As America grows more polarized, conservatives increasingly reject science and rational thought
The Tea Party has intensified social pressure on conservative-leaning Americans to shun science and academia
http://www.salon.com/2012/06/18/as_america_grows_more_polarized_conservatives_increasingly_reject_science_and_rational_thought/
I had no idea it was this bad. I knew our country was turning against science, but I naively presumed that most of the population believed in evolution. When I read reports that “46 percent of the population” believed in creation, I thought that the remaining 54% therefore believed in evolution. It turns out that I am the dummy in this case and have engaged in a huge logical fallacy. Instead, some 85% of our population does not believe in evolution, thus I am in a tiny minority even though the article states that the number of people believing evolution has “been a steady rise” to 15%.
I guess I have really been lying to myself all these years. People really are as stupid as I complain about on my bad days. It is no wonder that our political situation is so thoroughly fucked up, how can you possibly develop critical thinking skills if you start your thinking process that evolution is a farce?
It is going to take me a while to adjust to this ‘new’ paradigm. Emigration is really starting to look like the only viable future for me. Too bad my wife doesn’t agree.
I’ve often wondered how people can NOT believe in evolution, but I might have the answer: many of the “proponents” of evolution are different in no substantial way from the proponents of creationism or intelligent design or anything else.
They behave EXACTLY as their opponents do, as if evolution is a religion. They establish theories then derive “facts” by plausible extrapolation as if plausibility, alone, is enough. Their stridency in support of the insupportable is off-putting.
Take the primordial soup from which life evolved. I’m on board with that theory, but it’s merely a theory. We’ve so far failed to develop a soup of our own from which life evolves (or is “created” by an external hand !!), however hard we’ve tried. We may eventually find life in the universe in some place where a primordial soup is a distinct non-player.
Consider the fellow that explains that a bird has evolved to be drab because being unnoticeable is a survival plus. He sits right alongside the fellow that explains that a bird has evolved to be noticeable and colorful and attractive because those traits are survival plusses.
Too many scientists are not scientific. They’re high priests and preachers and evangelists working from faith, not facts. So long as they behave as if evolution is a religion and treat it as such, people will continue to pick and choose among the proposed religions. Evolution will get its 15%.
I think you are on to something. Quite a few so-called scientists speak about their work with a fervor that approaches religious conviction. I am already on record stating that a lot of ‘scientists’ lack a firm grasp of the scientific method and actually fail to design their experiment to produce any meaningful answer, no matter what the result. Also, there is the habit of refusing to make their work comprehensible to anyone else not an expert in their field (much like many high priests), thus, as you say, people are left to make a somewhat arbitrary decision on who/what to believe.