Free Speech in Science
Isn’t Medium great? They say “Anyone can publish on Medium per our Policies, but we don’t fact-check every story”. They trust the readers to assess the content and make their own judgments. Wouldn’t it be great if that were true in all areas of life?
How does science progress unless there is a forum for debate, unless new ideas can be put forward and old ideas challenged? So it’s disturbing when a prominent science journal calls for censorship of ideas they don’t like. This is what biologist Dave Speijer has done in an editorial in BioEssays, seriously calling for Intelligent Design websites to be censored by government mandate. His particular target is the Discovery Institute, which he accuses of subverting belief in Darwinian evolution, promoting non‐scientific explanations, and spreading misinformation.
If they are doing that, then other writers are free to point this out, challenge the articles, thus have an open debate. If such arguments are superior, then Intelligent Design won’t survive very long as a theory. Whatever you may think of it, we don’t need censorship by an authoritarian Scientific Dictatorship to enforce orthodoxy, along the lines of a Communist country, especially when their own Darwinian version of the ‘truth’ is not all that credible.
To hear some highly intelligent objections, check out this video:
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Sources:
BioEssays:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202000040
Responses:
