If you want to see how depressingly ignorant about science President Bush's new Press Secretary Tony Snow is, you need go no further than this rant at Bad Astronomy about Snow's assertions about evolution confidently made in obviously complete ignorance about science, what a theory is, what a hypothesis is, or what evolutionary theory actually says.
Depressing. The spokesperson for our President is clueless about science.
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The charm of democracy, as HL Mencken noted so long ago, is that it is the only truly amusing form of government ever invented. Unlike Mencken, however, I can't feel only joy and mirth when watching how ridiculous our entire political system is. That great American democracy that we're always…
A fellow medical student once asked me why I thought people become hostile to science-based medicine. Certainly our own failures contribute. When we have no treatments for a disease, or if the treatments themselves may also incur significant morbidity, it is understandable that patients will…
Here is a criticism of evolutionary biology:
…it is also true that the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory … We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory.
If a Bill Dembski or a Michael Egnor or a Ken Ham had said this — and it is exactly the kind of thing…
Some of you may remember Robert Meyer, a former Robert O'Brien Trophy winner we had some fun with a few months ago (see also here and here). He wrote an abysmal article packed full of blatant falsehoods about Stephen Jay Gould. He repeated a number of hoary old creationist chestnuts. For instance…
Yeah - never saw that one coming..
Orac,
You'd have really enjoyed JREF's TAM4 meeting this year. One of the speakers was Murray Gell-Mann who highlighted his experiences with several different presidential administrations in science advisory roles over the years and the vast differences they expressed in terms of interest and comprehension of science in general. It was fascinating.
You expected otherwise? W surrounds himself with people who think like he does, and he always has. Snow is typical - also ultimately meaningless, since his job is merely to repeat what the administration wants repeated.
I would guess the Clinton administrations would be the highlight of the recent administrations (say post-Carter), and that the second best would be Bush senior (though the Reagan administration wasn't exactly against science, there were certain cases of massive ignorance displayed).