Aidan wrote from Scotland:
Anyway, my point is this : European people may well have little
understanding of the religious fundamentalism of America; but equally
there are obviously Americans, in non-trivial quantities, who simply
fail to understand European secularism. And probably both groups don't
care what the others think of them.
Correct, in part. In America we have both groups too.
(I hope the election and discussions following did not make you think
otherwise.) Here in Berkeley and much of the rest of California, I
can say the same thing about knowing more Muslims than Christians,
especially of the fundamentalist/evangelical type. (Although some
quite unfriendly students have challenged me in my lectures on evolution
and to debate these people on creationism/evolution, they are my clients,
not my friends. Unfortunately, here in the US at least one
group cares very much what the other group thinks. Those kinds of
Christians (in part) want to impose their views on the entire US through
the schools. When they finish with the US, they will begin
evangelical work big time in other parts of the globe--the Koreas (well
underway in the south), China, Australia, the Pacific Islands, and even
Turkey. It is not yet a European problem, but it will be hard
to suppress these views completely. Already, I understand,
there are cells of these people in the UK, Germany, Russia, and maybe
other places as well. Be prepared.
Also, since Americans, for good or evil, make up a huge proportion of
paleontologists in the world, attacks on us will have impact on
you. We will spend even more time dealing with it and you will
become "embedded" in that mess. Some of those attacks are
rather direct upon the entire field of international paleontology.
Take the recent publication in the Proceedings of the Biological Society
of Washington by Steven Meyer, a leader in the "Intelligent
Design" movement (another kind of creationism pushed with millions
of dollars by the Discovery Institute: http://www.discovery.org/ ),
in which he uses, as ID evangelicals have been doing for some time (see
John Wells, Icons of Evolution), the Cambrian radiation as evidence of an
Intelligent Designer, by which they mean god. (See:
"The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic
Categories" By:
Stephen
C. Meyer
Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, September 29,
2004 on line at
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2177&program=CSC%20-%20Scientific%20Research%20and%20Scholarship%20-%20Science
). This was in a peer-reviewed journal, although the peer review process clearly failed because the editor himself appears to be one of them or at least a sympathizer, so I guess we don't know who the "peers" are. We will ignore it, except in these kinds of discussions, but one day we will all be confronted with this stuff, if not by them then by our students and friends outside our loop.
As in politics and policy in general, don't dismiss the American conservative movement as not having impact on you. It already has, both in world events and in paleontology.
JHL