Wow, I read the whole article and his hypocrisy is astounding. He actually does claim that discovering that men are inherently more intelligent than women, or that Asians are more intelligent than Zulus, would be a bad thing, yet he is still a racist and a sexist. I can't imagine the amount of cognitive dissonance involved for Vox to think that he is not prejudiced. (This is of course ignoring the fact that those tests have been done and have found NO connection between intelligence and race or sex.) Vox is basically saying that things were better off back before science existed. Is he completely insane?! Science is the reason that we've had so many advances so quickly. Before the scientific method was accepted incorrect ideas were held by even highly-educated people for literally MILLENIA. (Alchemy and the four humours were ideas that remained mostly unchanged from the time of Aristotle, if not earlier, to the Rennaissance.)
And anyway, those "iatrogenic deaths" have to do with the strictly-human medical staff making mistakes, and we know why they are mistakes. It has nothing to do with science itself. "Scientific socialism" does not exist, (and even if it did, it would have nothing to do with communism or other forms of totalitarianism) gassings were far from the biggest cause of death in World War One (that being trench warfare, which was tried as early as the American Civil War, before science had advanced very far, and was known to be incredibly deadly even then. Europe was a collective idiot for trying it in 1914!) The Nazis were more antiscience than people think (scientists were among those expelled from Germany by Hitler, scientific books, including On the Origin of Species, were banned under the Nazis, and their justifications for their race theories were about as pseudoscientific as they get. Not to mention all the fascination with the occult shared by high-ranking Nazis.) What a lame Godwin. I'll give Vox the fire-bombings of Tokyo and Dresden (or at least Dresden, which was unnecessary) but individual battles were ridiculously destructive since at least the time of the ancient Romans, assuming the Romans were not inflating theirs and their enemies' kill counts (if they were, then the deadliest battles were from the Thirty Years' War of the seventeenth century). As for abortion... it has existed illegally for centuries. The only reason it's done a lot now is because of sanitation (which is also the reason you don't die at thirty, or when having surgery, so count your fucking blessings, Vox!) Hell, the law is more to blame for abortion than science is, and Vox knows it. (He does wash his hands before eating, does he not?)
As for nuclear devastation... it didn't happen. I think that crisis is averted. (None of the countries with nukes are crazy enough to use them. If North Korea's "nukes" were ever deployed, they are so shoddily made that they would blow up in that country's face.) Scientists were the ones who discovered the dangers of global warming. It is the industrialists (including most conservative Republicans) who deny that anthropogenic global warming is occurring. It is also the industrialists who are responsible for most if not all of the environmental destruction in history. Is Vox going to say that industry is evil? I think not. To quote Anon-e-moose, il miglior fabbro, Hypocrisy, thy name is fundie.