Why The Science Wars Matter

Can't usually be bothered with full-on Fisking but some people ask for it. Take this unpleasant piece of slime from unpleasant piece of slime Tim Hames.


The Pope, this newspaper reported on Saturday, is about to ensure that the first married woman acquires sainthood. Now that the precedent has been established, I would like to recommend Margaret Beckett for (eventual) canonisation.

Yay, one paragraph in and already a cheap shot at religion. How daring for a science geek to have a crack at His Holiness. Still, at least we've got the that over with we can get on with the rest of the article.

The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, deserves this and other accolades for apparently convincing her colleagues in the Cabinet that there would be “no scientific case for an outright ban” on the cultivation of GM crops, and that it would be “irrational” for ministers to take the “easy way out” and concede one. If her view prevails, as seems probable, she will have struck a rare blow on behalf of sanity on the subject.

I've mentioned before that I think it's pathetic the way these people, supposed followers of the Way of Science, so easily lapse into Good Dog/Bad Dog terminolgy, but this paragraph is beyond satire.

Less obvious candidates for the place at the right hand of the Almighty are the Sunday Times journos who have exposed Andrew Wakefield’s claims about the MMR vaccine as “fatally flawed”. A partial absolution for past sins would be sufficient reward for them.

So who exactly said it was fatally flawed ? Timmy Boy ain't saying - fortunately Mel P is less reticent, as she explains why that verdict may be, just a little, questionable.

That the conflict of interests behind the Wakefield crusade has been outlined is welcome. It is a tragedy, however, that it has come after six years of ceaseless scaremongering.

Six years in which this supposedly devastating evidence could have been revealed, but wasn't, right up until now, just as the Courts are about to review the decision to withdraw legal aid from parents suing over alleged damage. Just fancy that!

What both the GM crops row and the MMR controversy reveal is a new (or rather the reversion to an old) division. For many years the character and role of the State has been the main faultline in British politics. But arguments about the State aren’t what they used to be, now that we are in an era when the two major parties are discussing whether public spending should be 42 per cent or 40 per cent of national income, each has agreed that health and education are the supreme national priorities and where the distinctions in their policies are largely technocratic.

Unless, of course, both parties are rushing to the centre prior to an election. Crazy theory I know, but it could happen.

Really, you think Timmy would at least try and grasp the basic details of how the country is governed prior to trying to lecture everybody else about the supremacy of the scientist.

What is emerging instead is a contest over the character and role of society. It can be witnessed in attitudes towards immigration, sexuality and women in the workplace. But above all it involves approaches to scientific progress.

Of course. It's all about science. The little stuff like Islamofascism, crime and taxation are all distractions. We really spend every waking hour thinking about you and your socially retarded mates, Timmy.

Now, what was that someone was saying about these people having delusions of granduar ?

The contrast is between optimism and pessimism, confidence and fatalism, change and continuity, hope and fear, reason and reaction.

Did I mention the Good Dog/Bad Dog thing ? Come apply your lips to the geek's over-developed backsides or you're a baby-eating savage. Alternatively, the fault line could be between those who claim that we are on the brink of a new era and so should junk all that mankind has learned over the past four millenia about governments and how to control them, and those of us who think democracy has still got a few years left yet.

The State is almost irrelevant to this debate.

Mainly because it has been captured and Vichyfied by fanatics like Timmy Boy. Nevertheless, the role of the state is one of the main points of dispute.

The GM and MMR disputes are the first of many similar contests, which is why their resolution is especially important.

At which point Timmy gobbles down the whole cake - either they are scientific issues or they are political, but you can't claim to be a dispassionate seeker after truth while claiming that choosing option B will result in the Earth falling into the Sun.

On both questions an oddball alliance has emerged — the old Left, the old Right and the New Age have united against what they perceive as an “establishment” consisting of Whitehall, big business and the scientific community.

Why drag Big Business into this ? I'm pretty sure that it wasn't Vodaphone that tried to smear Rose Addis or set up David Kelly. On the other hand is Kool Aid Tim really trying to convince us that government is not the major player in British Science ? Did BAe Systems buy out Reading Uni and no one's told me ?

This alliance rages against those it believes are out to poison food, injure children, fry our brains with waves from mobile phones and their masts, slice up cuddly animals for the fun of it and, under the cover of “therapeutic” cloning, develop a master race of which the Nazis would have been envious.

Listen, you Einstein wannabe, this sort of ridule works better when the paragraph before you haven't claimed Lord Tebbit, Arthur Scargill and Carole Caplin are all conspiring against you.

Such suspicions, and the sense of a shared enemy, have made unlikely bedfellows of the Daily Mail and The Guardian, which jointly oppose GM crops.

It's that confusion about politics again, init ? Timmy, my boy, put down the paper cup and listen: what this means is that your opponents have broad-based public support. Which raises an intresting question - just how much support do a group of people need before Timmy and his fellow drones will stop trying to claim they're a fringe element ?

This bizarre collection, apparently under the patronage of the Prince of Wales, has three features in common. The first is the reversion to a pre-Enlightenment view of humankind and history to a period before it was assumed that each succeeding generation was capable of doing, knowing and understanding more than the one before.

Or it could just be that we believe that the basic principles of government and the rights of man remain unchanged and unchangeable, and that being so, we have pledged ourselves to defend our system of government against all those who seek to strangle democracy under the guise of 'progress'.

The second shared facet is an extraordinary passion, a paranoia even, for conspiracy. Not only are politicians, civil servants, business executives and scientists behaving recklessly but they are doing so deliberately. It is as if the “GM” in genetically modified crops stands for General Motors and the letters MMR represent Ministers, Money and Research. These opponents are the sort of people who believe not only that John F. Kennedy died as a result of an elaborate plot, that Elvis Presley is alive and well somewhere on the Moon and that Diana, Princess of Wales, was fiendishly murdered, but that the same organisation is responsible for all three events. And they are running the cover-up on flying saucers.

Given that Timmy has just alleged in the self-same article that Prince Chuckie has conference calls with the editors of the Guardian and the Mail to plot how they'll drive Britain back into the middle ages, this may not be the best time to accuse anyone else of paranoia.

The third element is an attitude towards evidence that matches the credulity displayed by those who served on the O. J. Simpson jury.

Given that O J's lawyers generally presented their evidence in a way that was far more straightforward, honest and open than any British scientist has done since 1964, that's probably not surprising.

The fact that, on GM food, as the Royal Society put it, “the results of the farm-scale trials show that the weed management of the GM maize variety clearly has a less damaging effect on farmland wildlife than current conventional practice”, is deemed no more valuable than that some bloke in the pub reckons his ploughman’s lunch has started tasting peculiar lately.

Y'know it's a wild shot in the dark, but it could just be... maybe the public was not enthused by the contrast in risk and reward - here's a potentially dangerous technology and the pay-off for it is that it makes the weeding easier. Hallelujah!

The Wakefield “study” on MMR, which included a whopping 12 individual patients (some of whom, we are now told, were sent in his direction by parents already hostile to MMR), is deemed as valid as others that concluded that MMR was safe and that involved the study of three million children.

Great use of scare quotes 'Timmy' - you've got a career ahead of you at the Beeb. Parental hostility is indeed well known to affect the composition of the spinal fluid - or at least it is in the bizzaro world Tim enters every time he takes his special pills.

The real irony here is that those who favour logic and reason are far weaker than their opponents would suppose. Those most sympathetic to progress as a cause — the “modernisers” — are split between the three political parties, new Labour, the Conservative Portillistas and the heirs to Jo Grimond among the Liberal Democrats. And even among the activists among those groups they are not in a majority.

And this is the only true statement in the whole article. There is an alliance between the scienceistas and the alleged political progressives. Both base their world view on a mishmash of tranzi philosophy, cultural Marxism, elitist nonsense, self-idolatory and contempt for democracy, the rule of law, Britain in general, and its history and traditions in particular.

Despite the heroic efforts of a small number of underfunded groups, scientists remain inclined to fight separate battles over the likes of GM food, MMR, mobile phones, vivisection and therapeutic cloning, rather than combining forces to wage a wider war. Big businesses, partly because of competition between them, are similarly ineffective.

A little more conspiracy among the rational would, therefore, be helpful.

Again, I say why libel Big Business ? At least BP actually produces something useful, which is more than you can say about most publically funded research. Mind you, the whole rest of the paragraph is garbage too. While scienceistas may indeed not have an equivalent to SPECTRE HQ, there is as Timmy implies in the previous paragraph, a very definite agenda, a set of beliefs, political techniques and objectives which unite most of Britain's scientists. That they do not work even more closy together reflects the basic hollowness at the centre of their philosophy. These people seek to destroy all that has gone before and remake the world in their image. But whose image exactly ? These people sure boil over with rage about modern society but as far as ideas for what is to follow it ? Forget it. All they really agree on is that they should have more money and power and people should stop laughing at them. At the end of the day, we are talking about bitter, sociopathic losers who have been rejected by normal society and sought refuge in a weird subculture, feverishly planning for the 'post-democratic society' they will impose just as soon as they find a way to get past all us normal people. Bottom line: they don't work together because even they don't trust each other.