WHAT IS ‘SCIENCE’?

Although bandied about in general conversations, newspaper reports and television shows with the implication that it is the fount of all knowledge, the home of rationality and the universal arbitrator, ‘science’ is neither so easily defined nor clearly understood even by those who regularly invoke it.

The concept planted in our perception by education and the media is one of earnest professionals studying and experimenting to uncover universal truths, and seeking the means to better the lives of those it serves.

Though such people surely exist, a cursory examination shows the generality to be a myth. There is no universal science. The word is here being used as a catch-all for a number of diverse and often contradictory disciplines. It is almost inevitable, therefore, that it will be used to bamboozle. 

‘Science’ says there are hundreds of tiny nicotine receptors in your brain that force you to go on buying pharmaceutical products instead of cigarettes. Exactly which science - which scientist - would that be?

Physics is a science that has served us well. It has practical applications; it can predict things; and it has greatly facilitated our progress. Chemistry, likewise, has beaten a path to greater understanding, though its practitioners might not have reached the same conclusions as their physicist colleagues. With biology we get into a rather woollier area in which the ‘scientific method’ as we fondly believe it to exist has come something of a cropper.

Who decides what is a ‘science’ and what isn’t? And on what criteria?

A TV ‘science correspondent’ will consult the opinion of a psychiatrist, but would run a mile from an astrologer; yet astrology, in all but name, is very much closer to being a science than psychiatry.

There is no effort in this book to disparage the achievements or motives of the many people who have played a part in the advancement of the various sciences, or their valuable contribution to our understanding of the material universe.

But it is not logical - not scientific, in fact - to allow our lives to be ruled by false and idealised notions.

Science as a method of questioning, exploring and learning is greatly to be supported.

‘Science’, the vague and undefined authority with a spurious claim to mastery of life and the universe is nothing more or less than another dodgy belief system spreading ignorance and slavery under the guise of enlightenment.


From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

TRUTH TO TELL

Truth is the engine and the origin. It is what was there before everything else. It underlies and gives existence to all that we perceive, all we imagine, all we do and all we create.

Matter, religion, science, mathematics and philosophy are not truth but manifestations of our viewpoints upon it.

Truth would not need to assert itself. It is superior to, and unchanged by, all debate and conflict.

You can’t be partisan with it. It has no parts. It is the blank upon which opinions, concepts, beliefs and dogmas are constructed. You won’t find it by elaboration, but by looking beyond these things.

If you fill a blackboard with formulæ and ask a class what they are looking at, one in a million or more will say ‘a blackboard’. Human systems of ‘science’ and ‘belief’ fill ever more blackboards with diagrams and formulæ. The writing becomes ever more dense and significant. When it is solid enough, it becomes holy writ or a fundamental of science. Erstwhile authorities are invoked to add further weight before it is finally locked into bibles, computers and other unquestioning machinery, where it is hoped it will be held inviolable until the end of the apparency of time.

At which point, its edifices and graven gods are to be found crumbling in the desert, or mangled and blasted in a post-nuclear junkyard.

Truth will have been there all along, as if none of it had happened (if any of it did happen).

Like the projector concealed behind the rear wall of a cinema, it will have beamed some flickering images upon a screen, and collected them, their life and light, their noise and petty dramas, back into itself.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

IN THE BEGINNING

Every major old-time religion was characterised by its own particular creation myth. In the West, we are most familiar with the Genesis tale of God the Builder, though other myths are, of course, available. It’s quite ironic in itself, since it is not Christianity’s myth.

Christians don’t really mind it, but it is not they who keep it in the public mind. For a certain kind of ‘scientist’, it is a godsend (pun intended), because it is so easy to ridicule.

Of course you would be justified in thinking that ridicule would not be very scientific; that, if the said scientists had a better idea, they wouldn’t be any more worried about the thing than the Christians.

Problem is, unfortunately, that Science’s creation myths are even sillier and less adequate.

At least Genesis starts ‘In the beginning’. Science’s creation myth is that there is no creation, so starts after the beginning, when everything already was, and had decided among its inanimate self to go off bang. No life was harmed in the making of the Big Bang, thankfully, because the inanimate matter had not yet, spontaneously, accidentally and more than somewhat miraculously, come to life—not just for a fleeting moment, but long enough to come up with both the idea and the means to replicate and fill the Earth.

