Science is fucked. Completely and utterly arse-rooted.
I make no apology for the crudity, because there is simply no other way to convey just how profoundly dire and enraging the current state of science really is. It’s no exaggeration to say that were are teetering on the brink of a New Dark Age.
Contrary to the fatuous witterings of internet atheists, it’s not the churches which are threatening to extinguish the “candle in the dark”, as Carl Sagan described it.
On the surface, it sounds ludicrous. We live in an age of lightning technological innovation. But technology should not be confused with science. Modern society is like the steamship engineer in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Completely ignorant of thermodynamics or basic mechanics, he nonetheless operates the boiler effectively, because he knows that if the water level in a certain gauge goes below a marked level, the demon in the glass will become angry and explode.
I can think of no better metaphor for modern society.
We are a tribe of ignorant savages pressing magic buttons.
What’s worse is that we have become ignorant by choice. As a culture, we have un-learned nearly every mode of thinking that science relies upon. Universalism, scepticism, free inquiry, critical thinking, falsifiability. Last but not least: rigorous truth-telling.
It’s an onslaught of pre-Enlightenment barbarianism which is claiming even the most respected scientific journals. Nature, Science… these were once the peak scientific journals. Now, they’re just a sad joke.
As reported recently by The BFD, Scientific American recently promoted its new “documentary” series with a series of tweets making the ludicrous claim that human sexual dimorphism “is a myth invented by 18th century bigots”.
The SciAm thread is such a Gish-Gallop of ludicrous bullshit that it’s hard to know where to start. Which is the whole point of a Gish-Gallop: named after Creationist Duane Gish, a Gish-Gallop is the tactic of making so many nonsensical claims in rapid succession that an opponent is left completely flustered. Refuting each inanity in turn is a Herculean task.
Whether it’s the garbage claim of “Western science” or the obvious nonsense that sexual dimorphism was only invented in the 18th century. For more than 5,000 years, pre-scientific philosophies, from Taoism to Christianity, have explicitly recognised the reality of sexual dimorphism. The idea that no one noticed the difference between the poles and the holes until the 18th century defies comprehension.
Then there are the outright lies: SciAm claims, as many gender activists do, that 1.7% of the population is “intersex”. This is simply not true. In fact, intersex conditions are so rare as to affect less than one in 5,000 people. Of those, the majority are not “sexually ambiguous”: most will appear completely sexually normal, and would likely live their entire lives not knowing their intersex condition unless they were specifically tested. As evolutionary biologist Colin Wright says, Sex chromosome variants are not their own unique sexes.
It’s not just Scientific American. Last month, Nature issued a decree that it would not publish scientific research which hurt anyone’s feelings. Of course, they didn’t put it so bluntly. Instead, they hid behind weaselly-worded guff about “discriminatory, racist, sexist, ableist or homophobic” research. The witches’ familiar is out of the bag, though, when chief editor Stavroula Kousta announces, with all the pseudo-profundity of a Mediaeval pope, that “Some argue that we should evaluate such research only on the basis of its scientific soundness and merit. I disagree.”
And with such words, the candle of the Scientific Revolution flickers on the verge of being snuffed out.
Where did all this come from?
The greatest assaults on science in the 20th century have not come from the churches, the brief flurry of Young Earth Creationism in the 80s notwithstanding. The most sustained assaults on science have been wholly ideological. In the early 20th century, Marxist regimes decreed that science had to conform to Marxist doctrines. In Soviet biology, this became what is known as “Lysenkoism”, after its proponent, Trofim Lysenko.
Lysenkoism didn’t just blight Soviet biology, nor the lives of thousands of Soviet scientists exiled to the gulags. It led directly to the catastrophe of widespread famine, especially when the Chinese communists imported Lysenko’s nutcase “theories”. Tens of millions died.
The sustained assault on science in the West, though, can be traced back to 1962, and Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Although Kuhn’s book is more accurately a history of science and how new ideas progress, implicit in it are certain troublesome ideas that have metastasised into the surging tide of darkness that assaults science today.
Essentially, Kuhn argued that science is whatever it is that scientists do. Where philosophers of science like Karl Popper sought to establish objective criteria to distinguish science from non-science, subjectivity is at the heart of Kuhn’s ideas. While on the surface, Kuhn is right to point out that often the answers given by science depend on the questions asked, the implicit subjectivism in his characterisation runs far deeper. Although Kuhn denied this, later ideologues were quick to finagle it to their own ends.
Once post-modernism and its complete repudiation of objective truth had overtaken academe, a new category was added to Kuhn’s categories of “normal science” and “revolutionary science”: post-normal science.
It should perhaps not surprise us that the concept of “post-normal science” emerged from climate science: a field which still sails dangerously close to pseudoscience in too many ways. Climate scientist Stephen Schneider — hailed post-mortem as a “climate warrior”, which should be warning aplenty — argued that scientists must trade “normal science” (objective, politically agnostic) for “post-normal science”. “Post-normal science”, he argued, must sacrifice rigorous truth-telling — especially acknowledgement of uncertainty — for policy influence.
Which is activism, not science.
We got an unambiguous lesson in post-normal science, and the sort of “science” promoted by Nature’s new “ethics” guidelines, in 2017.
In 2017, the peer-reviewed journal Third World Quarterly published Bruce Gillie’s “The Case for Colonialism”. The paper was as rigorously assessed as any paper could be: double-blind peer-reviewed. Yet, soon after publication, the journal retracted the paper. Not because of any academic fault, but because the editor of the journal and Gillie himself were subjected to threats of violence, including death threats.
Think about that:
For the first time since Galileo, an academic paper was un-published under threat of violence.
This was no mere blip or anomaly. It was just the beginning.
Last year in New Zealand, seven respected academics were subjected to unprecedented personal and career-threatening attacks. Their “crime”? Defending science against religious superstition and offending exactly the sort of groups that Nature has decreed cannot be offended by scientific truth. They were accused of “racism” and “colonialism”, simply for asserting that Maori superstitions are not science.
The worst of the “Listener Seven” case, though, was that the attacks came, not from religious leaders or politicians, but from within the science (so-called) establishment. Two government-backed scientists, Siouxsie Wiles and Shaun Hendy, led a virtual witch-hunt. The pair wrote and petitioned for support for an open letter attacking the real scientists for supposedly “perpetuating scientific racism, justifying colonisation”. Wiles especially took to Twitter to drum up mob support. To its infinite disgrace, the New Zealand Royal Society, as well as the Tertiary Education Union and the New Zealand Association of Scientists, all joined in what Toby Young described as a “witch hunt”.
Every level of the scientific establishment in New Zealand, in other words, took up the cudgels of censorship against science, in favour of Stone Age mythologies. Leading scientific journals are subordinating scientific truth-telling to lunatic ideologies.
At the same time, there’s widespread acknowledgement that the peer-review system is “broken”.
There’s also a “replication crisis”. Replication is one of the keystones of science. If claimed results cannot be independently replicated, then they should be discarded. Yet, for the vast majority of papers, the experiments on which they are based are never repeated. Of those that are, the results of less than half are able to be replicated.
There’s no sign that things are going to get any better, any time soon.
Science really is fucked.