Sarah Palin: Stupid as a melting iceberg
I’m was amused by Sarah Palin’s Op-Ed that appeared in the Washington Post last week. In it she says that most scientists studying climate change are highly politicized, their proposed policies are not based on sound science, and that enacting such policies would acutely weaken the US economy.
Over a year ago, in our local MIT student run newspaper The Tech, I wrote a response to an opinion on the topic of Sarah Palin and her science rhetoric during her notorious vice presidential campaign. In it I said:
Mrs. Palin’s statements concerning science have been outstandingly defective and misinformed, surely causing research scientists, science educators, students of science, and many others to cringe in response. It is a great failure for the scientific community to witness a person making these statements rise to the position of vice presidential candidate.
I’ll add today that I am–and perhaps many other scientists are–still embarrassed to witness a person making these statements possess the fame and resources to publish them in a national newspaper with a readership as wide as the Washington Post’s.
God she’s dumb.
You'd Prefer An Argonaute 
Ha! That tree is such an insult to bacteria…
Hmm… Good point. I need to move the S. Palin branch up, perhaps a tick after archaea and eukarya split. Like many, I believe multicellularity probably emerged independently multiple times. S. Palin should have been one of the earlier instances. I’ll fix the tree tomorrow.
The initial placement was meant to emphasize the unusually strong devolution of the S. Palin species.