User:Revolver/Nightmare
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A (Waking) Nightmare
by Revolver
18 April 2006
I slowly open my eyes and look around. I'm unsure where I am or how I got here. A nurse stops by and soon it seems there are a dozen people or more standing around my bed.
Later that day, I am told that I have awoken from a coma, which has disconnected me from the world for 25 years. After taking a few weeks to realise my whereabouts and get my life in order, I pick up the latest issue of Nature that's just come in the mail. Scanning the columns, I notice an "editorial" piece entitled "Creationism in Perspective". Curious how this topic managed to wander back into the pages of Nature, I assume it must be something pretty important. Until I start reading it, that is, when I soon realise the "discussion" is not about creationists or intelligent design, but about "competing theories" of creationism/ID. I quickly jot down the most curious and promising references from the article, and I head off to the stacks.
When I get there, I find that, not only are there many articles on creationism, there are entire JOURNALS — Creationism Journal, Current Opinion in Intelligent Design, and even Proceedings of the Institute of Creation Science. A recent issue of "PICS" (as it's called) has another "editorial" piece, this one which does mention both "sides" of the issue which I was familiar with from before the coma, but now the article characterises those who "still" hold to evolution by natural selection as "creation denialists" or "creation deniers". Some even accuse evolutionists of suffering from mental illness and claim they should be sent to prison. Social benefits are withheld from those who refuse to send their children to schools teaching creationism.
When I see one of my old friends, a fellow "old school" chemist, (after catching up on the past 25 years), I ask him what on earth has gone on recently, and what does he think about it (???). His response is quick and abrupt:
Old School Chemist: Oh, you're not a denialist now, are you, mate? You missed a lot when you were gone. We've learned so much. All the 150,000+ papers on creationism that you missed can't all be wrong.
Perplexed Mathematician: Yes, but you don't really think that...
OSC: It's not a matter of what I think. Who are you to say otherwise? Are you a creationist researcher? How many papers have you published on intelligent design? You're just a common mathematician. Why, you're really in no position to make an informed judgment on the validity of intelligent design. This belongs to the experts, the people who've been studying intelligent design their entire lives.
PM: Yes, but you don't seem to have trouble supporting something that goes against everything...
OSC: But I'm not the one going against the best conclusions of tens of thousands of researchers. Look, every major scientific organisation in the world, every major scientific journal – Nature, Science, Cell, PNAS – every single nation on earth, all down the line, have given their stamp of approval to this. Well, okay, there's that one kooky president somewhere in central Africa, but apart from him...Who are you to question?
PM: But would you have said the same thing 25 years ago? At that time, if someone was really saying intelligent design was legitimate science, can you honestly say you would have supported them?
OSC: You really are tenacious, you know, but you have a fatal flaw – you've been in a coma for 25 years, and so it's been kind of hard for you to keep up on the literature. Oh, well... no one's perfect. Catch you later. Cheerio.
Undeterred, I head back to the stacks. It turns out, a couple years after I lapsed into the coma, a handful of creationists managed to land articles in Science, announcing ID as the "probable cause of intelligent life on earth". But within a year and a half, all the journals were reporting it simply as "the cause of intelligent life on earth". How did this happen? I look into some of the newspapers and online blogs of the day. As fate would have it, just about the time the papers were published, a wave of fundamentalism swept the country, and almost everyone found a reason in their interests (whether they really believed it or not) to jump on the anti-evolution bandwagon. The Republican party took over all three branches decisively, after a hopeful, but ultimately futile attempt by the Democrats and Libertarians to stop them.
The successor to Dubya, another fundamentalist, completely revamped the nation's science programs and instituted many of his close friends and allies (including creationists) into top positions. With support from the government and the journals, intelligent design didn't have much trouble becoming the new paradigm. And it didn't even matter when the lead author of the original articles announcing ID as the "probable cause of intelligent life on earth" was proven to have stolen a cultured sample of "near-life" (a sample of life just after being touched by intelligent design) and passed it off as his own, taking credit for the discovery, when in fact, a Belgian research team had done no less more than a year earlier. No one seemed to care.
But the "creation denialist" "fringe" is growing. They were such a threat a few years ago, when a controversial genetics conference was convened, all the creationists got together to sign an online declaration, the so-called "Douala Declaration", affirming intelligent design as the cause of life on earth. And the U.S. government even found it necessary to produce a couple anonymous documents "The Evidence of Intelligent Design in Life on Earth" and "Answering the Denialists: Facts and Misconceptions about Evolution and its Relation to Life". As I start to read the former, my eyes slowly begin to glaze over... and over... and then...
I slowly start to open my eyes again. Now it's dark and a thunderclap stirs my attention. Whew... thank god, it's just another nightmare.
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