{"id":1115,"date":"2007-02-12T08:31:12","date_gmt":"2007-02-12T08:31:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/02\/12\/cognitive-dissonance\/"},"modified":"2007-02-12T08:31:12","modified_gmt":"2007-02-12T08:31:12","slug":"cognitive-dissonance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/02\/12\/cognitive-dissonance\/","title":{"rendered":"Cognitive Dissonance"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s an interesting story in the New York Times<\/cite> this morning about a young earth creationist studying paleontology<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

[Marcus Ross’s] subject was the abundance and spread of mosasaurs, marine reptiles that, as he wrote, vanished at the end of the Cretaceous era about 65 million years ago. The work is “impeccable,” said David E. Fastovsky, a paleontologist and professor of geosciences at the university who was Dr. Ross’s dissertation adviser. “He was working within a strictly scientific framework, a conventional scientific framework.”<\/p>\n

But Dr. Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is a “young earth creationist” — he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This has predictably led to a bunch of people calling for him to be denied the degree, and denouncing the practice of creationists using academic credentials to lend themselves an air of authority. It’s an interesting problem, though– if he’s done the work needed to get a Ph.D., and written it in a manner entirely consistent with accepted scientific beliefs, are there really any grounds for denying him the degree?<\/p>\n

I would say no– we’re not the Bar Association, and there’s no character requirement for getting a doctorate. He’s done the work, and he can talk the talk, so give him the degree. To the extent that there’s a problem at all, it’s a scoietal problem– too many people take the Ph.D. as a sign of real authority, when in fact, doctors of philosophy are as likely to be nutty as anybody else. But I would expect this to generate a fair amount of heat (though precious little light) in science blogdom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s an interesting story in the New York Times this morning about a young earth creationist studying paleontology [Marcus Ross’s] subject was the abundance and spread of mosasaurs, marine reptiles that, as he wrote, vanished at the end of the Cretaceous era about 65 million years ago. The work is “impeccable,” said David E. Fastovsky,… Continue reading Cognitive Dissonance<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in_the_news","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}