A Quotation from Dr. Mary-Claire King — President of the American Society of Human Genetics — Advocates for Scientists’ Duty to Speak Up in a Culture Drowning in Lies and Ignorance — but Her Words Illustrate the Chasm between Thoughtful Evidence-Seekers and the Majority of the Population (and Its Often Intentionally Misleading Leaders)

© 2012 Peter Free

 

08 December 2012

 

 

Citation — to the letter that the journal Science published

                                                    

Mary-Claire King, The Scientist as World Citizen, Science 338(6107): 581 (02 November 2012)

 

 

What Dr. Mary-Claire King, president of the American Society of Human Genetics, said

 

Extracts:

 

Scientists insist on believable data both in work and in public life.

 

Bright young scientists do not accept nonsense from those in power, and they will not be eternally patient with those responsible for it.

 

The response of the scientist to nonsense is both conceptual and practical: to recognize it, expose it, and try to fix it. And because scientists are connected through worldwide networks, we can stimulate each other to do the same.

 

Solving complex problems, whether scientific, social, or political, requires honest and critical appraisal of data.

 

Truth ultimately matters more than consolidating power, securing funding, or furthering agendas.

 

© 2012 Mary-Claire King, The Scientist as World Citizen, Science 338(6107): 581 (02 November 2012) (paragraphs split)

 

I could not agree more.

 

But —

 

 

Dr. King’s words illustrate the chasm between most people and scientists of Dr. King’s caliber

 

During the course of my nearly 7 decades, I have found proportionally few people dedicated to truth.  And equally few, who are absolutely committed to the rational mechanisms that uncover what is true.

 

When we idealistically add a duty to courageously speak out against lies and ignorance — and implicitly to do so in understandable terms — we automatically make this group of evidence-seeking rationalists proportionally that much smaller.

 

The overwhelming majority of humanity does not “feel” — much less think — the way that Dr. King describes.

 

We are ignorant, often profoundly stupid (meaning that we cannot even begin to connect evidentiary dots) and only a very few of us “live” Dr. King’s truth-seeking ideal.

 

The gap between the nation’s scientifically minded minority and its un-scientific supermajority is difficult to bridge, even in conversation, under the best of conditions.  This is especially so in a culture which seems to value everyone’s opinion, no matter how unqualified or transparently stupid, as much as everyone else’s.

 

 

The moral? — Rational evidence-seekers can and should motivate each other to counter ignorance and lies, but doing so is always going to be an exhaustingly uphill struggle

 

Ignorance and stupidity are the determined enemies of rational truth-seeking.  Human inertia has always lain with the former.  Impressionistically speaking, the problem seems to be getting worse, especially in the United States.

 

The more complex that knowledge (and scientific investigation) becomes, the arguably less likely it is that most people are going to seek it.  Which may eventually become the United States’ most significant national security issue.