We must continually remind ourselves that intelligent design is not to cross our minds at any stage in trying to make sense of this, as our protean blob of suddenly soft and malleable matter goes about its business on a planet surface devoid of vegetation, predators or anything other than rock, other blobs and a lot of water, taking its energy from the sun. At some point, equally spontaneously and miraculously, it becomes conscious of all this, packs up the easy life, becomes a carnivore or a herbivore, (presumably quite quickly) develops clever means of converting its food and picking things up in 3D stereo, struggles further up the beach and sets about inventing evolution.

Manifestly, the single-celled blob has long-since gathered together with other single-celled blobs to create something more muscular and multi-cellular. But why would each of those cells agree to play its small part? How, indeed could it keep the coordinates of where its part should be unless there was one unifying force - someone with a drawing or a blueprint to work from?

‘DNA,’ I hear you say. OK, but where did that originate? Did one blob conceive the thing and talk the others into it? Did the whole party evolve from a big shapeless blob into a fish to counter the survival difficulties of living in the sea by committee?

If so, how many single-celled blobs does it take to make a diplodocus, and is it really worth all that effort to stand up to your oxters in swamp and eat raw veg? How would dear old Darwin or crabby old Dawkins explain the time spent evolving an oversized lizard in need of hip replacements? Survival of the fittest, or the fattest, perhaps?

It might not have been bright, but it was hardly accidental. Perhaps it makes a case for unintelligent design.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

THE TELEVISIONING OF WILDLIFE

Beryl.

Since the 1950s, wildlife and our fellow creatures have been a perennial source of fodder for what is perhaps the greatest raptor of them all – broadcast television. Their inherent tendency to be interesting and move about ready-made them for the medium, and their lack of interest in money or contractual obligations naturally endeared them to producers.

In the beginning, Hans and Lotte Hass, Armand and Michaela Dennis and the legend who already was David Attenborough brought us a sense of the diversity, resourcefulness and frequent stubbornness of their natural subjects, enlivened in the latter case by selections from Los Paraguayas.

Then one of those conjunctions from which showbiz legends are born occurred, when master of characterisation Johnny Morris endowed the filmed creatures with voices and personalities to create Animal Magic – still one of the best-loved and best remembered shows of the telly generation, and a large part of the foundation of that generation’s respect and affinity for animals.

While those animals went about their business, largely untroubled or inconvenienced by it, the burgeoning and oddly styled subject of TV ‘Natural History’ and its, by then, attendant departments and committees, were heading for the first of many historical revisions.

Morris, J. fell from favour, charged with the new crime of ‘anthropomorphism’ – assigning human traits and identities to the beasts of the field, fish of the sea, fowls of the air and so forth. The exigency that the orthodox scientific teachings of Konrad Lorenz derived from just such anthropomorphism was not raised in his defence.

So, while yesterday’s man went about opening fêtes and animal sanctuaries for his loyal public, a new Morris arrived on the block.

Desmond M. was out to prove that, not only were animals devoid of humanity, humans were too. 

Smarter than the average ape, he adapted to the new environment of Zoo Time and evolved into one of the first, and by no means the last, of his species to become an opinion leader by being where an opinion leader is expected to be: on the telly.

If there was one crime worse than anthropomorphism among serious minded zoologists in those days, it was Disneyfication. This is defined in this context as the business of editing clips of animals together in a sequence that, with the aid of a narrated fiction, forcibly evolves the footage from random observation to a paced and plotted adventure. This Mickey Mouse Club approach inevitably appealed to children and those in search of fairy tales by being guaranteed entertainment, with controlled highs and lows. Nobody was better at this than the Disney Organisation.

The whole idea was anathema to serious wildlife and natural history people, for obvious reasons. From pretentions of being genuine scientific study and education, these products had become a freak show, exploiting the animals as living cartoons or lay figures; unpaid actors in simple-minded tragicomedies.

It’s not clear exactly which imperative led to the complete about-face in BBC wildlife productions by the end of the century. Whether it was the acceptance that plotted programmes are more involving, or the slightly more sinister inevitability that orthodox beliefs regarding animal behaviour could be demonstrated to be true by such fakery – either way, the once despised Disney was now welcomed into the fold, its experts invited to Bristol to advise on subjects, plots and outcomes. With the BBC’s enormous and ever-growing archive, anything could be made to do anything – even more so as the technology of colour matching between clips developed.

