‘Proud, Boastful Ignoramus’
I’ve always felt 50-50 about Christopher Hitchens. While he calls it as he sees it, he’s rarely tactful. I tend to find his writing style full of unnecessary references and ramblings. But his article on Sarah Palin’s war on science is right on the money. He begins by noting her willful ignorance of fruit fly research:
…it didn’t seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place “in Paris, France” and winding up with a folksy “I kid you not.”
To explain exactly why such research is important, he continues:
It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly.
As I see it, it comes down to more than a difference of opinion of political or religious matters. A war on science will only through us deep into the New Dark Ages. The denying of the importance of scientific research should be the quintessential pivot point where we ask ourselves, Really, why? Unfortunately, there are some who just do not understand.
Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says that she doesn’t think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a “premillenial dispensationalist”—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.
I suppose if the world is ending, what’s the point of doing anything anyway? How utterly depressing!
Since I have nothing else to say on the matter, I will leave you with a demotivational poster I made exposing Palin’s hypocritical views on “life”.
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