Nov 6^th

 Dr. Carson, A Republican candidate for the Presidency, has produced some controversial new ideas recently. He has already relieved himself of some interesting opinions, opinions about which most people knowledgeable on the matters he is discussing find appalling. He uses the fact that the Warsaw ghetto held off a small portion of the German army for a time, to assert that if all the German Jews had just been armed The Holocaust would have been avoided. I would guess that Carson has never read William L. Shirer’s “Rise and fall of the Third Reich.”

He also claims that homosexuality is a choice because some long term prisoners become temporarily homosexual in prison. He believes that evolution is a plot by the Devil to discredit God. Global warming is a myth as well. The Earth was created by God in six calendar days of twenty-four hours each. He doesn’t believe carbon dating is accurate and apparently never heard of Argon-Argon dating. Never mind, he knows where the corpus callosum is.

Now Dr. Carson has added to this curious list of pronouncements: He tells us that the Egyptian pyramids were constructed by Joseph to store grain. Most authorities believe that the pyramids were constructed to store dead Egyptians. The fact that these structures are, for the most part, constructed of enormous blocks of solid rock would really allow for precious little storage of anything else. No matter, many of Dr. Carson’s other beliefs have little to do with facts. They do appeal mightily to non-fact-based conservative Republicans. His last book about the Constitution is high on the Times’ best seller list. Its reviews on Amazon are not uniformly glowing although most of the comments about the negative reviews insist that the unhappy, surely liberal, reviewer hasn’t read the book.

Dr. Carson is able to generate a lot of attention because the public assumes that he is well educated (He’s a brain surgeon after all!). His demeanor is one of calm self-control. One expects, after watching him for a bit, that he will shortly doze off. Then the man utters obvious absurdities and sticks with them. Of course that gets people’s attention. Part of the problem is the public’s conflating training and education. Medical school, law school and most graduate schools offer training; they do not offer education. Knowing where the Purkinje cells are in the cerebellum and what they secrete, or citing precedents to bolster stare decisis or winning a spelling championship does not prove that anyone is well educated. However, earning an M.D., or a J.D. or a Ph. D., means that the earners are surely able to continue learning and educate themselves. Most educated people are autodidacts, they are self-educated. Dr. Carson’s understanding of the world is apparently limited to the brain and a fundamentalist understanding of the Bible. That’s enough for many conservatives but surely not enough to win the Presidency.