Wednesday, October 09, 2002

Mark wrote, in connection to biology prof Dini who refuses to recommend creationists:
If a student said (and demonstrated), "I have excellent knowledge of all the subject matter, but I'll be damned if I ever consider it in my future work," would you recommend him?


Not sure if you mean "I'll be damned" in the technical theological sense rather than the more commonly heard colloquial "ain't gonna do that" sense. Either way, it is a bizarre straw man. To make it a little more relevant to medicine, what if the student said, "I'll be damned if I ever prescribe Prozac."? I'd be curious about the reasons for the statement, but I wouldn't blackball the student for it.

Nowhere in science have I found such narrow-minded, bigoted, and intolerant people as in evolutionary biology. Michael Dini and his defenders here on t.o are prime examples. Only an evolutionary biology would argue that the definition of science requires that alternate points of view be eradicated and undergraduates with those views be blackballed from higher education.

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