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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (678390)	4/6/2005 3:12:21 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769670

"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" --- HILARIOUS!!!!!!! Of course, this is an old trick for exposing shallow-thinking charlitans, and it has been used many times before. It never fails to be funny though! However, as to the claim near the front of your post: "Republicans are too anti-science to become good professors. That's the essence of Paul Krugman's recent New York Times column explaining why there are so few Republican college professors." Actually, no... that was NOT the main 'point' of his column (although I'll give you that he does implicitly dangle that ridiculous concatenation out there near the bottom of his column, with his use of the poorly chosen word 'Republicans' instead of something more appropriate such as Luddite, Theocrat, or proponents of the Supernatural, for any readers too weak in rhetoric to notice that he isn't actually making that claim....) The MAIN POINT of his column is SELF SELECTION likely accounts for most of these differences: "...But studies that find registered Republicans in the minority at elite universities show that Republicans are almost as rare in hard sciences like physics and in engineering departments as in softer fields. Why? One answer is self-selection - the same sort of self-selection that leads Republicans to outnumber Democrats four to one in the military." The very article that you posted, Pro, AGREES with this: "Krugman correctly points out that self-selection is part of the reason there are so few Republicans in academia." I thought the 'heart' of the Krugman column was contained in the following excerpt (note: science is NOT 'faith-based'. Claims must be verifiable.): "..."Consider the statements of Dennis Baxley, a Florida legislator who has sponsored a bill that - like similar bills introduced in almost a dozen states - would give students who think that their conservative views aren't respected the right to sue their professors. Mr. Baxley says that he is taking on "leftists" struggling against "mainstream society," professors who act as "dictators" and turn the classroom into a "totalitarian niche." His prime example of academic totalitarianism? When professors say that evolution is a fact. In its April Fools' Day issue, Scientific American published a spoof editorial in which it apologized for endorsing the theory of evolution just because it's "the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time," saying that "as editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence." And it conceded that it had succumbed "to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do." The editorial was titled "O.K., We Give Up." But it could just as well have been called "Why So Few Scientists Are Republicans These Days." Thirty years ago, attacks on science came mostly from the left; these days, they come overwhelmingly from the right, and have the backing of leading Republicans."