<p>Why did this scientist take this post-doctoral job if his beliefs were not consistent the requirements of his job? And now he wants to be richly compensated for being dismissed, for a specific job in genetics where the research he was being paid to do is founded on theorems of evolution. The Woods Hole lab is greatly respected, therefore, I have a hard time believing that they didn’t try to work something out with this scientist. By the way, he has accepted a new job at Liberty University.</p>
<p>boston.com</p>
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Like what? While he is employed by Woods Hole as an institution, he was hired by a particular PI to work on a specific project, funded by NIH $. That project required that developmental mechanisms be examined in the context of evolution (by comparison across species). The PI has an obligation to the NIH (and to all taxpayers) to pursue the proposed research, and requires the assistance - both technical and intellectual - of an post-graduate scientist. While this individual may able to technically execute relevant experiments (as can any trained technician), it is hard to see how he can contribute intellectually to the problem (which is the expectation one has for a postdoctoral fellow) if he believes the fundamental principles underlying them are a myth.</p>
<p>maybe his beliefs didn’t match up with his discoveries…that the discoveries or project or whatever actually supported evolution and he didn’t want to say, oppsy, me wrong…</p>
<p>There are always people who would like to cling on to their belief system even when the opposite proof is staring in their faces. Just like anti global warming crowd - it is not happening. Or the Fox viewers who still believe that WMDs were found in Iraq or the gun nuts, or the …</p>
<p>Yes, this irrationality is extremely frustrating to encounter and difficult to deal with. If anybody has any good ideas about how to cope with, for want of a better term, evidence nullification, please post.</p>
<p>…or the pro-global warming is caused by Americans driving cars crowd, or those who believe everything Gore says verbatim, or don’t believe Sadam used weapons of mass destruction, or CNN viewers, or…</p>
<p>“or don’t believe Sadam used weapons of mass destruction”</p>
<p>of course he used them, we still have the reciepts… </p>
<p>kinda funny isn’t it when we are a supplier of wmds and have one of the largest stockpiles in the world. I drove by it this summer in oregon. yes, we are burning them up and it will take decades to eliminate the inventory… maybe that’s why were dumbfounded, how’d he do it so fast?</p>
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<p>In general, I’m thinking there’s a challenge to teach and practice critical thinking skills when there are so many sources of information hitting us all at once. On the one hand, there’s the Great Books Curriculum, and other approaches with a core knowledge to pursue. These provide rich opportunity to read from a more limited menu of sources to compare, contrast, and evaluate, skinnying up and down Bloom’s Taxonomy, and acquire the ability to think (Mythmom, I know you teach college students.) This came from a time when there were fewer books that “all educated people” needed to know. </p>
<p>Instead, now, I can barely keep a conversation on topic in a room full of intelligent, educated people. Nobody’s listening to anyone else, but just throwing out the next factoid they heard from yet another source. I spend energy asking someone, “where did you hear that?” which might be better spent exploring the validity of the idea itself. It feels like a War of the Sources rather than a marketplace of ideas. </p>
<p>Your posting mentioned “Evidence Nullification” (If you coined that term, applause; if not, thanks for sharing, that’s a good one.) Recently I heard a bright university undergraduate student, American Jewish, who’d been in a two-week study program with Palestinean Muslims. Her wide and fascinating response to this experience included her stunned response to the statement of one student re: Holocaust Denial (“it was just a thousand people”). She said quickly, “We read different books” but is still struggling to understand fully how they could view the 20th century so differently. I remained with that image, of university students from around the globe reading entirely different cores of books, yet both are educated within their societies. How will they learn to communicate with nobody to validate their sources?</p>
<p>In the case of the Woods Hole scientist, I am always interested in those who cannot reconcile faith with science. On the one hand, there’s Einstein who wrote about his personal belief in God and how that did not interfere in any way with his explorations into the world of science. I haven’t read enough of his biography to know, but I know some very religious scientists for whom two truths can coexist. They feel no need to engage in a debate between religion and science, but say these are two distinctly different realms. Science ask “how” things happen, while religion asks “why” the same things happen. (Science also has “why” questions of course, but religion’s “why” questions are about the meanings and messages we derive from events, not the mechanics of how the events can occur in the first place. How a tornado occurs is different than why it hit Aunt Rose’s house.) These two different inquiries that need not be reconciled. In that way, there is no evidence to nullify from one realm into the other. The Woods Hole Scientist must resolve an issue of evolution/creation before he can go into his lab to explore genetics might be working too hard to unify an apple and an orange into a single fruit, or nullify the discoveries about each fruit when they are both rather amazing.</p>
<p>Thank you paying3 for your very thoughtful and detailed post. Yes, I coined that term as I was writing that post, and I think I’ll use it from now on.</p>
<p>This seems to be the challenge of my life right now. Yes, differing educations and lack of belief in the scientific method which can establish a working theory, an approximation of truth, creates this cacaphony of differing beliefs. Add to that, narcissism which keeps the truth of many situations unconscious for many people and sometimes teaching anyone anything seems almost impossibly difficult.</p>
<p>The narcissism is what I battle in my personal life; the “evidence nullification” in my professional.</p>
<p>From one of the articles on boston.com:
Shocking. Perhaps they feel they also have a right to insist on a belief in DNA, as well.</p>
<p>You don’t have to chuck your religious beliefs entirely to be a scientist – the graduate student whose desk is next to mine is a devout Catholic. But we work in a developmental biology lab, and she does have to ask evolutionary questions about the genes and neuron populations she studies. If she had a problem with that, which she does not, she would not have picked this lab to do her thesis. Likewise, if the Woods Hole biologist could not apply his work to evolutionary questions, he should not have picked a lab that asked such questions.</p>