> ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Dr. Core" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [gundam] [OT]Martian Settlement? > Date: Tue, 9 May 2006 16:46:35 -0400 > > > Joseph Riggs wrote: > > wouldn't have crossed my mind even though I'm well aware of the horrors > > perpetuated by Nazi Germany. > > > > Sometimes you just don't connect all of the mental dots that you need to. > > Scientists, even (or especially?) the left-leaning ones, are > inherently elitists. >
As someone who's generally conservative, I'm confident that the left side of the political aisle doesn't have that much of a lock on the elitist label. The evidence merely seems to suggest that there are more members of the left in academia, which means that equal percentages from both sides of the aisle will mean a larger raw number of them from the left side. Or that's my completely unresearched theory on the matter. The corrolary to that, of course, is that there might actually be larger numbers of liberal (as opposed to conservative) academia and/or scientists who aren't elitists simply because there's so many more. :P But I won't go there. In any event, the elitists are the ones that tend to get headlines by making statements that draw attention to themselves. > Around 1996 I attended a lecture by Nobel laurate James D Watson. He > spent about 1/3 of the lecture talking about genetics and DNA, about > 1/3 recounting the evils of Nazi eugenics and the last 1/3 of the > lecture advocating the positives of eugenics. Can you smell a closet > Nazi admirer? > The suggestion prompts me to wonder whether it would have been better or worse if the Nazis had a slightly better grounding in fact and DNA for their genetic theories? On the one hand, if they'd known what we know today then their defeat might have lent more weight to arguments against the at best slippery slope of human eugenics. On the other hand, if they'd known what we know now they might have actually been able to do some real damage (as if killing millions of Jews, gypsies, and other 'undesirables' wasn't bad enough). China and India have managed to do enough damage already with just the knowledge of what gender the fetus is (as an aside, I read a few weeks ago that India was prosecuting it's first case under a law that forbade abortions based on gender but that had largely been ignored until now). As it is, the Nazi theories were so clearly based on utterly outlandish and out dated fantasies that the idea of Nazi Eugenics has become almost buffoonish. It also means that no matter how close Watson's ideas are to an updated version of Nazi Eugenics, he can safely tell himself that he has nothing in common with them. I don't know how close his thinking might be (I'll take your word for it), but it is a problematic area. junior -- _______________________________________________ Search for businesses by name, location, or phone number. -Lycos Yellow Pages http://r.lycos.com/r/yp_emailfooter/http://yellowpages.lycos.com/default.asp?SRC=lycos10 -------------------------------------------------- The Gundam Mailing List MK-II [email protected] Archives: http://www.gundam.com/gml Help: Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with this in the BODY: help list
