but ultimately communication bandwidth is too low to really replicate ideas faithfully between minds. this is a central insight of all that theory, isn't it? we're inherently limited by what language is able to do in the first place.
I'm trying to think of how to respond to that idea "political valence is built-in" and struggling to know how to phrase my objection. I need to take a step back from the current round of the culture war and collect my thoughts on this further I guess.
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my instinct here is to say that the science itself can't possibly be inherently political, only the applications and policies that draw from that science are political. e.g. the fact that uranium is fissile is not political but possessing fission bombs is.
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so in the case of evolution it's not the fact of transmission of heritable traits through the genome that's political. it's the idea of a state eugenics policy affecting reproductive freedom that is. that's not a policy that ANYONE (in power) is promoting though, afaik.
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what I have trouble understanding is the the doctrinal adoption of slippery slope hyper-vigilance by those on the left. I find the right wing Christian fundamentalist objection to be a lot easier to understand (they have a religious doctrine directly undermined by the facts).
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I'm saying that in a tactical political sense they are correct in doing so. There is more to lose than gain in opening that can of worms. As Marx said, they seek not to understand the world, but to change it.
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there's a lot of collateral damage. suppose there are gene therapies that have to be administered in utero to be effective? or what about people that voluntarily have gene tests to see if they're recessive carriers of genetic diseases?
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Pffft, nuance. We're talking about the degraded generally comprehensible version, remember?
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fair point. how much nuance does it take to convince people that the cure for cancer is probably going to be a gene therapy?
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It's ok if they do evo thinking about populations of cells, and don't draw any political conclusions. Sure ppl will line up for cancer gene therapy.
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