Reply #37: Science, properly practiced, is not concerned with philosophical/ideological

[struggle4progress]

issues

It is, of course, true that individual scientists may not be immune from the ideological posturing and that fashion may play a role in funding. It is also true that various philosophical and political pretenders will imagine "ideological consequences" of scientific theories. But the theories themselves ultimately succeed or fail on an entirely different basis, which is really quite different -- and it is completely unclear to me how to explain the matter to a person who wants to evaluate scientific theories on the basis of their ideological implications

It is simply idiotic to attribute "wars, economic crises and destruction of the Earth" to the Darwinian notion survival of the fittest. "Wars, economic crises and destruction of the Earth" are serious problems: they are also as old as civilization. It is true that these problems may now threaten the very existence of our species, and that the problems require real attention, but the problems are real and material in nature -- and they must solved by attention to real material details. Pure philosophical analysis can be of no help here: philosophy can help us make our ideas clearer, but it cannot help us distinguish which ideas reflect the facts of the world and which ideas do not

I started to try to read this "book," but frankly, I can't stomach it: it's fluff. Considerably less ambition and considerably more focus might produce a shorter and much more meaningful text