It may be the largest rally in support of science ever. Hundreds of thousands of people have joined the Facebook group for the upcoming March for Science, and tens of thousands have offered to volunteer. Beyond a march in Washington, more than 400 cities worldwide will host simultaneous events on April 22 to repudiate science policies of the new White House and Congress.
Yet for all the excitement, STAT has found, plans for the march are plagued by infighting among organizers, attacks from outside scientists who don’t feel their interests are fairly represented, and operational disputes. Tensions have become so pronounced that some organizers have quit and many scientists have pledged not to attend.
What was billed as science advocates speaking with a unified voice, then, has instead surfaced long-lingering tensions within the scientific community.
I hope everyone has saddled up their favorite hobby horse for the march against science.
With tens or hundreds of thousands of scientists in the nation why all all these names so familar to me? Oh yes these are the professional drama regents that alway find some nano aggressions against the STEM community on twitter.
I believe we are united in our opposition to uninformed non-scientists, (like Tom Coyne – that famous blog troll), who deny the value of the scientific enterprise to humanity, and who indeed even appear to question (irrationally, except from a short-sighted bottom line/self-interest perspective) that scientific research is one of the fundamental human intellectual and rational objective activities which facilitates the rapid progress of the human race.
Perhaps scientific research should be funded by billionaires who can foresee a benefit for their own personal money-making machine…..yeah!
Why can’t everyone see that the purpose of the march is to promote atheism and collectivism and that these things benefit every type of person equally?