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To: Ichneumon
The explanation's more complicated with that.

Coming from a religious background, I was constantly surrounded by fundamentalist Christian literature and people. There is an unfortunate tendency to mix very highly political "doctors" and professors (e.g., the philosophy professor who said that we have a 20% chance of living in The Matrix) who have controversial, liberal opinions. Chuck Colson, for example, spends many radio broadcasts on silly Feminist-Ecology professors who are truly the "evil atheists" that G3K seeks out so viligantly. (Then he switches tracks and he will talk about evolution.)

You mix scientific doctors/evolution in the bag, and it's easy to make the connection that the peer-review world is nothing but a political sham, and that all university scientists are like that Matrix philosophy professor or feminazi professors.

Then, you have the "Elizabeth Smart" effect--even though the number of kidnappings are historically low, it seemed last year that kidnapping was epidemic because of over-reporting. When the Piltdown fraud, and the Haeckel fraud are repeated over and over, it's easy to believe that peer review is about as solid as a house of cards.

It's impossible to sympathize unless you've grown up in that kind of culture, but the basic point is--I don't blame AndrewC, Gore3000, or any of that crowd in the least bit for being so suspicious.
1,410 posted on 05/14/2003 11:43:45 PM PDT by Nataku X (Never give Bush any power you wouldn't want to give to Hillary.)
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To: Nakatu X
Un marque du place.
1,428 posted on 05/15/2003 5:04:35 AM PDT by Junior (Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes.)
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