The Daily Show is having a week-long series on Evolution. Stewart explains: “Sadly, the debate itself has not evolved in over 150 years… until this week.”
Today they had on blogger and science journalist Chris Mooney, author of the Republican War on Science (which I still haven’t read, previously mentioned here). Jon Stewart posed a few interesting questions:
JS: Who is the scientific community? Because we rarely… every now and then you see a guy in starbuck’s and you think, that dudes’s in science.
JS: Science seems ripe for this kind of abuse, because it’s very difficult to know if people are lying to you with science. Is that why it’s so easily manipulated?
JS: Is there a source that people can go to, like in the way when you are buying a car, is there a consumer reports for science? Is there somebody you can go to and you think to yourself “Oh my God, Evolution got 3 stars…”
Worth pondering…
September 13th, 2005 at 10:47 am
The wikipedia acts as an unbiased report of science.
For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_State
It explains the idea and that it lost momentum, and eventually evidence came in that refuted the theory for most cosmologists.
Take a look at the Intelligent design entry:
“Adherents of ID claim it stands on equal footing with the current scientific theories regarding the origin of life and the origin of the universe [1]. This claim has not been accepted by the scientific community and intelligent design does not constitute a research program within the science of biology. Despite ID sometimes being refered to popularly and in the media as Intelligent Design Theory, it is not recognized as a scientific theory and has been categorized by the mainstream scientific community as creationist pseudoscience. ”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design
September 13th, 2005 at 12:57 pm
…and ID got a “Not Recommended”…
September 14th, 2005 at 6:57 pm
Although we know that science is different than religion (and other academia), it is important to realize it doesn’t look that way to the outside world. Science appears to be just another elite group of people debating among themselves and sending their decisions to the lower people below. How is that different than what they do at the Vatican?
Of course, we know why it’s different, but how does the average guy on the street know that. It’s not like he’s tested the acceleration of gravity himself anytime recently, let alone tried to find a neutrino.
September 15th, 2005 at 7:16 am
Fake News Shows “Real” News the Way
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the blogosphere, including our own corner of it, has been abuzz with discussion of The Daily Show’s “Evolution-Schmevolution” week. I’ve certainly been enjoying it, although I feel like t…
September 15th, 2005 at 7:17 am
[...] As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the blogosphere, including our own corner of it, has been abuzz with discussion of The Daily Show’s “Evolution-Schmevolution” week. I’ve certainly been enjoying it, although I feel the interviews could have been done better. [...]
September 18th, 2005 at 5:15 am
Despite being couched in jokes, those questions seem to me to contain a high degree of insight. Nearly every other commentator these days either a) tries to pretend they know something about science, or b) laughs in an “aw, shucks” kind of way while practically taking pride in how little they know about it.