The Candle Flickers

The Guardian has an excellent opinion piece on the latest depressing-but-unsurprising news that almost 1/3 of British university students are creationists (check out the quotes in that article. And these are university students!). The article ties this retreat from reason with the rise of fundamentalism that the globe is currently suffering the effects of, in what the author aptly describes as the 'resurgence of the fairy-tales that once served mankind's intellectual infancy'. It's a pity, then, that such lucid thought is pretty much overwhelmed on the pages of The Guardian these days with endless apology-pieces for fundamentalist religion (usually Islamic, but also some Christian and Jewish) and postmodernist relativism (with their attendant 'ways of knowing' and 'points of view'). And for an hilarious example of the latter, don't miss 'Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism', which asserts that the evidence-based medical establishment is 'fascistic' in it's 'territorialisation' of medicine with it's 'post-positivist regime of truth'. What a hoot! Those fascists have ruthlessly doubled life expectancy at birth over the last century, and still they show no signs of stopping. Quick, somebody fetch my Shaman; I need a little concoction to steady my nerves..