Not Good Enough, Mr. Goodyear

I've tried to ignore Gary Goodyear's idiotic tirade over being asked if he "believes in evolution". Frankly, it was a poorly phrased question, and Mr. Goodyear's response was childish, immature and off-topic:

Science minister Gary Goodyear now says he believes in evolution.

“Of course I do,” he told guest host Jane Taber during an appearance on the CTV program Power Play. “But it is an irrelevant question.”

That's a different answer from the one Mr. Goodyear, a chiropractor and minister of state for science and technology, gave The Globe and Mail when asked the same thing during an interview published in Tuesday's paper.

“I'm not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don't think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate,” he said at the time.

Frankly, I don't care if Mr. Goodyear wants to believe in the Tooth Fairy. The real issue here, besides Mr. Goodyear's obvious religious fundamentalist sensitivities (his outrage is enough to convince me that underneath all that bluster, he really would prefer not to think too hard about such questions), is whether or not Mr. Goodyear understands the basic concepts of theory (as opposed to hypothesis) and the evidence that supports the theory.

It would seem that he doesn't actually understand. His recent attempts to clarify himself make my point for me:

“We are evolving every year, every decade. That's a fact, whether it is to the intensity of the sun, whether it is to, as a chiropractor, walking on cement versus anything else, whether it is running shoes or high heels, of course we are evolving to our environment. But that's not relevant and that is why I refused to answer the question. The interview was about our science and tech strategy, which is strong.”

If Mr. Goodyear really understood the science, he would not have used those examples, because they do not represent the kind of long term picture that the broad theory itself represents.

Between this, and Mr. Goodyear's attempts to defend a brain damaged approach to science on the part of the HarperCon$ by being a complete drama queen, we can safely conclude that Goodyear really is in the wrong place - in large part because he clearly neither understands nor supports the actual day to day work that science involves.

I suspect that like Bush II, the HarperCon$ are fundamentally opposed to science. Science represents knowledge and thought - and modern era political conservatism has been very opposed to people thinking for themselves. Conservatives succeed when they can keep people in the dark - just look at Alberta's government.