@ehBeth,
Quote:My perception of you has never been of anyone with a true interest in the sciences.
There are a very large number of people who think science is wearing a white coat and protective goggles whilst lighting a bunsen burner. I did myself once. It was quite comforting. It fluffs the ego.
Real science is very humiliating truth to tell. And it can face up to any fact. It doesn't use things like Ignore. That's akin to modest blushing.
One of our adult comics, ZIT I think, did a scientific paper on Kylie Minogue's bottom. She had been parading it a lot on TV and the head of Narrow-eyed Science at the paper decided, in the interests of the thesis/antithesis hypothosis I suppose, that a proper appraisal of the item/s was in the public interest. Or that of the scientific community at least. It opened my eyes to where a great deal of my money had disappeared. I had been blinded with the "sugar and spice and all things nice" baloney and it had cost me dear.
The cold instruments of the lab. and the continuously whirring cabinet on which the results of the experiment are being displayed and copied down by an ex-hat check girl are only examining inert matter. Dirt. Fossils. Rays. Long boring routines are the order of every day.
Not life. Not really I mean. Even a cadaver opened up in a lecture for budding forensic scientists with its bits and pieces being noted and an explanation of how each contribute to the mechanism as a whole in relation to what caused it to prefer lamb's fries, gently toasted, neat, to meat and potato pies, is not life.
Only today there is a report concerning identifying serial-killer genes. In the womb. Eugenicists are, as you might expect, enthusiastic but others are resisting their pleadings. The NRA maybe. The matter does raise some very ticklish questions. Anybody with the gene would have to be signed off to go free by somebody and if the gene kicked over the traces later that somebody would be in the ****.
And bureaucracies function so that nobody is ever in the ****. It is a guiding light.
Most people have life science on Ignore. And some of them use the cachet of the science of non-life, which it deservedly has, to start constructing theories on a subject, life, about which they know no more than anybody else and, in some cases, a damn sight less.
I have very little interest these days in the science of non-life. When I had, long ago, it was in a zone which was as small a corner of science as a corner in your largest room is which you need a needle to dust.
The items you see on the news concerning science are chosen by the editor on the basis that they might possibly relate to house prices.
That science guy CBS News have has a particularly ingratiating facial expression. Scott Pelley just looks like somebody who is overwhelmed that Scott Pelley is fronting the news coast to coast. Darwin studied facial expressions. In monkeys of course.
