Right around 8:40, he begins the often heard but never taken seriously assertion that only two Muslims have received Nobel prizes ("But he's not middle eastern Muslim, he's Pakistani Muslim" as if that mattered for anything???). Therefore, Muslims must not be as smart or something culturally is holding them back. This should strike any thinking person as bigotry. And it is.
Nasim Nicholas Taleb has already pointed out that when Richard Dawkins made the same argument, he was pointing out his own glaringly horrific understanding of statistics. I would link to Taleb's comments, but I can't find them. Luckily, there is this concise summary along with a Taleb video explaining it.
So Taleb has taken Dawkins to task for the Muslim/Nobel anecdote. It is now time for yours truly to take NDT to task for the same anecdote. NDT ends the anecdote with a slightly different moral.
"Now . . . how many Nobel prizes are won by Jews? It's like . . . a fourth of the Nobel prizes." He then goes on to point out that there are around a billion Muslims in the world but only 15 million Jews "tops." Therefore, the statistics prove that Jews are smarter than Muslims (according to NGT's asinine logic which Taleb rips to shreds).
But here's the kicker: "I don't want to know why 85% of the Academy [of Sciences] rejects God, I want to know why 15% DON'T."
Hold on there brainiac . . . didn't you just say Jews are overrepresented in Nobel prizes? So if you wanted to be a good scientist, using NDT's own data, wouldn't you want to be a JEW rather than an atheist?
Neil deGrasse Tyson, you are not a scientist. You are an ideologue. You lack the basic rationality that our children so sorely need. And here you are the de facto spokesman for "science." It's embarassing.
I see you have found mistakes in his speeches. I have listened to the one about Al-Ghazali you reference here. What I got out of the speech was that Al-Ghazali declared math was the work of the devil and it stopped the Muslim scientific advances. The fact he tries to prove his point with a couple of bad examples, does not invalidate the fact that religion prohibited the use of math. That cannot be good anywhere or anytime. Like Neil says, Math is the language of the Universe. Same thing went with Galileo and the Pope. It was about time Science was getting back at Religion.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think of Ken Ham and his museum in Kentucky where they have a full size Noah's Arc, complete with dinosaurs. As far as I'm concerned, Bill Nye destroyed Ken Ham when they debated at the Creation Museum. Anyway, I am enjoying the time to do what I please.
See you around.