Everyone seems to be talking about Intelligent Design theory (Hyperstition, for instance). I'm not really going to enter the debate. It's all too easy to rubbish the creationists, and cry about the children! the children! In fact I am tired of hearing scientists pontificating (that's not the right word) about the end of humanity as we know it.
What a pleasure to read the panicky essays in New Scientist: their little world of white coats and test-tubes is being destroyed by a bunch of hicks and trailer-trash.
My problem with science is that it's been dominant for far too long. I've lost count of how many 'philosophical' discussions have ended because my interlocutor started quoting shitty popular science at me. Or how any and every behaviour can be justified by the catch-all "survival of the fittest, innit."
The trouble is not that Darwinism might be portrayed as 'under threat' when it isn't, but rather that people think science is not in question. Youngsters are leaving school thinking that science can explain everything, and that scientific explanations are the only kind of explanation. Underpaid and overworked teachers are feeding the little 'uns half-baked ideas on topics which draw on a diverse range of knowledge, and which require careful treatment.
So, if pressed, I would have to say that my response to the intelligent design mess is to take science off the syllabus for a cooling period - say, twenty-five years, and then slowly reintroduce it. Hopefully by that time Tom Cruise will be president and we'll all be Scientologists.
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