The Science Nazi

Doc Nuke proposes a new office: the Science Nazi.

His job is to walk up to those who reject science and tell them, No Science For You!

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One of the other reasons the Intelligent Design folks don’t want to mention the method for the intelligence is that then they’d be forced to reveal that its just Creationism promoted by their evangelical Christian backers. I guess they just feel that Kansas, with its lack of topography, will be more open to their attempts to drag education back into the dark ages because nothing opens the mind more than a Kansas landscape. This is why we need the Science Nazi. In a situation like this, he would walk up to the Kansas Board of Education and announce: NO SCIENCE FOR YOU! What’s that Mr. Board Member? You want to use your cell phone? Sorry that was only possible with the scientific discovery of radio waves. NO SCIENCE FOR YOU! What’s that Mr. Intelligent Design/Creationist? You want to drive your giant SUV? Sorry, gasoline is a fossil fuel from the days of the dinosaurs, which don’t exist in your Bible. Not to mention the refining process, and the workings of the internal combustion engine. NO SCIENCE FOR YOU! What’s that Mr. Concerned Parent? You don’t support gay marriage cause it’s “unnatural” since gays can’t breed, even though your own quadruplets couldn’t have been born without fertility drugs? NO SCIENCE FOR YOU! What’s that President Bush? You don’t support stem cell research and denounce global warming, yet you want to bomb places and send spaceships to Mars? Bombs and rocket fuel don’t just magically appear like the voices in your head that told you to be president. NO SCIENCE FOR YOU! These are just a few of the reasons why we need the Science Nazi. We need to remind people that they can’t have it both ways. They can’t have their 21st century technology, medicine and conveniences and still expect society to adhere to fairy tales from 2,000 years ago. If they want that kind of life, they can hang out with the Amish or set up a sanctuary cut off from the world like in The Village. If they are lucky and a divine source is watching out for them, maybe a bunch of them won’t drop dead from easily curable diseases.

Though we disagree on a few points, I admit it's tempting to tell certain people that if they don't believe in the results of science, they should not expect to benefit from them.

This includes, for the People who Eschew Testing on Animals, no vaccines. No drugs. No surgical techniques that were first tested on animals.

For the Intelligent Design-Intelligent Origin Theory (ID-IOT) crowd, no crops that have benefited from any sort of breeding techniques. Let them eat teosinite.

But there's a problem.

Those who oppose the mainstream scientific opinion will assure you that whatever idea they're opposing is not, in fact, required to come up with whatever goodie they may want to use.

Medical advances need not be tested on animals, since tissue cultures and computer models will suffice. (OK, maybe they will now, but just how confident are you in the accuracy of any computer-generated result?)

ID-IOTs will insist that you can hybridize, selectively breed, and genetically engineer without believing that every living thing traces back to one common ancestor.

If your perspective is suffiently myopic, you can ignore arbitrarily large amounts of background. Just as a person can be revolted by the hunter and ignore the fact that her steak used to be walking around on four legs, believers in alternatives to current science will disregard the ultimate source for all the advances they rely on in their work, or for life and health.

The only way to really prove the issue would be to divide society into enclaves, each hermetically sealed from the other, and let each progress using the methods it considers true and correct. Over the course of generations, one of two things would happen: Any given enclave would independently drift over to something indistinguishable from modern science, theories, methods, and all, or it would independently fall behind and the standard of living in that enclave would lag behind that in the others. (Indeed, it might decline, and you'd have a massive die-off. Think of it as evolution in action.)