Three items

From
Date
Date-warning
Reply-To
Dear Norm:

I am responding to your inquiry  about rumors regarding the funding of
science.  I believe you have been misled.  I have heard nothing about
funding such pseudoscience as UFO research and astrology or about
grass-roots movements to dismantle science.  Instead, the emphasis seems to
be to increase funding for the kinds of research that lead to the solution
to pressing problems.  (Let's whup cancer and AIDS, but especially cancer
and only maybe AIDS; let's develop a solar-powered car; and let's make
smaller, faster microchips; but let's not worry about particle physics or
cosmology or genetics of polychaetes; and let's make sure that we do not
put any money into helping industrial research because that is corporate
welfare, a bad buzzword.)   Given a finite and shrinking pot of money,
there will naturally be some areas of science that feel the pinch.  As are
all countries in the world, we are broke, too; and as you know we are
borrowing money from future generations to sustain our life style.

If paleontologists are careful and go about this right, they should come
off all right for several reasons.  First, ours is a cheap science.  Most
of us can do a lot of good science with no funding at all, although some of
us would get awfully hungry in the summertime.  Second, we have the
dinosaur boom, which attracts a lot of attention to our science--even to
ostracodes and forams.  Third, and I think this one will ultimately sustain
us, paleontology is one of the few sciences that the average Joe Binks on
the street can understand and even practice.  Pick up Science or Nature.
It's pretty hard for anyone outside a rather narrow field to read most of
the papers published there.  Pick up the Journal of Paleontology or even
Paleobiology.  The articles there are on an entirely different level of
intelligibility.  As far as I know, there are no amateur cell biologists or
biochemists.  The average citizen, however, can go to the field to collect
fossils, and in most areas he is much more likely to find fossils than to
find rocks or minerals worthy of display or further study.  If we nourish
this undercurrent of interest in our science through the activities of
museums and the few paleontologists who are interested in popularizing
science and are good at it, then we should be able to keep the interest in
paleontology up at all stages of life from kindergarten to the nursing
home.  If so, it should be easier to sell Congress on funding our efforts.

There has been a resurgence of effort to teach creationism in the schools.
The Supreme Court recently beat down regressive state laws to that effect.
The response of the creationists has been to run stealth candidates for
local school boards.  The typical pattern is that the creationists get
control of the school board, they make a lot of rules about not teaching
evolution or about teaching creationism in the name of "good, ole 'Mer'can
fairness," the local citizens get up in arms about such stupid fatheadery,
and in the next election they throw the rascals out.  As the stealth
tactics become more widely recognized, reasonable people are able to help
flush out committed creationists before they are elected to positions of
responsibility.

Such tactics are worrisome.  What worries me even more, however, are the
great numbers of people teaching science who are, themselves, not committee
to the idea of evolution.  After all, retreaded coaches and all those other
folks who teach junior high school and high school science courses can be
fundamental Christians.  More than mere vigilance is required.  We need to
make programs available to schools that make the point quite strongly that
all scientists accept evolution as one of the ways in which the world
works.  There has been too much apology on our part, sometimes overt and
sometimes implied.

Best wishes,

Roger L. Kaesler

--
Roger L. Kaesler
Paleontological Institute
The University of Kansas
121 Lindley Hall
Lawrence, Kansas 66045-2911
(913) 864-3338 = telephone
(913) 864-5276 = FAX