think that Dawkins, as misguided as he is, thinks he’s helping. Maher doesn’t. He’s in it to crack jokes.
Though, since he can be funny at times, Maher is more tolerable. You just have to avoid his smug bigotry.
You also have to avoid his anti-vaccine, anti-germ theory, and HIV/AIDS denialism views. Maher is living proof you don’t need religion to be against science.
I really enjoy Dawkins when he is writing or speaking about science, but generally wish he would shut up the rest of the time.
Eh. He’s a comedian. If he pisses you off, then maybe you’re just not into his kind of humor.
That sounds plausible but it isn’t. This is a huge area of research – “the one area” potentially offers hope for Parkinson’s, diabetes, heart disease, cancers, and countless other serious illnesses as well as accidental injuries like those to the spinal cord. But it’s research that may take decades to come to fruition and requires large, coordinated research programs to be effective. Private investment, interested only in risk-averse short-term gains, has neither the money nor the interest in funding such ventures.
I saw Dawkins on last Friday’s show. I never miss Bill Maher, and I go into withdrawal when he takes his summer or holiday-season break. I thought Dawkins was pretty tolerable on the show, but as I said, some of his stridency at other times is annoying.
Really? Bill Maher’s mission is to “crack jokes”? Is that why the initial interview guest on his shows, his panelists, and his mid-show special guest are always intelligent, informed people with strong points of view – some of which run counter to his and mine, but which provoke interesting discussion? Is that why I find Real Time one of the most informative shows on television? Is that why Real Time has been nominated for a Prime Time Emmy every single year over its decade-long run so far? Is that why Maher – not by any means a wealthy man by the standards of celebrities – donated a million dollars to the Obama campaign? Because it’s all a big joke?
You know, for once I would like to see him in a laboratory surrounded by test tubes and microscopes actually performing a science experiment.
Or since he is a zoologist, take some students out into a forest and discuss the various ways the insects and animals interact.
Or even maybe see him dissect a frog and explain the various organs.
These are things scientists and science teachers do. If he is truly a scientist and wants to show how awesome science is, lets see him do some.
The simple answer is that the US is a very wealthy and very big place with a highly variable culture; fundamentalist anti-intellectual, anti-science attitudes in certain areas of the US are probably not helping but they’re also not hindering too much in somewhere like California or New York. I would expect that Dawkins knows this very well and he’s being hyperbolic.
He does this. He does science workshops and lectures for students that are great. He just doesn’t get mainstream press for it. If you search “Richard Dawkins science” on YouTube, you can find several examples. His passion for science really comes out in these, and I enjoy them immensely. I wish he would focus more on what he loves and less on what he hates, but, like I said, he doesn’t get much press for that.
I’m not even sure how this is controversial. You don’t generally find a lot of religious fundamentalists in the sciences. Engineering, yes.
One could argue there are bigger issues, like anti-intellectualism in general or math aversion or poor teaching of math, but anti-science views are a factor, especially in the South and Midwest.
I like when mild mannered guys like Chalmers Johnson, Chomsky, and Dawkins are called strident by their opponents. Now Hitchens, that was a strident dude.
It’s funny as hell, but it’s mostly celebrities and stuffed shirts yelling at each other and the same stories the rest of the news media is doing. Oliver is better for actual investigation and reporting of facts on things that actually matter, especially issues affecting the poor. I really doubt Maher would ever talk extensively about, I dunno, the plight of chicken farmers. Doesn’t help that Maher himself is a kaleidoscope of leftist woo.
Darwin is on British money. Imagine if someone suggested such a thing in the US, not Darwin obviously but perhaps Gould. So maybe he is badmouthing us from England. I, as an American, think he is totally justified.
Did he publish it in a reviewed journal? Or was it a clearly labeled bit of opinion? You have a very fuzzy idea of how science works.
I have a column in a computer design journal. The papers in this journal are carefully reviewed, my column can be any damn thing I please from speculation to jokes. Our readers understand the difference.
