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C00002 00002	THREATS TO FREEDOM OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY
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THREATS TO FREEDOM OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY


	By the end of the nineteenth century, the battle for
freedom of scientific inquiry had been substantially won, although
there remained some hindrances to the propagation of research
results beyond the scientific community in areas where they ran
counter to religious beliefs about morality.  However, the fascist
and communist ideologies brought new threats.  The fascist threat
came from the deliberate irrationalism of parts of fascist ideology
and from their hatred of Jews which extended to the results of
the work of Jewish scientists.  (Did the Nazi opposition to the
theory of relativity have any source other that the fact that
Einstein was a Jew)?  The communist threat to freedom of scientific
resulted from the Marxist dogmatism in the economics and political
science, from the tendency to freeze Lenin's philosophical
opinions into a police-enforced dogma, and from the availability
of the Soviet bureaucracy as a means of advancing both ideas
and careers by bureaucratic politics.

	The defeat of Fascism in World War II and the scientific
disaster of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union improved conditions
for scientific freedom after the War and the death of Stalin.

	Recently there have arisen new threats to scientific freedom
in the United States.  They have several sources:

	1. Because the extreme left in the United States no longer
supports the Soviet Union, fear of Soviet imperialism no
longer has such an automatic effect in generating suspicion of
all their ideas, although it is still valid as an example of what
these ideas may lead to.

	2. The civil rights movement has always had certain
characteristics that tended to turn it into a menace to freedom
as soon as it attained its original goals.  These include

		a. A social servo-mechanism aimed at attaining
a goal is most effective in getting there if the magnitude
of the force towards the goal is independent of the distance
to the goal.  Of course it may overshoot, but that is for the
future to worry about.

Stop now.  This requires a more precise formulation than I have
time for.

*******

Topics for papers at conference:

	1. Warfare of science and theology.

	2. Lysenkoism

	3. Science for the people

	4. Assessing technology assessment.

	5. Mumford, Roszak, et. al. only in their position as
possible threats to free scientific inquiry.

	6. Issues around the genetics of intelligence.

	7. XYY flap

	8. Sociobiology flap

	9. Shockley flap

	10. Issues around computer science.

Some issues:

	1. What decisins about innovation need to be made
collectively, and which can be left to private decision.
POSITION: It should never be forbidden to market a product
on the ground that the buyers might hurt themselves with it.
This would clobber the laws against drugs and fireworks.
Compromise: It should never be forbidden to market a product
unless it has already been shown that the buyers will hurt
themselves with it. CERTAINLY: It should never be forbidden
to market a product on the grounds that people will use it
to have an undesirable lifestyle.

TRULY BAD GROUNDS:  A product should not be marketed, because
it is not an optimal use of the country's resources.

Sleeper question:  Products that are determined not to be a good
use of the country's limited resources should not be permitted
on the market.  Agree or disagree.