Well, that’s the branding:
Observant students will notice that social problems surrounding science are seldom mentioned in official curricula. And now, these pupils are starting to act. They have shamed their seniors into including more diverse contributors as faculty members and role models. Young scholars insolently ask their superiors why they fail to address the extinction crises elucidated by their research. Such subversions are reminiscent of the mass-produced heretical pamphlets circulated by Martin Luther’s supporters at the start of the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century Europe. The inherited authoritarian political structures of science education are becoming brittle — but still remain largely unchanged from my own school days.
Jerry Ravetz, “Stop the science training that demands ‘don’t ask’” at Nature
Does that mean that, for example, it is okay to discuss the nearly intractable problems of Darwinism? Can we – just to start – brand the Darwinbird of pop science and the clever mare as not really scientific ideas—even though the theories are chockfull of Darwinblather? What about evolutionary psychology? The bad driving gene, for example?
Well, Nature might not be prepared to go that far, as noted at Evolution News and Science Today:
And when scientists advise on policy, they are pressured to become attached to official stances on issues, or to shun the responsibility entirely. They then find it difficult to resist dismissing all critics as cranks or ‘denialists’, whose rejection of ‘facts’ is a sign of their depravity. (To be sure, much of science denial is cynical and self-serving.)
Sarah Chaffee, “Breakthrough? Nature Calls for Openness in Science Education” at Nature
Much that is called science denial today is not “cynical and self-serving”; it is fed-upness with approved rubbish marketed as science because it suits a popular current philosophy.
Fine. The stakes are clear. They can’t have both.
Will they really choose science in the end? We shall see!
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