I know – the answer seems obvious. But let’s put this in context.

Iranian scientists are being killed, apparently in connection to their research on nuclear power. I’ll add that their deaths can’t reasonably be chalked up to collateral damage – say, someone blowing up a facility and a scientist ends up caught in the blast there. No, these are apparently incidents of scientists specifically being targeted and killed owing to what they’re researching and the practical, or at least possible, outcomes of said research.

Now, the particular politics of the Iran situation isn’t what interests me here – what I’m interested in is that some people (indeed, some people motivated largely by secular concerns) think it’s not only permissible to stop a scientist from conducting research, but it can be imperative to the point that killing him is justified. The interesting thing is, if someone is sympathetic to the idea, they seem to be sympathetic to the following claim: scientific knowledge and research needs to be tightly controlled, with some research off-limits for some, possibly all, people. Put another way, sometimes brutally squashing scientific research – being anti-science – is necessary.

There are a lot of interesting questions and considerations that could come up from this line of questioning, but there’s one particular issue I think this draws attention to.

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Large geometric shapes are being discovered beneath the Amazon forest. Have the discoverers evaluated their origins correctly? If so, why? Is there any way to distinguish between artifacts caused by human and extraterrestrial agents?
Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World By SIMON ROMERO January 14, 2012

RIO BRANCO, Brazil — Edmar Araújo still remembers the awe.
As he cleared trees on his family’s land decades ago near Rio Branco, an outpost in the far western reaches of the Brazilian Amazon, a series of deep earthen avenues carved into the soil came into focus.
“These lines were too perfect not to have been made by man,” said Mr. Araújo, a 62-year-old cattleman. . . . Read More ›

Professor Chris Hogue is a Canadian biochemist/bioinformatician who works on protein folding (among other things) at the National University of Singapore. Professor Hogue has recently started a new series on complexity and evolution on his Website. It turns out that Hogue is highly critical of the Intelligent Design movement. But what makes his criticisms especially interesting for ID theorists is that they focus on the process of human design itself, which Hogue argues is indistinguishable from an incremental process of evolution. In his first post on complexity and evolution, Professor Hogue begins with a short summary of his professional background: As a mid-career scientist I spend my time teaching, building software, and researching topics on molecular assembly and evolution. My Read More ›