Sunday, October 10, 2004

Another goofball Nobel Prize winner

It sounds like the Nobel Peace Prize winner is as wacky as the Literature Prize winner. This ABC News story says:
Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, today reiterated her claim that the AIDS virus was a deliberately created biological agent.

"Some say that AIDS came from the monkeys, and I doubt that because we have been living with monkeys (since) time immemorial, others say it was a curse from God, but I say it cannot be that.

"Us black people are dying more than any other people in this planet," Ms Maathai told a press conference in Nairobi a day after winning the prize for her work in human rights and reversing deforestation across Africa.
There is a theory that AIDS was an accidental byproduct of a 1950s Congo polio vaccine program, but we still don't have the technology to create a biological agent to kill black people.

Some scientists are only admitting now that there is such a thing as race. Just 4 years ago, this was the politically correct view:
"The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis," said J. Craig Venter in June 2000, standing beside President Bill Clinton to announce the completion of the first draft of the human genome sequence.
But this NY Times article goes on to explain that there is indeed such a genetic and scientific basis, and that basis is essential for some new medical treatments.

Something that has no coherent basis is the French philosophy of deconstruction. See this obituary of Jacques Derrida to get an idea of what nonsense it is.

Update: A bunch of Derrida fans complain here, comparing him to Einstein. Einstein communicated clearly, dealt with reality, and had his theories experimentally tested. Derrida was a nut-case, so are most of his fans.

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