Science, Evolution, and Politics! Oh My!

Science is science, right? Most of the researchers do a good job, honest, and flaws are quite rare, no?

But alas, my attention was recently attracted to an article by William A. Wilson called “Scientific Regress,” in which he details quite a few examples of scientific research results that fail to be replicated under identical circumstances. The Open Science Collaboration found that they were unable to reproduce the results of 65 percent of the 100 published psychology experiments they had tested. In another study over 75 percent of the results in 65 drug discoveries in cancer biology research were unable to be reproduced. To me this is not surprising at all, I’ve heard it said that if a patient is on five or more prescription drugs it’s nearly impossible to predict the symptoms they’ll have. Alas, William Wilson goes even further in citing another study of two thousand research psychologists, over half admitted to selectively reporting the experiments that gave the results they wanted. Further in that study ten percent were found to commit fraud.

Dr. John G. Hartnett took this information in his article “The Problem with Science is that so Much of it Simply isn’t” and drew a connection with evolution, I’d like to build on that with politics.

Now these aforementioned sciences are rather soft sciences, not hard sciences like mathematics where such actions are quite difficult to perform. If this selective research occurs in fields like psychology and medicine then what of today’s scientific dogma evolution? Evolution not only is a softer science but also isn’t even an operational science (it can’t be tested and observed, we’ve only evolved once!) thus it’s quite possible that this phenomenon is on a scale of even more grandeur, yet it’s practically accepted as fact and one daren’t attempt to challenge it. A behavior similar to the 1600 Roman Catholic “thou shall not question that the earth is flat!” With it’s domination of education I would imagine that evolutionary dogma would of had an effect on our politics as well, after all, if the main scientific philosophy of the age turns into unquestionable propaganda then there must be political ramifications as well. Such selective research and dogmatism would be quite easy to project onto politics as not only is it quite a soft science but also a very emotional one, look at our current healthcare fiasco! All one has to do is say “Lo! Ye hearts of stone! Wilt thou truly bring about the demise of our posterity?” Suddenly anyone that says Obamacare needs to be repealed is the second coming of Hitler.

Let us take a step back, why is evolution and science something to confer with politics? Well, Christianity used to dominate science, the entire western world and its scientific enlightenment was due to Christianity. Many of Einstein’s scientific heroes were Christians. When evolution began it partly became popular on the fact that it was the first real scientific theory that opposed Christian creationism. Now contrast this with the knowledge that the United  States of America was founded on Judeo Christian philosophies, especially our legal system which is almost a copy of the legal system proposed by Moses. This can, in part by the nature of these philosophies, cause friction. While I do not believe that evolution in itself is an attack on the foundation of America I do believe that those that turn it into propaganda have allowed it to damage that foundation. One such example is that most educational subjects are intertwined in spite of how the modern education system divides them. Early in America’s education the Bible was required teaching until the late 1960s when it was then no longer required teaching. After this change, such things like teenage pregnancy statistically began to rise along with various other immoral activities. Coupled with the advancing introduction of evolution in schools, and with the new generation growing up in a post WW2 world where America became the dominate power, this new generation began to develop strange philosophies that were once quite foreign to America. Seeing the rise of these political philosophies that America used to stand against, and the propaganda that bled over from the current science, it’s no wonder that we have a few “Thou shall not question” dogmas at play.

One Response

1. LeadTheWay says:

   July 30, 2017 at 6:00 am

   Ironically evolution was viewed as just another scientific theory. Darwin himself had no grand plan to crush Christianity. However, I think that changed at the scopes monkey trial.

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