In the United States, the rise of Donald Trump as president has lent fresh life to dodgy ideas such as denial of climate change, vigorous teaching of creationism, and anti-vaccination fads. Of course, such rejection of scientific thought isn’t limited to the United States.
In India, some universities posit that Hindu saints invented “nuclear technology, cosmetic surgery, rockets and planes”. A minister want to rewrite history textbooks to show Maharana Pratap won a battle he lost.
Scientist, educationist and communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson has a riposte for this anti-scientific bent of mind. In a four-minute video, Tyson talks about the role science plays in democracy, by looking at its relationship with the United States.
“Science is a fundamental part of the country that we are,” he says in the video above. “But in this, the 21st century, when it comes time to make decisions about science, it seems that people have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not.”
According to him, that is the “recipe for the complete dismantling of our informed democracy”. The video also has a clip of US Vice President Mike Pence’s speech when he was a congressman, demanding that evolution be taught as a theory and not fact.
“Every minute one is in denial, you are delaying the political solution that should have been established years ago,” says Tyson in reaction to the clip before concluding, “Recognise what science is and allow it to be what it can and should be – in the service of civilisation. It’s in our hands.”
The bottomline, for voters everywhere, including India: learn something about science to make the right political choice.
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