1. He feels comfortable with peddling views on topics outside of, not only his specialty, but in a totally different branch of science using his identity as "A SCIENTIST" to do that.
2. In the process he completely muddies the issues showing that he really doesn't seem to understand them. He clearly doesn't understand the difference between the hybridization of naturally occurring variations and inserting entirely novel genes into an organism, making it an artificial organism with unknowable and possibly permanent modifications. Even Chris Mooney, while pushing the video notes that he seems to be rather confused about the science he is commenting on.*
3, He feels entirely comfortable, using his celebrity as "A SCIENTIST" to tell the critics of a massively profitable industry to shut up. Or, being a geezer whose career as a celebrity scientist is based on a certain degree of kewlitude, "chill out".
One of my earliest blog brawls was over just an atheist demanding that laypeople must accept what scientists say. Re-reading it after seven years, I'm glad to see I'd pointed out that the kind of authority claimed by scientists doing what the pop-hero of celebrity science, Neil deGrasse Tyson, has been granted by virtue of his appearances on TV, lead to religious authorities, claiming a similar right to be believed provided them with their propaganda to attack religion. I also noted another case when a celebrity scientist, another physicist, presented their superstitions about the life sciences as an example of why the public should not just trust what scientists say.
I have noticed that people and groups in the Center for Inquiry, CSICOP, and others started by the atheist ideologue and promoter of scientism, Paul Kurtz are remarkable in demanding that the skeptics of the GMO industry shut up. I would include Tyson in that group, he certainly seems to associate with them an awful lot. Which makes me want to know if there are any financial ties among those people and groups with the GMO industry. Only, I guess that's one of the things we're supposed to shut up about.
The first time I remember hearing of Neil deGrasse Tyson was when he hosted some Nova programs, just about the same time I came to conclude that what was once the finest science program on American TV had become a vehicle of corporate and ideological propaganda. I'd assumed that the Koch family was the only thing at work in that but a lot of it is also the same kind of materialistic scientism of the kind that Tyson and his media celebrity associates push. That the pseudo-skepticism industry is telling the skeptics of industry to shut up was probably a predictable trend. It's a big part of why I find Tyson to mostly just be annoying.
* Chris Mooney is enough of a journalist to have noted,
In fairness, critics of GM foods make a variety of arguments that go beyond the simple question of whether the foods we eat were modified prior to the onset of modern biotechnology. They also draw a distinction between modifying plants and animals through traditional breeding and genetic modification that requires the use of biotechnology, and involves techniques such as inserting genes from different species.
Mooney has had extensive relationships with CFI, Paul Kurtz and others in the pseudo-skeptical industry, though he is also a real journalist. I recall reading he left CFI over some disagreement about journalism so maybe he will, eventually, think more critically about the lines they are promoting.
Update During The Late Lunch Shift: A Salon-Alternet article by the "Freethought" blogger and atheist analog of Ann Coulter, Greta Christina, which RMJ writes about today, uses, quite irrelevantly, a picture of Neil dG Tyson as some kind of atheist religious icon.
The article, itself, is only good as an example of the jr. high logic that passes muster as atheist thinking, these days. The neo-atheism is a fad that passed its sell by so long ago that it's sale should be legally prohibited. I wish I could tell you that Greta Christina is the nadir of neo-atheist . um.......... thought?, but there is even worse in comment threads.
Of course, the GMO industry still wants to control those plants they release from the laboratory, suing farmers for copyright infringement when the GMO seeds find their way into fields, or pollination of crops, where farmers didn't pay for the right to these "Frankenfoods."
ReplyDeleteBe they harmful or not, the corporations certainly want to maintain control over them, which is perhaps a more frightening prospect.
As for science v. religion, Salon has a new one up from Alternet which patiently explains that "liberal" Christians like yours truly can't possibly reconcile evolution and God as Creator because, while the author of the post understands little about evolutionary theory and less about Xian theology, she knows enough to know Xians are dead wrong about everything and simply can't be right because, well: Xians.
If science and religion can be reconciled, or at least live together in harmony, it destroys the sanctity of science, and we can't have that. Funny how much of this argument comes down to what is holy.
Funny how much the fundamentalist Xians and the fundamentalist atheists have in common.
There is a surprising amount of pushback at in the comments at the Salon article, but also a dearth of reading comprehension. One theme is that the article is a critique of creationism and creationists.
ReplyDeleteIt isn't.
I like Greta Christina's garbled version of "evolution" which isn't evolution but a further garbled version of natural selection as once understood by some of its most ignorant of vulagarizers but which hasn't been credible for more than a century, especially in the last half-century. I don't think even Dawkins would want to be associated with it.
ReplyDeleteCouple that with all the comments against religious belief because believers don't understand science.
ReplyDeleteWhich they do, largely by disparaging religion.