Re: paleonet A swipe at science from Ireland

[Duncan McLean <d.mclean@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

Actually I quite enjoyed Kevin Meyer's polemic posted by Breandán. Sure it is
largely bunkum, but it reminded me of Miles Na Gcopaleen (an antecedant comic
writer for the Irish Times).

Isn't anything that brings scientific debate into the public arena a good thing?
and aren't those philosophical problems at the centre of the article tricky
ones? I think you'll find they are. Working as a scientist in a field such as
palaeontology in which theory is developing rapidly, I have always enjoyed (and
shared with students) the philosphical difficulty that, no matter how precise
my observations are, my interpretations will, eventually, be overturned and
demonstrated to be incorrect by new theory (I like to kid myself that somebody
in the future would be interested in my data!). That doesn't prevent me from
using science to provide practical results (making biostratigraphical
correlations rather than curing cancer in this case) based upon the paradigms
that I have.

I read the article as an attack on atheism rather than on science, with a
simplistic premise that science begets atheism or atheism begets science. And I
have difficulty taking this too seriously: as a wet-behind-the-ears english
postdoc I stayed at the home of a colleague in Cork, Eire. His mother, very
politely brought up the question of religion and asked me if I was a Roman
Catholic. Not knowing what to expect I told her that, no, I was an atheist. Her
response "Thank heavens for that. I expected you were a protestant".

Amongst the blizzard of ID e-mailing on Palaeonet I think that you are
overreacting. I will, no doubt, and in due course, be proved wrong.

Duncan McLean

Palynology Research Facility,
University of Sheffield,
Dainton Building,
Brook Hill,
Sheffield,
S3 7HF, UK