We are now battered by so many confusing political issues traveling under the name of “science” — having to do with global warming, nuclear power, AIDS, stem-cell research, cloning, endangered species, and the teaching of evolution in public schools — that the layman may be tempted to shrug it all off and leave such matters to the experts. Well, don’t. Just grab a copy of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (Regnery) and enjoy a good read. And some good laughs.
The author is my old friend Tom Bethell, a masterly writer who lights up daunting questions with simple explanations, apt analogies, startling facts, and often hilarious understatements. His book is in no way “against” science; on the contrary, it’s deeply respectful of scientific method, properly applied. What it exposes is the abuse of that method by various charlatans who seek political power, publicity, and government contracts. Not to mention the pleasure of duping gullible journalists and causing mass hysteria.
We are currently being urged, as Bethell notes, to panic over global warming. Unless the government enacts totalitarian measures pronto, one pundit warned, “by the end of the decade our rivers may have reached the boiling point.” That was written in 1970.
Such preposterous prophecies are now routine; social pressures play a role too and, Bethell reports, the magazine Science has rejected articles by distinguished scientists who dissent from the fashionable fear-mongering. (Notice that these allegedly imminent crises always require more government, never less.)
Like what passes for merely factual history, what passes for objective science is heavily infected by propaganda. Many things we hear every day — so often that we assume they must be established truths — are, in fact, nonsense.
The book culminates in a lively examination of that greatest of scientific errors, Darwin’s theory of evolution. In fairness to Darwin, he couldn’t have foreseen some of the difficulties modern biochemistry would present; nevertheless, he should have known better. Maybe it’s just my own narrow mind, or perhaps my deeper mammalian bigotry, but try as I may, I have never been able to perceive much resemblance between the whale and the mosquito. Even if they were the same size it would elude me.
It comes as a relief to learn that this is not a mere eccentricity of my own; Bethell explains why even some sophisticated biologists share it. The eye of the octopus is very much like the human eye, for example, yet nobody thinks men and octopi had a common ancestor with eyes; did both creatures just happen to acquire such complex organs accidentally and independently? Why is “intelligent design” out of the question?
Not only is the theory, as Bethell shows, at once tautological and incoherent; the fossil record is so devoid of evidence for evolution that the “proof” has had to be supplied by desperate speculation, logical fallacies, poor parallels, hopeful predictions, wacky experiments (on fruit flies), empty rhetoric — even outright fraud: Ernst Haeckel’s drawings of embryos became notorious among scientists. (One advantage of experimenting on fruit flies, by the way, is that “the animal rights people don’t object.”)
If you still think evolutionism is “science,” your belief won’t survive this marvelously incisive book. And the blazing coda, on the National Institutes of Health, will convince you that we need a constitutional separation of science and state.
The book is attractively designed, but the real treat is the writing. Few men write expository prose as fine as Tom Bethell’s, every word measured, never a word wasted, always elegant in its simplicity, and so compact of expression that it almost defies summary. The same can be said of C.S. Lewis and George Orwell, but not many others.
Poster Comment:
Boldings are mine ... as science, Evolution is bunk and it's high time that this was acknowledged.