Where have all the scientists gone?

It’s absurd in the 21^st Century to have to reassert the primacy of science as the dominant force in our contemporary world. It is by leaps and bounds the most successful among all the contenders in the marketplace of philosophy. It is the empirical system of knowing that has brought untold benefits to mankind, enhancing our longevity, our wellbeing, and our happiness, though most of today’s elites might strenuously (but pointlessly) disagree. Beyond any doubt, the application of science has effectively decoupled large swathes of the human population from the drudgery of subsistence survival on a rocky planet orbiting an unexceptional star in an insignificant outer arm of our galaxy.

Yet, in recent times, the West has faced the most absurd and outrageous attempts to delegitimise science, the science that was largely responsible for our collective rise to pre-eminence in the modern era. In his recent edited book, The War on Science, Lawrence Krauss reads the entrails with grim affirmations penned by a who’s-who of today’s intelligentsia. It is not an unreasonable claim to say that it was the Enlightenment that built the modern West. But today, there is, perhaps alone in the West, as Douglas Murray has catalogued, a cultural death wish, a desire sprung from the ideology spawned by French postmodernists to cast it all down in an orgy of anarchic intellectual hedonism.

Just lately, this same improbable derangement ensnared comedy writer, Graham Linehan, best known for his classic sit-com Father Ted. Having touched down at Heathrow after a transatlantic flight from Arizona, Linehan, someone who recognises the scientific reality of binary sex categories and a vocal critic of transgender activism disembarked to be met by no fewer than five armed police officers who proceeded to escort him away for questioning over three reprehensible tweets he made months before. The dystopian nightmare envisioned by George Orwell in 1984 has finally materialised on British soil.

Meanwhile, here at home, literary savant Malcolm Gladwell has furiously backpaddled on his attitude towards inclusion of transgender athletes in women’s sports, claiming he felt the arguments for biological males being permitted to compete were specious, and that he was cowed into silence by the prevailing activism. The scientific truth was blatant but he was, by his own admission, too cowardly to defend it.

And then there is the utter embarrassment of watching the until-five-minutes-ago universally lauded godfather of evidence-based medicine, Gordon Guyatt, try to defend his capitulation over the trans issue. In a widely criticised communication that appeared on McMaster University’s website, Guyatt and his co-authors published a mea culpa that disowned inevitable common-sense policy decisions that were in part prompted by the team’s work which comprised a careful assessment of the evidence provided by the relevant clinical studies in support of gender-affirming care and medical transition and concluded that they are of uniformly low quality. This was, to many eyes, an ironically patriarchal scientist having caved in real time under the pressure of radical ideological activism and now caught with his trousers down by two smart women, Mia Hughes and Stella O’Malley.

But how can this be? Because our society’s loyalty to the truths that science has so effectively revealed throughout the Twentieth Century and since bequeathed to the new Millennium have been eroded to the point where objective reality seems less palatable, altogether less believable, than a commitment to individual truth and ‘lived experience.’

Anyone who vocally dissents from today’s prevailing lunacy—an ideology that gainsays the impossibility that a man can become a woman—is now deemed deserving of confinement to a cell for a dozen hours or more to reflect on their wrong thoughts—life-threatening spikes in blood pressure notwithstanding. The reality is that Graham Linehan could be any one of us. But how did we get here? It embodies the fruition of the Faustian pact struck by the postmodernists.

We should not be surprised that such a trade-off might be too tempting for many of us mere mortals to resist. The human condition, when reduced to its essential form, comprises little more than a compulsion to survive, an inclination that places us at the epicentre of our perceived universe. It is, after all, a natural instinct ingrained in our—and all other—species over millions of years of evolution. And it is this instinct for self-preservation that postmodernism appeals to, breeding scepticism of objective truths, and prioritising identity, not of the autonomous individual, but as remorselessly characterised by a sense of tribalism and belonging.

In Canada for nearly a decade now, the government has been shamelessly gaslighting Canadians into the false belief that Indigenous science should be accounted as a knowledge system that is the equal of Western science. The entire concept is ludicrous, because prefixing science with a modifying adjective—whether that be Indigenous or Western— is meaningless. The choice is an immutable binary, in the same way that sex in mammals falls into one of two categories. Something is either science, or it is not. If Indigenous science refers to scientific activities conducted by the native Canadian peoples, then it is simply science. If it is something outside of science, such as superstition or other untestable belief systems, then it is not science at all. It is something else, less plausible, that denies falsification by evidence.

Scientists in recent days have done very little to help their own cause. The blatant lies published in the world’s leading science journal, Nature, that denied the true origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus from a virology laboratory in Wuhan is perhaps the most egregious example. The fact that there is a emblematic genetic sequence found in the Covid-19 virus that codes for a specific function, one that is routinely introduced by the tools of genetic engineering, and is vanishingly unlikely to have occurred spontaneously, was to most expert eyes a smoking gun.

The recent onboarding by Nature of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) nonsense was another misdemeanour. This lesser betrayal, though driven by the well-meaning self-awareness of a cadre of scientists keen to shrug off Oppenheimer-twinged nightmares—an era forever tainted as an American capitalist patriarchy—is nonetheless an ideological crime that strikes at the heart of meritocracy. It permitted into the decision-making calculus that dictates success in grant applications, or faculty hires, or tenure decisions a layer that is ineluctably tied to immutable human characteristics such as gender, race and sexuality, among others; and it deprioritises merit and individual achievement.

And that’s even before we examine the abrupt cancellation of science professors like me for saying the wrong things. To be pilloried, at least in part, for making startlingly accurate but—as it transpires—unforgivable, politically incorrect biological analogies in a chemistry lecture with the sole aim of protecting the flimsy sensibilities of students indoctrinated with the absurd and non-scientific tenets of transgenderism seems inconceivable, far less defensible. These are some of the missteps, both small and large. To fellow Gen-X-ers who recall my favourite Norwegian band, a-ha, it’s a “minor earth, major sky.”

We do not have time for this. Science professors are waking up to the new reality on college campuses. The foundations of free enquiry have been quietly usurped by the unthinking moralising self-hatred of ideologues hailing from the hopelessly intellectually stilted social sciences. And they are waking up late to the party. One esteemed chemistry colleague at the University of Toronto confided in me how he recognised the fad for DEI initiatives as a nonsense, one that would eventually evaporate away like an unwanted solvent; yet he serves on the DEI committee for our department. Great Scott!

Currently, nearly all of the levers of academic power are in the hands of those who care only for the student experience, prioritising the feel-good narcissistic euphoria of young freshman, and at once demoting fairness, merit, and authenticity. Yet, for all of its recent progressivist overreach, something that is widely ridiculed, Canada is a country built on major contributions to science by such great Canadians as Maud Menten, Frederick Banting, Charles Best, John Polyani, James Till, and Donna Strickland, to name but a few. If we are to survive the ideological derangement of recent years in this country, we must once again champion science and reject ideological superstition. This is our future if we, as a nation, are to succeed.