The New Scientist reviews Conservapedia. Along with our own Dr. Myers and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, the article quotes one:
Joshua Rosenau, a graduate student in evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas and contributor to Science Blogs claims the site has a darker side. “On some level it’s also reflective of a harmful attitude that some people ? especially those on the far right ? tend to have about science and truth,” he told me. “They are re-defining their own truth and seem to think facts are malleable.”
If the article didn’t also quote Andrew Schlafly, Concerned Son of America, it’d be a great crowd.
In the interview, I also pointed out that this strategy runs right to the core of the The Republican War on Science. This idea that truth is something which can be changed by arguing about it was the basis of the tobacco companies’ defenses for decades, it was the basis for oil company intransigence on global warming until recently, and it explains the creationist obsession with staged debates. Ron Suskind famously quoted an anonymous Bush Cheney administration source explaining that guys like him (and me, I suppose) are “in what we call the reality-based community” ? people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.”
“That’s not the way the world really works any more,” the source continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Welcome to Conservaworld, as accurately documented by Conservapedia.
Like Alice, I find this such people ?
“[H]e never finished the sentence, for at this moment a heavy crash shook the forest from end to end.”
Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at the