The "Salem Hypothesis" (or "Salem Conjecture"), named after Bruce Salem, is the hypothesis that there is a correlation between subscribing to creationism and working in an engineering discipline.
Origins
The "Salem Hypothesis" is credited to Bruce Salem, a regular contributor to the Usenet talk.origins newsgroup. It is the "onjecture that an education in the engineering disciplines forms a predisposition to viewpoints."
Critic of creationism PZ Myers elaborated on its origin and meaning by stating:
Academic support for the hypothesis
In a paper presented to the Iowa Academy of Science, John W. Patterson stated that "engineering educators, senior engineers, and registered professional engineers are perhaps the most prominent leaders of the creationist movement." Patterson offers two possible explanations for this phenomenon:
#Lack of interest among engineering societies in policing themselves with regard to "ethical irresponsibility or scientific incompetence", allowing their membership to "publicly endorse ludicrous forms of pseudoscience without being publicly chastised by their professional societies."
#Involvement by engineers in "the rather difficult subjects of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics", allowing them to "develop confusing and yet authoritative-sounding arguments which are unintelligible to laymen."
In a working paper, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog state that:
They further note that a Carnegie survey shows that "engineers turn out to be by far the most religious group of all academics", and note the relevance of the Salem hypothesis to these results.
|
