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It is a serous question (speaking, here, as someone who is primarily a physician and secondarily a biologist).
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Are biologists as a class (on average, and in terms of particular individuals) exceptionally evil?
The answer is yes - so long as we understand that the worst evil is not what we do (because everyone does evil) but what we advocate: what we promote.
Biologists are exceptionally evil in the sense of being exceptionally active (and effective) in the promotion of evil.
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Interestingly this is true from whatever socio-political perspective you like to consider it - biologists are evil from the Left/ Liberal/ Politically Correct perspective because they promote eugenics, racism, sexism, and are apologists for inequality and Nietzschian domination; and biologists are also evil from the Religious Right perspective mainly because they promote atheism - but also relativism (metaphysical Darwinism), hedonism (in that promotion of gratification and avoidance of suffering are seen as primary motivations), and nihilism (in the sense that life is simply differential gene replication and nothing more, death is extinction etc.).
So biologists are evil from pretty much both sides and all angles - the exception being that nerdy, unstable and weakly-motivated fringe-Left position of secular Right libertarianism/ soft-fascism whose world view is, in a sense, primarily-biological (e.g. the Dark Enlightenment, Alternative Right, Reactosphere group).
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The only group who could conceivably be all-round pleased with the activities and influence of biologists would therefore be Satan and his demons - i.e. the forces of purposive evil, dedicated to the destruction of good!
Makesh yer fink, dunnit...
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A more interesting question would be whether physicians are exceptionally evil. Fifty years ago they obviously would not have been. I don't know enough to decide now, but I'm wary of the profession (As of my own, for that matter).
ReplyDeleteThey also have an extraordinary sense of self righteousness on average.
ReplyDeleteSaint Luke would count as sort of biologist?
@B - I meant among modern scientists - there weren't really any biologists until the late 19th century.
ReplyDelete@Matias - Red Herring! - Thread Hijack Attempt! I have written plenty of stuff (blogged and written articles and books) about physicians/ medical researchers in the past.
ReplyDelete@Matias,
ReplyDeleteI am much more concerned about physicians being objectively deluded. The politicization of the profession naturally leads to increasingly deluded practitioners.
I've known some friendly biologists, and even some devoutly Christian biologists, but as a rule they do seem to be very touchy about the status of science: always worried about imaginary anti-scientific social currents, responding to any outside criticism with hysterics and accusations of ignorance. They seem much more psychologically invested in the metanarrative of scientific progress vs. religious superstition than even physicists and chemists. Is it because Scopes was much more recent than Galileo? I don't get it.
ReplyDelete@JP - Yes, we are all more concerned about physicians and have written extensively on the topic and it fills the media. But you come here to read stuff you don't read everywhere else, yes? Evil biologists - that's today's theme...
ReplyDeleteThis one of the reasons I seriously question your criteria of reproductive success as an indicator of spiritual health. As one indicator among many, fine. But the way you have elevated it to such a height is on the borderline.
ReplyDeleteIs it because Scopes was much more recent than Galileo?
ReplyDeleteThe fight over evolution is still a live issue. Heliocentrism, not so much.
@Th - " I seriously question your criteria of reproductive success as an indicator of spiritual health."
ReplyDeleteYou have this backwards. I say that deliberate reproductive suppression is an indicator of spiritual malaise.
Not equivalent to what you said - not at all.