Why? Doesn’t that speak poorly of the powers of the scientific method?
From Jeff Tollefson, Lauren Morello& Sara Reardon at Nature:
Republican businessman and reality-television star Donald Trump will be the United States’ next president. Although science played only a bit part in this year’s dramatic, hard-fought campaign, many researchers expressed fear and disbelief as Trump defeated former secretary of state Hillary Clinton on 8 November.
“Trump will be the first anti-science president we have ever had,” says Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington DC. “The consequences are going to be very, very severe.”
Trump has questioned the science underlying climate change — at one point suggesting that it was a Chinese hoax — and pledged to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.
Although he has offered few details on policies for biomedical research, Trump said last year that he has heard “terrible” things about the US National Institutes of Health; he has also derided NASA as a “logistics agency for low-Earth orbit activity“, and said he would expand the role of the commercial space industry in the US space programme. More.
Et cetera yada.
This is not a political blog so I (O’Leary for News) will do no more than suggest that if the “stunned” had spent less time preening and more time examining the problems of the American electorate as the electorate perceives them, they might have avoided the “fear and disbelief.”
One suspects they don’t have many friends down there and acting snooty won’t make them any more.
Point of possible interest: I have a news desk at a Canadian site where an ID sympathizer approached me last year and said, Trump is going to be president. Give me space and I will call every contest right for you. He did, including last night. Does that mean that ID would be more useful in making predictions about human behaviour? [No, no, human behaviour is all an accident!]
See also: Stephen Hawking disappointed by Brexit
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