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86 MIN READ TIME

In Defense of Anti-Science

BY J. HOWARD SIEGAL

IS IT AUDACIOUS OR FOOLHARDY FOR SOMEONE RAISED on Erector Sets and soldering kits, who still tinkers with arduinos and who writes code for money, to take a stance against science? Am I going to sit here and eat of the fruits of science while ungratefully pointing out that the roots are rotten? Yes I am, and I’m going to shudder to my core as I make common cause, if briefly, with anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers; however wrong they are, their noses are keen to the stench of science. The word itself has become a kind of rejoinder lately, often as the object in a newly beknighted grammatical construction: “because science.”

“Do you know why we are able to land a spacecraft on a comet?”

“Because science, that’s why.”

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Skeptic
21.2
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