Interesting email from a longtime scientist-reader. Posted for informational purposes (i.e. I don’t necessarily agree with everything in here):
Your discussion has touched on the question of whether science generates moral values. I believe that scientific research, properly conducted, is a moral good, because it uncovers true facts about the world around us. This is why scientists are driven crazy by ID, creationists, and (yes!) global warming deniers, because they are obscuring the truth, which is a moral wrong. In the latest _Economist_, a letter writer suggests that scientists support Darwinism because of our “vested interests”. Our first and foremost interest is in being *right* — my personal interest is in being more right, more quickly, then my competitors — because it is only when we are right, and when we can convince our peers that we are right, that we can advance our careers and hoist our flags of personal glory. I’m not saying that any of you (certainly not Derb) is guilty of this sin, but the Right in general seems to have enthusiastically picked up the baton of postmodernism from its exhausted champions on the Left, and our President now leads the race to deny the existence of objective truth, or its inherent moral weight.