Some Things You've Just GOT to Ignore

I am not convinced that he doesn't understand it.

That is how a much respected correspondent of mine replied to my critique of an essay which criticizes the scientific community in Kansas for the no-show strategy in the recent KB0E hearings on the Science Curriculum.

Yah. She was correct (as usual!) in pointing out the author's first line to me "In the game of Politics..."

Adding weight to his argument, he Charles C Haynes, goes on to say

Clearly, what the public thinks — and how people vote — matters...

And he expounds upon it with:

Because the general public (including state and local board members) knows little or nothing about the actual science involved, decisions about what gets in the science classroom are often based on hostility to evolution — not on a scientifically sound discussion of the evidence.

That's why science groups should abandon the silent treatment and begin promoting their own alternative for dealing with this controversy in standards and classrooms."

But this is exactly why the issue needs to be dismissed publically by the Science community. I know it seems strange but "dismissal" is not, in this situation, an ignorance of or withdrawal from the argument. As a strategy, it is based upon the idea that science needs must regroup and observe the antics of the creationist vogue in order to let them show themselves as the fools they truly are. It is a trust, no matter how foolish it may indeed be in the ability of the people to see for themselves what is really being debated.

Here's the hard point that makes Prof Haynes' commentary more accurate than I want to give it credit for being: I am constantly amazed at the number of people who think evolution means that humans evolved from modern day apes! From high-schoolers to my 40 something co-workers, folks simply don't understand the details of evolution, much less the mechanism of Natural Selection. As Brent of UTI points out in a recent post, even the "eminent" historian Paul Johnson believes, and gets PUBLISHED belching out the ignoramist line that evolutionists have never truly or convincingly

... made their calculations (of the time-line of human evolution) chronologically. Had they done so, they'd have seen that natural selection works much too slowly to fit into the time line allowed by the ages of the universe and our own planet.

This kind of non-sense coming from an educated man, a very-well educated Professor, was printed by an organization such as Forbes, in which it appears! His "evidence" is his ignorance! Brent's take on that is excellent so I'll just get back to why I strongly, not completely, but strongly disagree with Professor Haynes' position that abstaining from the KB0E hearings was both rational and politically sound.

Politics is as much a dramatic art as it is mere exposure. Even bad publicity is good doesn't ring very true for science in an atmosphere where it is not understood very well to begin with.
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