That those heresies of yesteryear are now mainstays of modern thinking seems to have cast little light -- for many of today's scientific breakthroughs are waved away with the same breezy disregard that dismissed gravity as "only a theory." Indeed, even long-established science is getting the boot: A century and a half after its unveiling, scriptural literalists are laughing off Charles Darwin's theory that contemporary species evolved through natural selection over millions of years. Sidestepping an avalanche of evidence reinforcing Darwinian theory, its critics are pushing with worrisome success for public-school teaching of "intelligent design" -- a fairy tale that hardly qualifies as a theory.
This resistance to scientific scholarship is driven by fundamentalist believers, who've found quite a friend in President Bush. The president might be excused for showing sympathy to his most conservative allies. But when doing so entails snubbing a commonplace of biology like evolution -- which even Catholic schools teach without blinking -- something is very much awry.
And that flap is just the start. On a vast array of issues -- climate change, reproductive health, sex education, stem-cell research, environmental degradation and loads of others -- the policies of the U.S. government flout scientific fact in favor of wishful thinking.
This is no way to run a society -- and America's scientists are gearing up to say so.
