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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

I heard the incoming Vice President, Mike Pence, does not believe in evolution. In fact there's a video of him, admittedly a long while ago now, making a speech where he seems to not understand what the scientific meaning of "theory" is.

Are people not concerned about this at all? People in high positions ought to know basic things about how science functions, yet as the article points out, barely a word was said about science.

As a European, I think if someone went on a show like Question Time (a UK live debate show) and revealed they didn't believe in evolution, they would be finished in politics. And there would be even more mockery if they said they thought the earth was 6000 years old (though I don't know if Pence believes that).

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he also wanted to spend tax payer money on 'Conversion Therapy' for gay people. This is absurd and a huge step back for us.

http://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2016/jul/28/...

There are plenty of Americans who would disqualify a candidate that doesn't believe in evolution, global warming, or some other widely known scientific fact.

Unfortunately, there are just as many ill-informed Americans that share these views. It's sad and depressing, and is usually just the result of being in a conservative bubble. If you live in rural America, your friends and family all regurgitate the same things they hear from Fox News, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, Breitbart, and other conservative sources, which, for whatever reason, seem to hold a lot of scientific things in contempt.

They're ignorant, sure, but it's hard to see things from another perspective if you've never really been exposed to anything else.

> If you live in rural America, your friends and family all regurgitate the same things they hear from Fox News, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, Breitbart, and other conservative sources

It's funny that conservatives 'regurgitate', while liberals are simply repeating things they've thought about deeply after hearing John Oliver say them.

Both sides have people who don't think critically. It's a huge problem. I consider myself a liberal but I dislike sites like Huff Post. It looks to me just like Breitbart. I don't know why it's popular. John Oliver is funny and can give some insight into many topics but no one should use it as sole source of information, I don't think many do but I'm not on the receiving end of their argument so it's hard to tell.

    > They're ignorant, sure, but it's hard to see things 
    > from another perspective if you've never really been 
    > exposed to anything else.

Are you sure they're ignorant?

Could they not be intelligent, rational individuals with the personal agency to have looked at the same facts as you and come up with different conclusions?

> Could they not be intelligent, rational individuals with the personal agency to have looked at the same facts as you and come up with different conclusions?

No. Just as someone that says 2 + 2 = 457 is also wrong.

Not on that subject, no. It's not reasonably possible for a person to look at the known facts of modern biology and not believe in the process of evolution.

Things intelligent, well-read people can disagree on: fiscal policy; democracy versus republic; abortion rights; single-payer healthcare.

Things so overwhelmingly shown to be factually true that it's not a sign of reasonableness to debate them: Earth and life are old; vaccines don't cause autism.

There are 'liberal' biases in science too, especially when it comes to 'evolutionary' differences between races and genders.

I can echo this sentiment and pile up on it by saying that a self-proclaimed atheist could not be president of the United States. It could happen in France, Germany, the UK, Sweden though (and has).

By the same token, there are hordes of Americans who affect a belief that there are no races, and think any attempt to apply Darwinism to human nature is the quintessence of evil. Liberal Creationists.

Race is a social construct.

Edit: I'm 50% Ashkenazi, we are prone to Tay-Sachs disease, caused by a genetic mutation. Does that make me a member of a separate race.

Science is a "social construct". As is anything else we talk about. Try telling someone with sickle-cell anemia that race is just a social construct.

http://www.hematology.org/Patients/Anemia/Sickle-Cell-Trait....

Yes, you are therefore a member of a well-defined breeding population (deme) and that membership gives us useful information immediately. Not only do you have a greater chance of getting certain diseases, your group also has higher intelligence, with a mean almost a standard deviation higher than gentiles. If race was arbitrary it would not give us predictive validity of that kind.

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