Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss

It is not that common in the scientific community to find scholars that dedicate their precious time to the advertisement of science to the general public. Perhaps the most famous examples are Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman (definitely one must read his books :) and Stephen Hawking. Dawkins and Krauss are two, say, more recent examples of this sort of scientists. I've already written a bit about Richard Dawkins, an Oxford professor of evolution. Lawrence Krauss is a physicist at Stanford University, who seems to be very active in the US.

Today I saw a very enlightening and interesting debate among them. The format of the debate was also very different since there was no moderator, so they discussed freely about anything they wanted. They discussed from the beauty of science to social impacts of scientific education. One comment that I found very interesting is that, when discussing about morality, people tend to put science in a lower level with respect to religion. However, when there is a serious problem, such as an epidemic, people forget about what they previously said and resort to scientific methods. For instance, when there was the risk of an bird flue epidemic, the same government that allowed creationism to be taught in schools, discusses about the possibility of the virus to mutate, what would allow for it to contaminate humans, but does not discuss the possibility that the virus was created to destroy us.