This coming Earth Day is the March for Science. “On April 22, 2017, we walk out of the lab and into the streets,” say the organizers in a charming effort to sound like hellions. It doesn’t really work, though, thanks to a Twitter feed full of stuff like this:
There are also a zillion Star Trek jokes, pictures of Albert Einstein, nerdy hats, and everything else you’d expect from scientists. However, early on in the planning some people suggested that the organizers should try to ensure that the whole thing wasn’t just a bunch of white men. This led to a statement on diversity, and eventually to this single tweet among the gazillions of others:
Maybe this is a little over the top. YMMV. However, as I read it, the organizers aren’t saying that these issues can be reduced to data and solved as scientific problems. They are saying that these things affect scientists, just as they affect us all.
Nonetheless, the good folks at National Review are upset. A scientist named Alex Berezow says he won’t be attending the march because, among other things, “It’s curious that a website that seeks to include everybody conspicuously left men, whites, and Christians off the diversity list.” Wesley Smith agrees:
Berezow is exactly right: For example, science can tell us the biological nature of a fetus. It cannot tell us whether it is right or wrong to have an abortion. That question sounds in morality, ethics, religion, and politics.
If science properly understood ever becomes conflated in the public mind with left wingism, it will profoundly harm that crucial sector and thence, the human future.
Science is already too politicized with policy or ethical debates wrongly called questions about whether one side or the other is “anti-science.”
I suspect that if we dig deep enough, we would find George Soros money paying for all of this. Be that as it may, no reputable scientist should march in the March for Science.
Yeah. George Soros is everywhere. And making an effort to highlight the fact that women and people of color are scientists too isn’t a good thing, it’s “politicizing” science. That sure is a funny definition of politicizing.
