Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tivert 1047 days ago
> Evolution is completely uncontroversial.

No, you wish it was uncontroversial. Or it is uncontroversial within a carefully chosen subset of the society that agrees with the idea an its implications, but that's cherry-picking and does not actually mean it's uncontroversial (without qualification).

> Teaching about evolution is controversial because it pokes holes in certain commonly held beliefs. That doesn't make any of the actual underlying facts controversial.

How can you say that? The idea isn't controversial, but somehow only teaching it is? That's pretty obviously not true: the people who object to teaching evolution almost certainly object to the idea itself. I'm pretty sure they also dispute the "actual underlying facts" (at least historically).

1 comments

Evolution isn’t controversial across the many scientific communities and nations around the world. There is no rival theory poised to capture scientific energy around the world.
Exactly. You can accurately say "evolution isn’t controversial in the scientific community" (with a qualification), but you can't accurately say "evolution is completely uncontroversial [full stop]" (unqualified).

A course-grained "controversial" tag will either apply very broadly or be inaccurately used (out of parochialism or other bias).

Scientific wikipedia need only summarize scientific consensus. A thermostat on the public mood should be more like a live dashboard over data streams.