A flip-flop should be no handicap.

[and-justice-for-all]

When a politician changes his mind, he is a 'flip-flopper.' Politicians will do almost anything to disown the virtue — as some of us might see it — of flexibility. Margaret Thatcher said, "The lady is not for turning." Tony Blair said, "I don't have a reverse gear." Leading Democratic Presidential candidates, whose original decision to vote in favour of invading Iraq had been based on information believed in good faith but now known to be false, still stand by their earlier error for fear of the dread accusation: 'flip-flopper'. How very different is the world of science. Scientists actually gain kudos through changing their minds. If a scientist cannot come up with an example where he has changed his mind during his career, he is hidebound, rigid, inflexible, dogmatic! It is not really all that paradoxical, when you think about it further, that prestige in politics and science should push in opposite directions.

I have changed my mind, as it happens, about a highly paradoxical theory of prestige, in my own field of evolutionary biology. That theory is the Handicap Principle suggested by the Israeli zoologist Amotz Zahavi. I thought it was nonsense and said so in my first book, The Selfish Gene. In the Second Edition I changed my mind, as the result of some brilliant theoretical modelling by my Oxford colleague Alan Grafen.

Zahavi originally proposed his Handicap Principle in the context of sexual advertisement by male animals to females. The long tail of a cock pheasant is a handicap. It endangers the male's own survival. Other theories of sexual selection reasoned — plausibly enough — that the long tail is favoured in spite of its being a handicap. Zahavi's maddeningly contrary suggestion was that females prefer long tailed males, not in spite of the handicap but precisely because of it. To use Zahavi's own preferred style of anthropomorphic whimsy, the male pheasant is saying to the female, "Look what a fine pheasant I must be, for I have survived in spite of lugging this incapacitating burden around behind me."....http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_15.html#dawkins

[TZ]

1. I love Dawkins BUT...

I don't think ANY parallels between science and politics are valid. Come on, science is all about the search for truth/fact and sorry but I think most of politics is all about the obfusication of the truth.

[trotsky]

2. True, the parallel is pretty lame.

But wouldn't it be nice if the same principles from science were applied in politics?

[and-justice-for-all]

3. Edge.com proposes questions to intellectuals...

of all calibers. Explore the site some more, I think you find it interesting.