In case there should be an inconsistency where one animal was spliced with another to move the action on, any remaining sniffiness about anthropomorphism faded in the face of the useful expedient of assigning jolly names to the lead characters. Calling fifty different meerkats Beryl sustains and reinforces the illusion that one performer is running the gamut of emotions and plot points demanded by the fabricated drama.

Meerkats have been being meerkats since time immemorial without any reference to evolutionists or behaviourists – for the greater part of that time, there were no such authorities to which to refer. They managed somehow. But telly meerkats have certain obligations. They live in time slots, they must have ‘alpha males’, and they must have evolved from something, because televolution says they must.

The mastery of television wildlife filming and presentation achieved in a few short decades by the likes of the BBC is wondrous to contemplate, but its very expertise can too easily become a liability. The computer generation exemplified in the ludicrous Walking with Dinosaurs cannot but make us wonder if anything we are looking at really came to pass.

At time of writing the BBC announces a spectacular new production in which it admits to using fakery – not merely to make one animal appear to be another, but to counterfeit interactions and events. ‘It might look like this chipmunk is about to be eaten by a very large bird. In actual fact the two never met and absolutely no chipmunks were hurt in the making of this programme. We would never do anything like this in any of our proper wildlife shows, of course.’

Oh yeah? Pull the other one, frankly.

It’s not difficult to understand the urge to make ever more spectacular television. The technical expertise is there; how can you not use it?

In the end it comes down to ethics and trust. The BBC has a high and hard-won reputation. It is highly trusted still for its original values and its vital role in the 1939-45 war. If it continues to blur the divide between fact and entertainment and to use sleight of hand to control ‘reality’, whether for relatively innocuous dramatic reasons or to enforce its preferred dogma, sooner or later it will lose that trust and wildlife television will face its own ‘extinction event’.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

A CLASS APART

By the time I was twelve, I was already an ardent ‘believer’ in science. On being shown it one day, my neighbour turned up her nose and declared that my pet Lizard wasn’t an animal.

‘What is it then?’ I asked her, ‘A plant?’

She went on to explain that animals are cuddly things and a lizard is a creepy-crawly, so is classified with other creepy-crawlies, such as spiders and beetles.

Affronted by her ignorance, I reeled off a catalogue of stuff about orders, phyla, species, the family lacertidae and other kinds of learnèd hogwash.

All these years on, I see how ignorant I was to believe these officially constructed classifications had any more truth in them than hers.

The lizard was the most ignorant of all, being party to neither system of taxonomy, but it alone was possessed of full understanding of its role and duties, not as a representative of other ‘lacertidae’, but specifically as itself.

Its successors continue with identical expertise, regardless of classification and consensus science, and all unwitting of the changes in their motives, place in the scheme of things, history and the evolutionary back-stories spun about them to suit the notions and fashions of humanoid myth.

Good or bad, right or wrong, ‘science’ has not touched them.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

BANG TO RIGHTS

It seems Sherlock Holmes never actually said, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’

It’s a case of misattribution, like: ‘Alas, poor Yorrick, I knew him well’, ‘Come up and see me sometime’, ‘Play it again, Sam’, and ‘I believe Iraq has weapons of mass destruction’ – part of the collective memory, but never uttered in fact.

Not long after Sherlock’s time, however, identifying villains became a lot more elementary, thanks to the introduction of fingerprints.

As long as the miscreant’s dabs were taken, and the fingerprints officer wasn’t otherwise influenced in the largely interpretive art of cross-matching by other little hints and suggestions, this was a fair way of putting Chummy where he said he wasn’t.

Bequeathing the method to the police forces of the world, Home Secretary E.R. Henry boasted of its foolproofness on the grounds that ‘everyone’s fingerprints are different’.

Most of us know this as a scientific fact, though it’s never really been proved. Certainly the indications are that it is a high probability – and the chances that the statement applies to the comparatively minimal sample of known criminals is very much higher.

But, even assuming uniqueness, as records increase, differentiation becomes more problematical, with the potential of being overtaken by the inherent margin for error.

As more and more prints were amassed, the forces of the law were forced back again on hunches and hogwash such as psychological profiling, which at least seemed to work on television.

But cometh the hour, cometh the men.

Crick and Watson let the gene genie out of the bottle and the jig was up.

Everyone’s genetic fingerprint is different. It’s a known scientific fact – so you can now be banged up for things you got away with the first time because your finger type fingerprints were smudged or a psychological profiler was looking for Hannibal Lecter.

