Sidestepping an avalanche of evidence reinforcing Darwinian theory, its critics are pushing with worrisome success for public-school teaching of “intelligent design” — a fairy tale that hardly qualifies as a theory. This resistance to scientific scholarship is driven by fundamentalist believers, who’ve found quite a friend in President Bush.

Editorial: Wise words in defense of seeking wisdom

These are tough times to be curious — especially if you’ve made a vocation of it. After half a lifetime of theory and analysis, you might go so far as to advance knowledge — and then you’ll really be up a creek. These days, discoveries that society’s leaders find inconvenient are just as likely to be assailed as accepted. Such scorn has singed not only unpopular findings, but the realm of science itself. It’s an ugly and ominous trend, which citizens should move to oppose.
Scientific revelation often challenges human conventions — which explains why people sometimes find it irksome. They found it so when Copernicus and Galileo first spoke of heavenly revolution, and when Newton stood firm with gravity.

That those heresies of yesteryear are now mainstays of modern thinking seems to have cast little light — for many of today’s scientific breakthroughs are waved away with the same breezy disregard that dismissed gravity as “only a theory.” Indeed, even long-established science is getting the boot: A century and a half after its unveiling, scriptural literalists are laughing off Charles Darwin’s theory that contemporary species evolved through natural selection over millions of years. Sidestepping an avalanche of evidence reinforcing Darwinian theory, its critics are pushing with worrisome success for public-school teaching of “intelligent design” — a fairy tale that hardly qualifies as a theory.

This resistance to scientific scholarship is driven by fundamentalist believers, who’ve found quite a friend in President Bush. The president might be excused for showing sympathy to his most conservative allies. But when doing so entails snubbing a commonplace of biology like evolution — which even Catholic schools teach without blinking — something is very much awry.

And that flap is just the start. On a vast array of issues — climate change, reproductive health, sex education, stem-cell research, environmental degradation and loads of others — the policies of the U.S. government flout scientific fact in favor of wishful thinking.
This is no way to run a society — and America’s scientists are gearing up to say so. The vehicle for their voice is the Defend Science Project — formally organized this spring by U.S. scholars eager to mobilize Americans against the pernicious attack on science. What do they want you to do? Just visit defendscience.org to give the site a look and sign their “Defend Science” statement. If you’re at all curious, do it.

Editorial: Wise words in defense of seeking wisdom
Published: May 19, 2007