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Not why they should.
From James Barham’s “When our best science is not good enough” ( The Best Schools, November 6, 2011),
First, the new trend in science toward enlisting the political and judicial system to help one side to prevail in a scientific dispute is highly injurious to the health of science itself, to say nothing of the polity, and it must be stopped. If a scientific consensus is so insecure that it has to have its claims imposed on the public by court order—as happened in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover decision in Pennsylvania with respect to the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution—it can scarcely expect to command the respect of that public, and it forfeits whatever intellectual authority it might otherwise be entitled to. Similar efforts are now afoot to impose an artificial consensus on the subject of climate change. They are equally to be deplored.
The first requirement for ascertaining the reliability of a consensus scientific claim, then, is a climate of frank and open debate, free from political intimidation.
Both the Darwin lobby and Christian Darwinists whine that Americans “don’t believe in” evolution – and it never occurs either to them or the plush-toy media figures with whom they have a cozy relationship to ask what contribution their politicizing the issues makes.
It’s this simple: In (real) science, medicine, and engineering, your results must follow certain quality standards. Even Einstein can be wrong, even if one result is that “There is no solution that works.”
In politics, you can get any results that the electorate will vote for or judges will rule. A judge could rule that Einstein is right and the faster-than-light neutrinos are wrong. Or that you can’t teach about them in school. Or whatever. That then becomes the official “truth.”
But people understand the difference between the truth standards of knowledge and the truth standards of power. Physicists have demonstrated the former by resting content with the current uncertainty until better data shall arrive; Darwinists have demonstrated the latter in abundance by relying on courts to enforce their dogmas.
Each gets the public confidence it deserves.
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