I have written here before of how one supposedly settled “scientific consensus” after another is constantly being overturned, much to the distress of those who have staked their prestige and grant money on the status quo. Sometimes it seems to intelligent design proponents that Darwinism is the only subject where scientific dissenters are routinely shut down, ostracized, denied tenure or fired and personally attacked in the media. But it is not so. Scientific persecution has happened repeatedly in history and, oddly for a supposedly enlightened age, it is happening more and more now.
Yes, the Scopes Trial of 1925 has been turned on its head eight decades later. Scopes was fined for teaching Darwin’s theory, while today’s teacher will be fired if he offers the evidence against it, as well as for it. The same is true of the trial of Galileo. He upset the scientists of his day enough to cause them to get Church help in silencing him, while the scientific establishment of our day would use methodological naturalism to intimidate anyone (Church included) who challenges a materialist explanation for the origin of the universe.
But the anti-Darwinists are not the only dissenters undergoing a contemporary scientific Inquisition. Here are two current illustrations, the first from an article by John Tierney in The New York Times that fat is not the public health menace that consensus science made it out to be a quarter century ago. Just think how many billions of dollars have been spent in the false belief that it was so! “Fat-free this,” “fat-free that.” Until recently you really couldn't challenge the consensus.
Now, as to persecution of dissent, it would be hard to match the ill-treatment Larry Summers got at Harvard for the sin of suggesting that there are differences between the brain biology of men and women. Humiliated already by losing his job as Harvard’s president, he is having his reputation for apostasy from accepted PC science ground into him at the University of California, Davis. Imagine, Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary is now a “don’t invite’m” in polite liberal society.
There is a pattern here, friends. Global warming, abortion, cloning, embryonic stem cell research, the list goes on and on. Of course, it is not nearly so fierce in most fields as in the supposedly “non-existent” scientific debate over the adequacy of Darwin’s theory. You would be hard pressed to think of a subject where the leading spokesman in the field—Dr. Dawkins, in this case—not only wants rival scientists fired and disgraced (his New York Times review of Michael Behe’s new book, The Edge of Evolution, shows that), but he also wants ordinary citizens barred from teaching their children anything other than The Gospel According to Dawkins. The English haven’t been burning people at the stake for five hundred years now, but Dr. Dawkins’ apparently thinks the custom should be revived.
Since this subject is now slated for politicization in America, thanks to the National Center for Science Education and even the National Academy of Science, PBS, and at least one presidential candidate (Sen. Clinton), I plan to keep posting examples of failed scientific consensus and the crimes that have been committed in its name in the past. And those being committed now.
We all have to get over the childish assumption that scientists are superior beings immune from human pride and ambition, not to mention human guile and bile. Here’s a question though, do these negative qualities derive from evolutionary adaptation—and therefore must be excused—or from a human nature anchored to the very existence of man's soul, and therefore must be confronted?