Hey hey hey!! How much does religion affect MIT?

tech_fan
Wed, 19 Dec 2007 13:49:50 +0000

Mollie –



I guess my view is that having the national academies vote is a little dangerous too – the majority of scientists are not always right. In my field, until not very long ago, the majority of scientists would have said that there was no neurogenesis in the adult brain, and they would have been profoundly wrong. (And it’s not that it just hadn’t been investigated, and therefore they didn’t know – it had been examined, and people said there was no neurogenesis.) A vote tracked over time would perhaps be useful.



This is certainly a valid criticism. My preferred outcome would be a vote of the national academies every 5 or 10 years, preceded by expert testimony and debate, with representatives of other intellectual disciplines having a role too. But, of course, it is easy for the broad public to feel excluded from such a process… How to allow qualified people to decide these issues without seeming elitist is, as I said above, the big political challenge. I have no particularly good ideas on this point.