Posted on 01/02/2006 5:49:09 PM PST by blam
Ban all schools? That's a dangerous thought
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
(Filed: 03/01/2006)
The Earth can cope with global warming, schools should be banned and we should learn to love bacteria. These are among the dangerous ideas revealed by a poll of leading thinkers.
John Brockman, the New York-based literary agent and publisher of The Edge website posed the question: what is your dangerous idea? in reference to a controversial book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett that argued that Darwinism was a universal acid that ate through virtually all traditional beliefs.
Brockman received 116 responses to his challenge from Nobel laureates, futurists and creative thinkers. These were among them:
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The evolution of evil
When most people think of stalkers, rapists, and murderers, they imagine crazed, drooling monsters with maniacal Charles Manson-like eyes. The calm, normal-looking image staring back at you from the bathroom mirror reflects a truer representation.
The danger comes from people who refuse to recognize that there are dark sides of human nature that cannot be wished away by attributing them to the modern ills of culture, poverty, pathology or exposure to media violence.
The danger comes from failing to gaze into the mirror and come to grips with the capacity for evil in all of us.
David Buss, Psychologist, University of Texas, Austin
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Our planet is not in peril
Environmental crises are a fundamental part of the history of the earth: there have been dramatic temperature excursions, severe glaciations, vast asteroid and comet impacts. Yet the earth is still here, unscathed. And yet many people in the various green movements feel compelled to add on the notion that the planet is in crisis, or doomed; that all life on earth is threatened. The most important thing about environmental change is that it hurts people; the basis of our response should be human solidarity. The planet will take care of itself.
Oliver Morton, Chief news and features editor at Nature
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Let's stop beating Basil's car
Basil Fawlty, television's hotelier from hell, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down. He seized a branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Has it run out of petrol?
Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Fawlty?
Isn't the murderer just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective genes? Why do we vent hatred on murderers when we should regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? We shall grow out of this and learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Fawlty.
Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary biologist, Oxford University
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Biotechnology will be domesticated in 50 years
This means cheap tools and do-it-yourself kits for gardeners to design roses, and for animal-breeders to design lizards and snakes. It means biotech games for children, like computer games but with real eggs and seeds.
There are two dangers. First, smart kids and malicious grown-ups will find ways to convert biotech tools to the manufacture of lethal microbes.
Second, ambitious parents will find ways to apply the tools to the genetic modification of babies.
The unanswered question is, whether we can regulate domesticated biotechnology so that it can be applied to animals and vegetables but not to microbes and humans.
Freeman Dyson, Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study
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Bacteria are us
Our sensibilities, our perceptions that register through our sense organ cells evolved directly from our bacterial ancestors. Yet our culture's terminology about bacteria is that of warfare: they are germs to be destroyed.
We load our soaps with anti-bacterials; stomach ulcers are now agreed to be caused by bacterial infection. Even if some admit the existence of "good" bacteria in soil or probiotic food, few of us tolerate the dangerous notion that human sperm tails and sensitive cells of nasal passages lined with waving cilia are former bacteria.
If this idea becomes widespread it follows that we humans must agree that, even before our evolution as animals, we have tried to kill our ancestors. Again, we have seen the enemy and, as usual, it is us. Social interactions of sensitive bacteria, then, not God, made us who were are.
Lynn Margulis, Biologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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The posterior probability of any particular God is small
You can't in any logical system I understand disprove the existence of God, or prove it for that matter. But in the probability calculus I use, He is very improbable.
Philip Anderson, Princeton University, Nobel laureate
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Science must destroy religion
Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us incapable of criticising ideas that are now patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive. It has also obliged us to lie to ourselves about the compatibility between religious faith and scientific rationality.
In the spirit of religious tolerance, most scientists keep silent when they should be blasting the hideous fantasies of a prior age with all the facts at their disposal.
Sam Harris, University of California, Los Angeles
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Science encourages religion in the long run (and vice versa)
Ever since Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, scientists and secularly-minded scholars have been predicting the ultimate demise of religion.
But, if anything, religious fervour is increasing across the world. An underlying reason is that science treats humans and intentions only as incidental elements in the universe, whereas for religion they are central.
Science is not well-suited to deal with people's existential anxieties, including death, deception, loneliness or longing for love or justice. It cannot tell us what we ought to do, only what we can do.
Religion thrives because it addresses people's deepest emotional yearnings.
Scott Atran, Anthropologist, University of Michigan
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School is bad for children
Schools are structured today in much the same way as they have been for hundreds of years. Schools should simply cease to exist as we know them.
The Government needs to get out of the education business and stop thinking it knows what children should know and then testing them constantly to see if they regurgitate whatever they have been spoon-fed.
We need to stop producing a nation of stressed-out students who learn how to please the teacher instead of pleasing themselves.
