Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

letters to the editor:

Carson is the master of one science: ignorance

In many ways, it would be advantageous to elect a president with a working knowledge of science. After all, we have not had one with such expertise since Thomas Jefferson. One potential candidate for that position might have been Dr. Ben Carson, but his statements show he does not fit the criteria.

The major argument against his scientific expertise is his stand on biological evolution. He stated in an interview on the Discovery Institute’s “ID the Future” podcast in February 2013 that the incredible amount of evidence for evolution constitutes only “incredible fairy tales.”

A second point was his unwillingness to counter Donald Trump’s absurd tirade against vaccinations during the second Republican debate, instead stating that we are “giving way too many in too short a period of time”; this in spite of overwhelming evidence that vaccines have only rare and minor side effects.

Dr. Carson also supports the use of torture as an interrogation technique, stating in the first Republican debate that “if we don’t tie (the generals’) hands behind their backs, they will (fight wars) extremely effectively.” A 2006 Intelligence Science Board flatly noted that there was no data supporting the claim that torture produces reliable results. The report would be summed up by this passage: “The scientific community has never established that coercive interrogation methods are an effective means of obtaining reliable intelligence information.”

I guess one does not, in fact, need to be a brain surgeon to be a brain surgeon.

The writer is a registered nurse.

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