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I voted to remain, I believe that being in the EU is beneficial to the United Kingdom. This article, however, at the very beginning suggests: > Britain has bee

by unfunco 10y ago

I voted to remain, I believe that being in the EU is beneficial to the United Kingdom. This article, however, at the very beginning suggests: > Britain has been a powerhouse of discovery since the age of science began. Newton, Darwin, Crick? They parted the curtain on gravity, evolution and DNA. > Now comes Brexit, and to use a non-scientific term, the scientists in the country are freaking out. Britain joined the EEC in 1973, the discovery of gravity, evolution, and deoxyribonucleic acid, all happened well before we joined the union and happened without EU funding. I don't think the sciences will suffer too much from a withdrawal of EU funding, since the government will want to remain a leader in these fields, the industries that will suffer will be agricultural and manufacturing, fields that are deemed to primitive for the current century.

sievebrain 10y ago
Agriculture might benefit because the UK now has the option of allowing GM crops, which the EU tries hard to block for what it claims are health reasons but (given the lack of scientific evidence to support such a policy) is actually yet another form of agricultural protectionism.
- Angostura 10y ago
  Actually the claims are primarily on environmental reasons - horizontal gene flow etc.
- unfunco 10y ago
  Farming is heavily subsidised by the EU though, only this morning the Independent was reporting that farmers are now regretting the decision since their funding could be lost, and that they voted leave because they didn't understand the ramifications: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/farmers-brexit-regret-bregret-funding-common-agricultural-policy-a7163996.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/farmers-brexit-regret-b... It could be spin, the farmers I know though (I'm originally from a very rural town in mid-Wales) don't really understand what GM means, they're old school wellies and corn hanging out their mouth types.
  - sievebrain 10y ago
    The Independent might as well be the official state outlet of the EU as far as I can tell. You'd get more balanced coverage from reading Chinese media about China. Just taking a few representative headlines from its website: http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/brexit http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/brexit "Why there could be post-Brexit riots this summer" "Ford to consider closing UK factories in Leave towns after Brexit" "The only way to save Britain after Brexit? Stop London's dominance" "Brexit blamed for Bank of Japan monetary stimulus plans" "Brexit doesn't make me proud to be British" "I've been mapping kindness across the country to tackle racism" "Why our post-Brexit economy can't be saved by slashing interest rates" "Revealed: the shocking scale of racist hate since the Brexit vote" "Incident by incident – the grim litany of post-Brexit hate crime"
    - unfunco 10y ago
      I actually agree, I (maybe consciously, maybe subconsciously) choose to read the news from the left, since the United Kingdom doesn't really have balanced news. The BBC, for example, might as well be the official state outlet of the Conservatives and American news democrats, with their outright disdain for Corbyn, and their refusal (with late acceptance) to publish stories about DNC leaks – I'm forced to pay for the BBC, I'm not forced to pay for news from the left.
      - sievebrain 10y ago
        If you deliberately seek out news sources you know to be biased, and then compare them to other news sources, aren't you always going to conclude that those other sources are biased in the other direction? You say the BBC has "outright disdain" for Corbyn but in my experience BBC News does manage to do a pretty good job of being unbiased. Are you sure that they aren't just reporting an unfiltered flow of stories and many of them happy to be pretty negative, thus they may seem to be biased?
- justincormack 10y ago
  The objections to GM crops are mainly about IP law being applied to food crops, not safety.
  - sievebrain 10y ago
    Your objections, perhaps, but the EU's trade barriers against them are justified on the grounds of what they call the "precautionary principle" i.e. something might be dangerous until proved otherwise and each type of crop must therefore be approved one at a time by the food regulators (which they almost never do) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_genetically_modified_organisms_in_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_genetically_modi...
    - internaut 10y ago
      The precautionary principle is about as scientific as Pascal's Wager and for the same reasons. It is not clear to the public this is a political policy, not an instrument of scientific thinking.
justincormack 10y ago
Agriculture is a core area of Tory expertise as they are the party of landowners. Manufacturing is what Labour as party of trade unions is about. Brexit is about a return to an imaginary past era half Victorian half 1950s all make believe. Science is not really on the radar.
- SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
  I would say area of "concern" but not necessarily "expertise".
- internaut 10y ago
  > Brexit is about a return to an imaginary past era half Victorian half 1950s all make believe. You shouldn't be so dismissive of the general possibility. Why not have a Renaissance? It's happened at least twice in recent European history. Consider the infatuation Britain had with the Roman Empire during the Industrial Revolution. Sometimes digging back into the past for inspiration is the right answer to tackling future problems. For politics I mean it in a quasi-mythological sense but it is clear that reaching back to reconnect to the past is partly responsible for every Golden Age. As for whether this will occur or not, I am undecided but I suspect Brexit has more to do with avoiding an anti-renaissance.
  - justincormack 10y ago
    Mussolini and Napoleon also liked to look back at the past.
    - internaut 10y ago
      I didn't say it was always a good idea. ISIS looks to the past too! I've already made the point on HN that Britain's successful attempt to recover a glorious past (Roman Empire) and Hitler's unsuccessful attempt to do the same thing should be held as comparable. Their motives were identical. I realize such a comparison may seem despicable but we've got to deal with the fact that all ideas come from somewhere, and let us face it, it is not as if Hitler was an original thinker. He saw it worked for the British and attempted to replicate. Obviously I'm not implying the British went to the lengths of the Nazis.
beevai142 10y ago
> discovery of gravity, evolution, and deoxyribonucleic acid Two of those happened quite a long time ago, when the world and UK's power was quite different, and the scientists and their students in question are long gone.
- dekhn 10y ago
  that's quite silly- Britain is still very strong in all three topics you cited. It wouldn't be hard to show direct-line ancestry for many existing active british scientists to historically prominent scientists (well, OK, probably not Newton).
cJ0th 10y ago
Perhaps it's even a boon for science. Necessity begets ingenuity they say. It would be interesting to know (and impossible to find out) how many research projects failed because a surplus of available funds led to bad decisions. In other words: Would project X have led to a breakthrough if they didn't have A but A-B dollar?

by unfunco 10y ago

sievebrain 10y ago

Agriculture might benefit because the UK now has the option of allowing GM crops, which the EU tries hard to block for what it claims are health reasons but (given the lack of scientific evidence to support such a policy) is actually yet another form of agricultural protectionism.