Genetics is more scientific because it’s got so many billions of little peculiarities that only  computers and algorithms can tell one from the other. ‘Spot the difference’ for the digital age. Perhaps ‘spot the similarity’ is more to the point.

So how many of those billions of peculiarities are found at the average crime scene? A dozen? How stable, how reliable, are the dozen? Pass.

But it’s all very scientific. They scrape up what’s there, set the computer running, and Bob’s your uncle. Or possibly the Avon Lady.


From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

PREVENTION AND CURES

It’s a frequently overlooked, or perhaps intentionally neglected, fact that no external intervention, be it by surgery, medico-pharmaceutical chemicals, nutrition or chiropractic, ever cured anyone of anything.

All any external agency can ever do is to bring about circumstances in which the individual is better able to recover.

Medical cancer treatments, for example, cut out, burn or poison affected tissue, in each case causing effects equally detrimental to any healthy tissue in its proximity. Indeed, in the case of surgery, the treatment leaves the body to deal with the additional trauma of amputation.

On a purely stimulus-response basis, this may rally what’s left of the immune systems of the body and the combined threats of the illness, and the acute treatment may raise the impetus of the organism to survive. But this process has enormous variability from individual to individual on the basis of the degree of fight that the subject retains and how much more interested they are in surviving than giving up the ghost.

When we allow ourselves to think in terms of ‘being cured’, we at once abrogate responsibility and invalidate our inherent powers of maintenance and recovery. Vesting the process of ‘curing’ in some – or any – outside agency misses the point, weakens those powers and, perhaps worst of all, allows that agency to pronounce that an individual is ‘incurable’, with sufficient devolved authority and disheartening ‘certainty’ to make it so.

A faulty jet engine cannot be made to work with French chalk, puncture patches or any number of Allen keys, but it would be a very arrogant bicycle repair man who would declare the subject ‘incurable’, though he would be forced to admit that its cure was outside the limits of his own skills and expertise.

Why, we might ask ourselves, in those countries in which the medico-pharmaceutical alliance has the most influence, is it illegal for anyone to claim curative skills or properties? Such legislation in no way protects the private individual. On the contrary, it prevents the possibility of future discovery of ‘cures’ or assistances in the maintenance and increase of wellness.

It is there solely to protect the established monopoly, of course; although, by the diminution of hope it introduces, it adversely affects even that body’s success rate.

‘Where there’s life, there’s hope,’ runs the old adage. The reverse is as true if not more so.

A typical medically engendered ‘study’ recently concluded that there is no ‘statistical benefit’ in taking cranberry juice for cystitis.

What could be the purpose of such a study? Clearly numerous people have been using it with some symptomatic amelioration for decades or centuries. In the unlikely event that its benefits were the result of some kind of delusion or ‘irrational’ belief, did that make it any less beneficial? 

Pharmaceutical painkillers themselves operate by deluding the patient into believing the source of the pain no longer persists.

Once again, the only motive there can be in such a study is to keep up sales of pharmaceutical products. What possible interest are ‘statistical’ results to an individual? Why should she or he believe, or have any truck with, them?

If, as we are expected to accept on the one hand, everyone’s DNA and fingerprints are different, why should we imagine that what is true for one individual is so for all others?

How can a medico pronounce something incurable, when he is leaving out of his calculation the most vital factors of the equation – the uniqueness of the individual and his or her impulse for life? He holds neither the cure nor the keys to the future. All he is saying, in fact, is that he himself lacks the techniques, the equipment or the monetarily determined freedom to intercede further.

No one blames him for the actual situation, but such demolition of hope is completely without justification. If other healing practices do no more than give patients something to try, how can it not be worthwhile to advocate them as the ‘alternative’ they are? People do get well and survive for many years after being branded incurable. Few, or none, of them are the ones who take the doctor’s word as supreme authority.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

THE LEGACY OF SCIENCE

Painting by Sue Randle

Life managed to organise and operate the brains and bodies, the chemicals and the minerals of the Earth for millennia before Galen or William Harvey ‘discovered’ the circulation of the blood.

Dragonflies and pterosaurs could manage the business of flying and landing, navigation and aerodynamics way before the advent of aeronautical science.

Science has done wonders in distilling, explaining and counterfeiting these skills and feats. It can make robots and CGI images that seem to be alive, but it would be a manifest delusion to say that it has actually ‘brought them to life’.

