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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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Eugenics, the darling of elite, educated progressives 100 years ago in their quest to create Utopia, has been out of favor since those crazy Germans took it too far in the late 1930s, but there is one sound reason it found favor; why wouldn't we eliminate serious diseases beforehand instead of treating them after? 
Most people do not want war in their backyard.  In geopolitics, people claim to love their neighbor but they still prepare to fight; Switzerland, the home of neutrality, still has hundreds of forts built into their mountains and young men are required to own a gun(1). 
Why do clowns freak us out?  And why are robots cute until they look too much like people, and then then they creep us out?

It's our old friend the Uncanny Valley and it basically postulates that the more realistic something gets to a human likeness, the more repulsive it is.  I don't mean like realistic special effects as in "Wrath Of The Titans" - that giant, flaming lava hand of Chronos looks cool - but rather likeness when it comes to humanoids, be they zombies or robots.  
Sometimes Science 2.0 has to swim against the stream. The stream, in this case, has been the long-standing irrational belief that America 'needs' more scientists.
It's no secret that an alarming number of left-wing people hate science - and scientists.  But why do far-left anarchists really hate science, enough to get violent about it? And why don't the right do anything more than be Freedom of Information Act pests?

Sure, more people on the right than on the left deny evolution, but they aren't shooting evolutionary biologists, we just have to be embarrassed that fringe sectarian zealots in backwater counties try to teach children how God planted fossils as some sort of faith-based head fake. There is no physical danger.

But science is deadly if you get a left-wing group after you.
A small parasitic crustacean blood feeder that infests certain fish that inhabit the coral reefs of the shallow eastern Caribbean is the absolute perfect species to name for a pleasant Jamaican stoner - and so it came to pass.  The little critter has been designated Gnathia marleyi.