Showing posts with label gordon gauchat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gordon gauchat. Show all posts

Saturday, April 7, 2012

TOP DRAWER people have not changed their mind about Science, scientists have changed their minds about TOP DRAWER people ...

Michael Marshall
Scientists haven't changed their minds on GOD - they still don't believe in GOD, by and large.

But they are no longer certain HE is on the side of the Big Battalions.

They no longer believe Charles Darwin's claim that civilized man will inevitably kill off the weak and the small.

Instead they fear Humanity's stay on earth will be relatively short and it will end up being inherited, once again, by the meekest of the meek - the microbes.

Naturally, this does not leave the people in the Big Battalions and in the skyscrapers of Ever-Upward-Human-Progress very happy.

 That is what take away from Gordon Gauchat's study on why the Republicans hate 'Science' ....

SCIENCE , not conservatives or moderates or liberals, has changed since 1973

Michael Marshall

A study of almost 40 years of public polling data has set the print-o-sphere and the blog-o-sphere aTwitter.

Gordon Gauchat published his study in the April 2012 issue of The American Sociological Review.

He says that after the 1973 Oil Crisis, people started to change how they viewed Science.

I disagree - totally.

Science is not the reified entity that scientists like to claim it is - universal, eternal, unchanging : sort of God-Without-The-Beard .

It is a human social system and as subject to change as any other human collectivity.

Scientists and hence Science changed after 1973 for two major reasons.

First, scientists in powerful positions but born in the modernist era started to retire and die.

Secondly, the scientists born after Hiroshima and Auschwitz who gradually came to positions of power within industry and academia no longer believed in the tenets of modernity, or at least no longer believed them as strongly as their elders.

Yes, liberals/lefties/greens also started to abandon the old modernist science and embrace the new post modern commensality science while religious conservatives, in reaction , joined old line modernists in defending the old time scientific religion all the stronger .

Enemy of my enemy must be my friend is the name of that  scientific theory.

There are two very different types of Science and scientists out there --- we need to be always very clear which ones we are talking about...