Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 24 Editor's Choice: 2
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Science is about truth
[Read the article: The atheist and the creationist: Can't they just get along?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Cary has triggered a violent response because Creationism is just one of the areas where wishful thinking and ignorance (truthiness) are replacing facts in American society. The news most Americans receive has been reduced to Journalism 101: two quotes for and two against is a news story. Truth no longer matters.
In the Iraq war run-up, the Times buried in the last paragraph of a long story on the infamous uranium tubes "experts have contended that the tubes are too big to be used for uranium separation." A statement about fact: if the tubes were the wrong size then the entire claim was necessarily false, but the journalist didn't consider that fact important enough to verify. Instead the story was about what some spokesmen said.
Think of the stories that always get the quotes and anecdotes treatment: creationism, climate change, vaccines and autism, "EMF" from power lines, mysticism, UFO's, magnets-herbs-accupucture-auras in alternative medicines. More people believe in astrology than even creationism. "Teaching the controversy" means pretending there is no such thing as truth.
Just last week the NY Times had an auto section story on the EMF "dangers" in hybrid cars. It mentioned the huge medical studies on the question but didn't consider it newsworthy to mention the result: no effect whatsoever.
We are seeing the effects of the vaccine stories now: mumps and measles and other serious diseases reappearing in school children. Meanwhile Europe removed thermosil from vaccines with no effect on the autism rate.
Belief should be driven by knowledge: no real biologist would reject evolution- it is the language in which biology is written. Nothing in biology makes any sense except in the context of evolutionary processes. Claiming otherwise is like claiming Shakespeare is not written in English: if you ignore the whole it's easy to take potshots - hey what language is "bare bodkin" or "coign of vantage" anyway? Read the whole thing and it's incontrovertible.
Would we make the same decisions as a nation if we relied more on facts? Could the death penalty persist if all knew that 1/4 of convictions of the Illinois death row were overturned when DNA evidence became available. How many died falsely?
Would we ever have gone to war in Iraq if Americans understood the middle east better and had a president who could find it on the map?
Climate change? Would we have done more if sneering wasn't seen as enough to place against models and data? Would we behave the same way if we understood conservation of energy - that the oil we are burning now is a fixed limited store of energy from the sun collected by plants over millions of years?
Would we feel the same way about God and mans's role in gender and sexual issues if we remembered that 1 in 1000 of live births is of indeterminate gender? (XXY or hymaphrodite or just unclear.) They used to do surgery to just pick whatever looked closest, now they wait and let the child decide after seeing the consequences of bad choices.
What do we make of a God that kills 80% of fertilized eggs before birth? (includes ~30% of implanted that miscarry, rest don't implant) Does it change our view of heaven or when the soul enters the body? Or is this just the consequences of our mutations? What about the souls of identical twins? So is God an abortist?
How do we feel about mitochondria - creatures within our cells that do not share our DNA or reproductive methods? What about the 15% or so of bacterial DNA imbedded in our DNA and some of our genes? Who are we anyway?
Knowledge isn't just power, it's the core of wisdom.
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You can't use copyright to suppress news
[Read the article: Various items]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: “quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; ...."
You may own the way you say things but not the ideas you have said or the fact you have said them.
Also note that: "Several categories of material are generally not eligible for federal copyright protection. These include among others:
Works that have not been fixed in a tangible form of expression [this means what you say but don't record]....
Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, as distinguished from a description, explanation, or illustration..."