Michael Bishop's"Enemies of Promise"ContentsI.Prologue: A War of IdeologiesII.The Antagonists: Zealots, Ignorants, and Other Assorted AnnoyancesIII.The Battles: The Result of Ignorance and FearIV.The Fallout: The Wake of ConflictV.Ceasefire: Imminent or Impossible?VI.SummaryAppendix A: Supplementary InformationAppendix B: Works CitedI. Prologue: A War of Ideologies In the summer of 1995, the periodical Wilson Quarterly published "Enemies of Promise," an essay by J. Michael Bishop, a Nobel Prize-winning professor of microbiology from the University of California, San Francisco. The essay addressed the renewed criticism the scientific community has received in recent years by an ignorant and unduly critical public. The overall effect this single work has had on the world may be nominal, but the points Professor Bishop raises are significant, and provide ammunition against the ignorants who maintain this "intellectual war," centuries after it was sparked.II. The AntagonistsOne of the most visible critics of science today, and the progenitor of the anti-science sentiment is the religious community, specifically the conservative Christians. One can hardly read the newspaper without reading of one religious figurehead or another preaching on the "fallacy of science," pushing their own brand of "truth" on whoever would hear them. As Bishop writes "It is discouraging to think than more than a century after the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species (1859), and seventy years after the Scopes trial dramatized the issue, the same battles must still be fought."(256) And the loudest rallying cries to these battles can be heard issuing from the throats of the ranks of zealots and their hordes of followers.Other, more surreptitious opponents of science abound as well. Ironically, one such antagonist originates from within academia itself: the postmodernists. Of this group, Bishop writes: "According to these "postmodernists," the suppo...
