Ciencia y corrección política

Relacionado con este post sobre las declaraciones del administrador de la NASA, la corrección política no conoce límites ni fronteras. Si no me creen, miren en lo que caen para seguir preservando el mito del “noble salvaje”:

Despite the evidence, since World War II many archeologists and anthropologists have been promoting the myth of the peaceful savage. Otzi was initially described as a shepherd, though found with his body were a bow, a dagger and an axe. Prof. Keeley told Mr. Wade that a grant application he'd made to study a Neolithic ditch and palisade was rejected until he changed his description of the structure from "fortification" to "enclosure."

The second major distortion has to do with race. Geneticists have identified five races -- Africans, Caucasians, Asians, Pacific Islanders and Native Americans -- based on the continents on which each race developed, Mr. Wade said. (Interestingly, skin color is not, he said, a good indicator of race. For instance, both fair-skinned Scandinavians and dark-skinned Indians are Caucasians.) Yet recently the deputy editor of the New England Journal of Medicine wrote that "race is a social construct, not a scientific classification."

It is one thing for sociologists to prattle on so, but it is disturbing to have someone with scientific training rejecting scientific fact because it is deemed politically incorrect. It's also dangerous, Mr. Wade said, because different racial groups have different susceptibilities to disease.