I’m unaware of Carson ever doing any research. Surgeons, even good surgeons like Carson was, don’t need to know anything about evolution to do their job, no more than car mechanics have to be experts in combustion engineering or mechanical engineering to be good mechanics.
Thanks. I’ll look those up.
Yes his mouth does get him in trouble. Recently he got into trouble by saying “mild pedophilia” isnt harmful and that a woman when presented with evidence her unborn child has down syndrome should have just “aborted and tried again”.
It looks to me like you’re agreeing with Shodan: Dawkins wasn’t being a scientist when he made the allegation.
He was not speaking from his expertise as an evolutionary zoologist, if that is what you mean. He was making an observation about the composition and beliefs of the electorate, a significant portion of which do not accept scientific theories that have been widely regarded as demonstrated to be factual beyond any reasonable doubt and in absence of any exceptional evidence to the contrary, e.g. natural selection. Were this four hundred years earlier, he would doubtless be railing upon the Catholic church for rejecting heliocentricism. While Dawkins is certainly militant and abrasive in his screeds against religion (stemming from his personal experience with an ex-wife who insisted on raising their child in a particularly backward and Fundamentalist sect of Christianity) he makes and defends his points with clarity and citation. It certainly isn’t a stretch to observe the anti-intellectualism and education atavism of a nation in which a substantial portion of the population refuses to acknowledge established scientific principles and in which the teaching of evolution is contraversial in many states to the point of attempting to insert pseudoscientific gobbledygook like Intelligent Design into the science curriculum.
As for the impact upon science, one can see it in gene therapy research, which has been substantially restricted in the use of embryonic stem cells over nothing more than religious objections to abortion. The only reason religious uathorities aren’t railing more heavily in other fields such as high energy particle physics is because that work is already internationalized thanks to the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider. (While the cancellation was a political move rather than religious, there was a small but vocal minority of Pentacostalist whackjobs who were lobbying against operation of the SSC on some flaketastic basis about bringing the Apocalypse prematurely or some other absurd horseshit.). But the largest impact that religion has had on science in the US has been on education, which is ironic because what we now view as the hard sciences of chemistry, physics, biology, and astronomy all had their origins in the education and communication traditions of the European Enlightenment.
Stranger
Once a scientist, always a scientist. But opinions don’t have to come with tables of data.
If you’ve read Dawkins, you’d know that this whole thing is driven by his mail from the religious attacking him for his writing on evolution. So he has lots of data supporting his views, if not data that would ever go into a paper.
If Dawkins were a sociologist he might do a study on the influence of religion on science, but he’s not. He knows anecdotal data can drive opinion pieces, not papers. That’s being a scientist.
I was thinking along those lines earlier. I know some folks think that Dawkins can be overly aggressive in pushing his atheist views, but as an evolutionary biologist, he is on the receiving end of attacks from overly aggressive religious types, so it’s hard to blame him. And frankly, I’ve not seem him be “overly aggressive”.
I do, however, need to correct an earlier post of mine in which I implied that Dawkins didn’t right books about the subject. Not sure how I forgot The God Delusion, but that was certainly one of his books.
So can he demonstrate any causal relation? Or that this is uniquely attributable to religiosity as opposed to natural human suspicion and suspectability to pseudoscience which may come in the guise of religion but also from other sources?
I’m curious if there’s any more details on this, since it would be rather unusual that Dawkins who has been an atheist since his youth would marry a fundamentalist.
Much has been said about American anti-intellectualism, although I fail to see how we are particularly more anti-intellectual than any other nation while once socioeconomic disparities are accounted for, American schoolchildren do just as well if not better than their foreign counterparts.
Any real opposition to embryonic stem cell research is pretty much dead at this point, and I don’t see how its different except in its greater weakness than the non-religious opposition to things such as nuclear power, GMOs, and vaccination.
Or perhaps its because there’s no religious objection to it.
Yes and I’m sure you can find Indian witch-doctors thundering how we can’t store nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain because of ancestral spirits or whatnot.
So how exactly has there been a causal relation in religion affecting science education in the United States? Is America significantly less scientifically innovative? Does it have disproportionately less youths going into the sciences?
Its called being a polemicist.