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comment by b_b
b_b  ·  926 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A New Company With a Wild Mission: Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth

Some of the dumbest people I know are highly accomplished surgeons. The longer I've been in science the more I've come to think that scientists are as fucking dumb as everyone else. If you ever want a very dull but informative read, the Mismeasure of Man is a great one. It chronicles the saga of trying to use science to keep the whites on the top of the heap after the fall of slavery (proto-eugenics, say). This science was done by the greatest luminaries of the time, led by the chief of zoology at Harvard.

Science, fact gathering, knowledge, etc, are very often used as the basis to do really nefarious and dangerous stuff, but they know how to couch their actions in such esoteric language that makes it seem as if it can't be captured in simple terms such as "torture an elephant in hopes of torturing a mammoth."

People love to mistake "science" for "truth", when in fact science is nothing more than a systematic way of asking and attempting to answer questions. It's a tool. Period. One can use one's hammer to build a house for the homeless, or one can use it to smash skulls. It isn't the hammer's fault either way.

Note that I say all of this as someone who makes a living torturing small animals in hopes of making medicines that will end a lot of grief for a lot of people. It would be very easy to construct an argument that I'm the bad guy. It's a matter of perspective, values, and relative value of, say, mice vs. humans.