[fishtank]

"do you have the education required to promote it?"

Yes, I do. I just don't think that a valid article should be dismissed with name calling by those who don't even understand the science behind it.

The schoolyard games are being played by the people who are calling names about the people who wrote the article.

[50sDad]

Point taken.

[GladesGuru]

Dear Fishtank,

Consider reminding those demanding a credential check that Einstein said that if one's theory was not understandable to the man in the street, that one needed to refine one's theory.

What the credential demanders confuse is the difference between science - where the hypothesis must stand on it being testable & repeatable, and scholasticism - where the 'authority' of the hypothesis is important.

When I was a wee one, the seventh grade science teacher teaching us the rules of science emphasised that science recognized no authority. The suthor was not important, that the hypothesis was what mattered.

She then reminded us that science came to this rule after the sorry experience of the Inquisition making a certain early astronomer recant.

Science was right - while the Inquisitionis gone, I sat in an Dept. of Environmental Protection office in Tallahassee, FL and had to watch while a nationally known scientist(Ken Alvarez) was made to recant by a modern day inquisitor named Kirby Green.

Green was what his name implied, a socialist, and a FloriDUH Democrat. He was responding to the outraged demands of his intellectual masters, NPS, Audubon, ad nauseam. It was like watching an intellectual zombie crawling out of its grave, removing the oak stake from its chest, and re-enacting the horrors of the original Inquisition.

However, there is some hope for the future in the Sheeples Republic of FloriDUH. Thanks to Congressional intervention, the research lab in Everglades National Park which was originated by some of my academic mentors/colleagues has been taken out of the Dept. of Interior's control and given back to a university. Law enforcement (authority in its essence) no longer controls inquiry (inherently indifferent to, if not antithetical to, authority) at that lab.

Thank you Congressman Charles Taylor (R) NC.

And thanks to you, Sir, for such a prime example of why the intellectually honest should be willing to do what Crick/Watson said - "be willing to have an idea knocked out from under you before morning tea, or get out of the laboratory"