BTJ writes:

In general, it is remarkable how little these fundamentalists actually know about the text of the Bible.

Indeed it is! Suprisingly few fundamentalists have slaves, or send their daughters to live outside the camp at "that time" of the month, even though the Bible is very clear on their right to do the first and their duty to do the latter.

Slightly less remarkable, considering their antipathy to it, is how little these fundamentalists actually know about the science they are deriding. From the letter:

Many scientists today have denounced Darwinian theories as bogus science. Yet the EBIO department upholds it as the Gospel truth and hides itself in a false cloak of intellectual arrogance.

To be clear, no scientist, anywhere, "denounces". If they have better data, a better theory, they publish. Creationism's published theory -- ID -- has been conclusively debunked. Not so Darwin's natural selection, which despite the objections of the god-botherers continues to predict and explain new data every day. And no scientist, anywhere, upholds anything at all as the "Gospel" truth. Scientists can certainly be intellectually arrogant, but this can't be used to "cloak" anything. If you want to say something in science, you say it publically and invite every other scientist to pick it apart as best they can.

Which brings us full circle to government policy. At the highest levels of government, we need far less "I'm implementing my vision regardless" and far more "Here's my best plan, now what problems do you see with that?"

Amusing how closely the former conforms to the religious world-view and how closely the latter conforms to the scientific method...

Andrew (rhetorically?) asks:

If Darwin was right, how does such religious idiocy survive? What is it fit for?

I think most people would agree that, in a dangerous world, children that obey their parents' instructions are more likely to live, grow up, and have children, than children who ignore their parents' instructions.

So we are selected for obedience to authority.

I further suggest that our ancestors are far more likely to be those folks who ran away from the rustling in the bushes (whether or not it was actually dangerous) rather than those who stayed to investigate -- a substantial portion of investigators were subsequently eaten which made them somewhat less likely to have kids!

So we are selected for jumping to conclusions from limited evidence.

Put these two things together, and you have strong predispositions for believing what we are told coupled with a strong tendancy to extrapolate badly from that information, especially towards the "this is a threat to me" conclusion.

These two things alone explain all sorts of behaviour, such as the extraordinary motivating power of fear, and our extraordinary socials skills in the "identify the leader of this group" category.

A friend of mine explains the origin of religion using the "virgin down the well" story.

Og: Why da harvest dis year worse dan last year?

Ug: Dunno. But last year just before da harvest, remember that girl fell down da well?

Og: I do remember dat! And she was a virgin, too, dat's what Ag's mom said.

Ug: Really? You thinking what I'm thinking?

Og: Dunno! What you thinking?

Ug: Seems like when there's a virgin down the well, the harvest is better, and it's been like dat two years in a row!

Pretty soon you're sacrificing virgins / chanting to the sky god / praying to Jesus to make the harvest better every year.

Economists have been suggesting externality charges -- the means by which you "factor in" the "cost to the commons" parts of your consumption -- for over 50 years.

The problem is that the general public, with all its aspirational wishful thinking, doesn't want them.

Consider congestion charges for one example. Simply put, if you drive your car between 8-10am and 4-6pm, you pay some money to offset the inconvenience you are causing everyone else by driving at those times. That money -- all of it -- goes to fund public transport. Everyone wins! Those who still choose to drive their cars at those times find that the roads have less cars on them; those who choose to use the bus or subway find those services dramatically improved.

You simply scale the congestion charge until you get the "right" amount of cars on the road, and the "right" level of public transport service.

London has implemented just such a system, and frequent visitors to that city report both traffic and public transport greatly improved.

But in the USA and elsewhere, such a scheme would never make it past the ballot box, as the side effect of "forcing" the poor off the roads at peak times and onto the (excellent, well funded) public transport seems elitist and socialist all at the same time...

I've suggested in previous discussions about this issue that externality charges could also be a way to help solve pollution problems, but only if you could get the WTO organisation to act as a sort of "pollution externality charge escrow agent".

Governments are also generally against any plan which ties one type of revenue to one type of expenditure (a "product safety" tariff which funds an excellent inspection and certification system for example) because governments typically want to shove all income into general revenue so that it can be used untransparently to keep power, rather than spending it on the general good.

What happens in a democracy when the majority are dead against things that are in everyone's interest? Simply put, they don't happen.