Science

Have you noticed that whenever the conversation turns to the subject of Charles Darwin, an extraordinary amount of dogmatism is often on view?  What’s curious is that the dogmatism is patent on both sides of the debate, on the side of the Darwinists just as much as the side of Darwin’s critics.  I have often noted with amusement how sensitive to criticism the Darwinian faithful are. Any hint of a shadow of dissent and they rush for the garlic, the wooden stake and a signed copy of On the Origin of Species. I think I understand the psychology of the response. They are terrified lest acknowledging the strength of this or that criticism start them down the road toward creationism and teaching the Book of Genesis in Biology 101. Where does the truth lie?

Dr. Jonathan Jiang dreams of beaming an easy-to-read message into space before civilization collapses. He’s run the simulations to test humanity’s self-destruction rate. According to his computers, there’s a 0.1 percent chance that humanity destroys itself in the not-so-distant future. He’s even more pessimistic than Stephen Hawking, who bowed out of public life saying, “I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet.” Jiang, who works for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, co-authored the 2022 paper “A Beacon in the Galaxy,” which argues for the importance of streamlining the communications we send into space hoping they might be intercepted by an interplanetary species.

On July 4, our Independence Day, Judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction ordering the federal government to immediately cease contact with social media companies, which it had been urging to censor protected free speech. Evidence unearthed in the Missouri v. Biden case, in which we are co-plaintiffs, has revealed a vast federal enterprise dictating to social media companies who and what to censor. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Surgeon General’s office, the National Institutes of Health, the FBI, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the White House itself were all closely involved.

A few minutes into celebrated Harvard geneticist Dr. George Church’s appearance on The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert motioned towards him conspiratorially. “How do you think your work will eventually destroy all mankind?” asked the comedian, peering meaningfully over his glasses and tapping the table. “It’s a couple of options. Do you think it’s going to be like a killer virus? Or more like a giant, mutant, killer-squid-man, who arises from the Pacific, between Easter Island and Chile, and feasts on our flesh?” Colbert’s probing was tongue-in-cheek, of course. But the joke worked because it touched on real concerns. Dr. Church, sixty-eight, has had a long and storied career, including helping to launch the Human Genome Project in 1984.

Ever since I can remember, I have always been aware of something called the “Doomsday Clock,” a symbolized calculation produced by a panel of prominent scientists of just how close humanity is to destroying itself. Published on the cover of every issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a journal founded in 1945 by Manhattan Project physicists, the clock’s hands would move toward or away from the dreaded midnight hour depending on how near Armageddon was believed to be. As a kid, the Doomsday Clock seemed an appropriate warning of how the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union might accidentally spin out of control.

The number of Americans who believe in God has reached an all-time low, according to a Gallup survey that’s been tracking our nation’s “values and beliefs” since 1944. For a God fearin’ woman such as myself, it’s a disheartening statistic. But we are told never to abandon hope, and recent events — the Supreme Court rulings against abortion and in favor of prayer, a million swing voters switching their registrations to Republican, Keeping Up with the Kardashians finally airing its last season — betoken a more God-centered future. Gallup reports: The vast majority of US adults believe in God, but the 81 percent who do so is down six percentage points from 2017 and is the lowest in Gallup’s trend.

Who should be the custodians of science? For centuries, scientists themselves have been. Now, their custodianship is under threat. Science has long operated as a sort of guild, with the guild managing its own practice and traditions. This holds for the guild’s continuity: admission of aspiring members to the guild is controlled by the guild itself. For the sciences, aspiring members must clear a competitive series of hurdles: apprenticeship (graduate school), journeyman (post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor), then full membership (tenured professor). For the past few decades, science’s stewardship has been shifting into the hands of an arriviste managerial class with no idea what science is or any real respect for it.

Last month, President Biden tapped Dr. Eric Lander to be his science advisor and lead a new "war on cancer" initiative. Just five days later, he was unceremoniously dumped. Nominees come and go all the time, of course, yet there was no doubt over Lander's scientific and managerial qualifications. He is a professor of biology at MIT and Harvard University. He was instrumental in steering the Human Genome Project to a point of actual utility, providing detailed genetic maps of heritable diseases, and proceeding from those clues to novel treatments. He is a skilled political operative, hobnobbing with the wealthy and powerful on his way to becoming the president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

If the history of humanity is the history of big ideas — from the wheel to space flight, cave painting to the multiplayer game, monotheistic religion to special relativity — then the same is true of our future. By the 1960s the developed world had witnessed 200 years of extraordinary activity on every front. This was the era of the moonshot; of political obsession with technological mastery; of experimentation in music, culture, knowledge and relationships. Humanity had undergone a big-ideas revolution and the expectation was that progress would keep accelerating. In 1967, Herman Kahn, the futurist and theorist of nuclear war, and fellow futurist Anthony J. Wiener published The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation Over the Next Thirty-Three Years.

The biggest shock amid the COVID-19 pandemic has been the discovery that the virus may have been released during an illegal collaboration on so-called 'gain-of-function' research between the US nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Recently revealed National Institutes of Health (NIH) documents show that American taxpayers directly subsidized this joint effort, despite a federal government ban on any experiment that might give pathogens the ability to leap species. Even worse was that EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak tried to shut down any debate on whether the coronavirus had been leaked from a lab by getting 27 prominent scientists to endorse a March 2020 letter to the medical journal the Lancet.

The vaccine programs launched this year appear to offer a Happy Ending to the Horrible Story of the COVID-19 Pandemic. But I am cautious. Not because I am ‘antivax’, but because lasting ‘ever afters’ are never written in the language of emotional manipulation and coercive control. Herd immunity, when enough people have either recovered from COVID or been vaccinated, will end the pandemic. The pressure to get there has given us a vaccination drive with an unprecedentedly strong behavioral psychology and emergency response approach. A panoply of persuasions has been deployed to encourage the hesitant, the slow and the complacent. From dating app bonuses to donuts, lotteries to laminated vaccination cards — when do incentives become coercive?

The American businessman and astronomer Percival Lowell first popularized the notion of life on Mars in 1906 when he described vast canals observed on the planet, some spanning the equivalent distance of Boston to San Francisco. He believed an intelligent Martian civilization was in peril, their world drying out and dying, and they had constructed as a planet-wide irrigation system to move water from Mars’s polar ice caps to the rest of the planet.American folklore has it that the idea of Martian intelligent life was so pervasive that a 1938 radio drama of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, about a Martian invasion, ignited mass panic when millions of people believed it was a real newscast.