Angostura 10y ago
Actually the claims are primarily on environmental reasons - horizontal gene flow etc.
unfunco 10y ago
Farming is heavily subsidised by the EU though, only this morning the Independent was reporting that farmers are now regretting the decision since their funding could be lost, and that they voted leave because they didn't understand the ramifications: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/farmers-brexit-regret-bregret-funding-common-agricultural-policy-a7163996.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/farmers-brexit-regret-b... It could be spin, the farmers I know though (I'm originally from a very rural town in mid-Wales) don't really understand what GM means, they're old school wellies and corn hanging out their mouth types.
- sievebrain 10y ago
  The Independent might as well be the official state outlet of the EU as far as I can tell. You'd get more balanced coverage from reading Chinese media about China. Just taking a few representative headlines from its website: http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/brexit http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/brexit "Why there could be post-Brexit riots this summer" "Ford to consider closing UK factories in Leave towns after Brexit" "The only way to save Britain after Brexit? Stop London's dominance" "Brexit blamed for Bank of Japan monetary stimulus plans" "Brexit doesn't make me proud to be British" "I've been mapping kindness across the country to tackle racism" "Why our post-Brexit economy can't be saved by slashing interest rates" "Revealed: the shocking scale of racist hate since the Brexit vote" "Incident by incident – the grim litany of post-Brexit hate crime"
  - unfunco 10y ago
    I actually agree, I (maybe consciously, maybe subconsciously) choose to read the news from the left, since the United Kingdom doesn't really have balanced news. The BBC, for example, might as well be the official state outlet of the Conservatives and American news democrats, with their outright disdain for Corbyn, and their refusal (with late acceptance) to publish stories about DNC leaks – I'm forced to pay for the BBC, I'm not forced to pay for news from the left.
    - sievebrain 10y ago
      If you deliberately seek out news sources you know to be biased, and then compare them to other news sources, aren't you always going to conclude that those other sources are biased in the other direction? You say the BBC has "outright disdain" for Corbyn but in my experience BBC News does manage to do a pretty good job of being unbiased. Are you sure that they aren't just reporting an unfiltered flow of stories and many of them happy to be pretty negative, thus they may seem to be biased?
justincormack 10y ago
The objections to GM crops are mainly about IP law being applied to food crops, not safety.
- sievebrain 10y ago
  Your objections, perhaps, but the EU's trade barriers against them are justified on the grounds of what they call the "precautionary principle" i.e. something might be dangerous until proved otherwise and each type of crop must therefore be approved one at a time by the food regulators (which they almost never do) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_genetically_modified_organisms_in_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_genetically_modi...
  - internaut 10y ago
    The precautionary principle is about as scientific as Pascal's Wager and for the same reasons. It is not clear to the public this is a political policy, not an instrument of scientific thinking.

justincormack 10y ago

Agriculture is a core area of Tory expertise as they are the party of landowners. Manufacturing is what Labour as party of trade unions is about. Brexit is about a return to an imaginary past era half Victorian half 1950s all make believe. Science is not really on the radar.

SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
I would say area of "concern" but not necessarily "expertise".
internaut 10y ago
> Brexit is about a return to an imaginary past era half Victorian half 1950s all make believe. You shouldn't be so dismissive of the general possibility. Why not have a Renaissance? It's happened at least twice in recent European history. Consider the infatuation Britain had with the Roman Empire during the Industrial Revolution. Sometimes digging back into the past for inspiration is the right answer to tackling future problems. For politics I mean it in a quasi-mythological sense but it is clear that reaching back to reconnect to the past is partly responsible for every Golden Age. As for whether this will occur or not, I am undecided but I suspect Brexit has more to do with avoiding an anti-renaissance.
- justincormack 10y ago
  Mussolini and Napoleon also liked to look back at the past.
  - internaut 10y ago
    I didn't say it was always a good idea. ISIS looks to the past too! I've already made the point on HN that Britain's successful attempt to recover a glorious past (Roman Empire) and Hitler's unsuccessful attempt to do the same thing should be held as comparable. Their motives were identical. I realize such a comparison may seem despicable but we've got to deal with the fact that all ideas come from somewhere, and let us face it, it is not as if Hitler was an original thinker. He saw it worked for the British and attempted to replicate. Obviously I'm not implying the British went to the lengths of the Nazis.

beevai142 10y ago

> discovery of gravity, evolution, and deoxyribonucleic acid Two of those happened quite a long time ago, when the world and UK's power was quite different, and the scientists and their students in question are long gone.

dekhn 10y ago
that's quite silly- Britain is still very strong in all three topics you cited. It wouldn't be hard to show direct-line ancestry for many existing active british scientists to historically prominent scientists (well, OK, probably not Newton).

cJ0th 10y ago

Perhaps it's even a boon for science. Necessity begets ingenuity they say. It would be interesting to know (and impossible to find out) how many research projects failed because a surplus of available funds led to bad decisions. In other words: Would project X have led to a breakthrough if they didn't have A but A-B dollar?