@farmerman,
How can I satisfy you on that score when your
style of science dismisses out of hand all that science relating to human emotions. And I have mentioned that often enough. Maybe you should read The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
Maybe you should say that observable cultural differences, instantly recognisable by all of us, in dress, manners, music, art, language and all the rest, skin colour being irrelevant, are merely affectations and not an outcome of the various belief systems. And that the study of them is not science.
It was the same at Dover. Only a certain
style of discourse about evolution was permitted. The outcome was thus predetermined. That particular
style can only end up where it did.
The expert witnesses were not themselves the locus of the discourse. They were referenced to a mass of documentation, scientific instruments measuring a small proportion of measureable objects, modes of thinking, terrier on a rat style, all of which they not only made use of but which modify their observational powers.
They saw evolution in the limited way they wanted to and had it in isolation from everything else including the schools. The defence as well.
The dodge is at your end.
Measure, for example, the distance between the birth places of couples getting married in various cultural situations. That's an objective measure. Measure the correlation between higher educational awards and number of rooms in the parental abode. That's objective.
And social science is in its infancy. Your science has flowered. The limits of its observation have been reached. It is now technology which requires imagination. And if religion stimulates imagination, as I would argue it does, then eradicating it will bring technology to a halt as well.