We need to produce adults who love learning, not adults who avoid all learning because it reminds them of the horrors of school.
We need to stop thinking that all children need to learn the same stuff. We need to create adults who can think for themselves.
Call school off. Turn them into apartments.
Roger Schank, Chief learning officer, Trump University
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Free will is exercised unconsciously
By observing another person's brain activity, one can predict what someone is going to do before he is aware that he has made the decision to do it.
This finding has caused -philosophers to ask: if the choice is determined in the brain unconsciously before we decide to act, where is free will?
Are these choices predetermined? Is our experience of freely willing our actions an illusion, a rationalisation after the fact? Is one to be held responsible for decisions that are made without conscious awareness?
Eric Kandel, Columbia University, Nobel laureate
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Science may be 'running out of control'
Public opinion surveys (at least in the UK) reveal a generally positive attitude to science.
However, this is coupled with widespread worry that science may be "running out of control".
Whether this idea is true or false, it's an exceedingly dangerous one because it engenders pessimism, and de-motivates efforts to secure a safer and fairer world.
The future will best be safeguarded - and science has the best chance of being applied optimally - through the efforts of people who are less fatalistic.
Lord Rees, President, the Royal Society
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Revealing the genetic basis of personality and behaviour will create societal conflicts
We attribute behaviours in other species to genes but when it comes to humans we seem to like the notion that we are all created equal, that each child is a "blank slate".
But it will inevitably be revealed that there are strong genetic components associated with most aspects of human existence, including personality sub-types, language capabilities, mechanical abilities, intelligence, sexual activities and preferences, intuitive thinking, quality of memory, willpower, temperament, athletic abilities, and so on.
The danger rests with what we already know: that we are not all created equal.
Craig Venter, Scientist
Fortunately, the world is run by the dummies. This keeps things on an even keel.
How many of such dangerous people can we tolerate at loose in society?
No, just the ones run by government.
If Fawlty's defective car ran amok and killed a dozen innocent bystanders, we would hold Fawlty responsible for not controlling his "defective" machine.
Sometimes it is easier to dispose of something than to fix it. People are brought up to understand right and wrong. At some point LATER they become defective. Personal accountabilty is a reality.
Meanwhile 45 million babies have been thrown away because they were "unplanned". Shouldn't people know by now where babies come from? Those babies weren't defective. Their parents were.
Mother who gets abortions: Darwin Award winner.
In the spirit of religious tolerance, most scientists keep silent when they should be blasting the hideous fantasies of a prior age with all the facts at their disposal.
Sam Harris, University of California, Los Angeles
A man born too late in time. He would have made his mark in the Third Reich.
It is interesting just how many atheists want to comment on God and religion.
Evolution ping
"School is bad for children"
http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a3846d8ab444a.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
Who says [some] scientists don't have an agenda?
They're scared to death they may be wrong.
There's a lot here to prove the truth of the maxim that you don't have to have a low IQ to say stupid--and ultimately totally false--things. Dawkins, who has already been mentioned above, and Venter, also, I will nominate. Our "sexual orientation" is fixed by our genes? Like, in a newborn nursery at the hospital, among the 10 babies you could say that not only are, for example, 6 white, 3 black and one Asian, but 7 are heterosexual, 2 homosexual and 1 bi?
What's this world coming to??
Thanks, but I donno about this one as an evolution thread.
I have to admit I get confused when 'serious' thinkers bash religion like this. I can't understand why they take such an infantile view of religion and it's role in society. It might just be short sightedness, or an inability to see the forest for the trees, but I think it's important for those of us who don't have the same kind of problems reconciling science and religion to begin engaging in the debate.
It's a silly thing to believe that a society can make progress in any direction without a common vision of the goals, and since science is morally neutral like math, (or at least it's supposed to be) that goal must come from something else. Christianity and the Judeo Christian ethic have been the guidepost of western civilization and as such, have proven themselves to be of great benefit to those who live under it's influence.
That doesn't mean we need to pass a law and start rounding people up at gunpoint on Sunday morning to get them to go to services, in fact I personally believe that it's quite the opposite, one of the great strengths of the Christian world is that if you don't believe, there won't be any troops at your door to force you.
But that doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. We have a common morality, and a common set of values, and we need to embrace them and recognize that there is room for those who may doubt in some areas. Christianity is the original big tent, and it's by leading the doubters to the truth that we all benefit.
We can't and shouldn't rely on government's sword to make people seem faithful, we should rely on showing them the truth to actually help them be faithful.
My feeling is that Science and religion can be easily reconciled, just like math and religion. I think the trouble arises when the respective proponents of either science or religion begin to think in terms of politics and power instead of sticking to their respective domains.
Just a quick blurb to open up the discussion. Thanks.
VOUCHERS WOULD FIX THIS PROBLEM.
Maybe the next President won't let Ted Kennedy write his education policy.
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