Life, by definition, is the thing that is missing from mechanistic science. Did the full members of that Science  fail to notice it, like the elephant in the room, or did they – do they still – have a positive agenda to deny or disregard it?

The genesis of modern science is a catalogue of tragedy. Ballistics, explosives, weapons of mass destruction, poisons, electro-shock, drugs, torture, fungicide, pesticide and ethnic cleansing – the means, if not the will, for these assaults on the sanctity of life have long been the driving force of Science. They remain so to this day. Bringing death continues to be the most successful achievement of chemistry and physics – not surprisingly, as they have long since fallen into the habit of prostituting themselves to corrupt and bellicose governments in return for funds for their ‘enhancement’.

Fundamentalist mechanistic scientists aren’t really anti-creation, or even anti-god. They just want creation to be mindless and god to be a particle.

Dawkins’s little genes have to be conscious and self-willed in order to be selfish. They also need to cooperate, which is not a signal attribute of selfishness. What’s worse is that they need to know the plan, or they won’t know where to start or when they’ve finished.

Randomness and selfishness, if either could exist without discernment and purpose, would not achieve the replication life has been performing six nights a week and twice on Sundays since the dawn of time, without understanding what it was replicating and when it had done it.

No matter how powerful or mouthy its high priests, mechanistic science is not the things it studies to classify and comprehend. It is, at best, a view of those things – a more or less useful approximation.

It is not pure in its endeavours, not so much because it doesn’t find the elephant in the room, but that it has a policy of denying it.

Remembering that we are defining Science here as an entity, a mass of which many of those who would rightly call themselves scientists would not be representative; this is the Science that has its only real existence in the minds of millions of believers, and, for that reason alone has powers of enchantment and influence far beyond its material form. (Funny, that.)

What we’re looking at then is the amorphous, encyclopædic, all-knowing myth of joined-up Science with a capital ‘S’ – the one that gets on the telly, rather than the plodding, tedious and repetitive observation of things that brings about any actual addition to the store of scientific data.

The big Science that everyone believes in is, by all definitions, another religion. It has its creed, its clergy, its churches, its rallying cries, its believing congregations, its creation myths and even, moving in a highly mysterious way somewhere in the bowels of the Hadron Collider, its particular and particulate god.

For millennium upon millennium, life has worked to make this planet a fit place to live on. In its various forms it has broken down minerals, combined chemicals, fed rivers and seas and assisted its fellows to live and breed. Its ministrations have helped to change atmosphere, land, sea and climate – not ‘man made’ but ‘life made’. If you look around you, almost anywhere on Earth, you will see little that hasn’t been modified by life.

Big Science would have us accept that, not only did the elements combine purposelessly and accidentally, but some such random scattering of matter engendered sentient creatures, which went spontaneously from being clods of earth or lumps of rock to self-replicating, self-willed – maybe even self-ish animated forms.

No religion has a more bonkers and far-fetched creation myth than this, and yet it is an essential ingredient of mechanism, swallowed wholesale by many who think they are too savvy to believe in God the Builder – that nice Mr Attenborough and a whole boiling of celebrity ranters among them.

Gautama, Wesley and Loyola had to schlep from town to town and find their own food and lodgings. The peddlers of this latter-day nonsense – Cox, Roberts, Bonnin et al. – are saved the expense and travel by the gift of television and a generous stipend from the BBC, the collection plate having ‘evolved’ into a tooth-and-claw enforced licence fee.

In truth, almost everything we value, every freedom we enjoy, everything put in place for our benefit or protection, both spiritually and corporeally, came from believers in God and the sanctity of life. By the mid-to-late twentieth century, we in the West enjoyed a comfort and freedom never before experienced by such a cross-section of people, and many movements for good that we still rely on were formed, if not by believers in God the Builder, by those suffused with the Christian ethic and a clear sense that all must thrive for one to be guilt and pain free.

Centuries worth of legal freedoms, hard won from musty and selfish states, reached their peak in the fin de siècle before the ersatz Darwinian faith, with its bigger media guns began to usurp the place of its senior rivals.

Respect, trust and fellow-feeling are immaterial to a mechanistic faith and, since it gained ascendancy, those beacons of civilisation have been snuffed out and stifled at an alarming pace.

Almost all of America’s cherished amendments have been overridden in a few short years and, while giving  lip-service to democracy, western governments have sold their souls to global corporations for part of some pseudo-Darwinian vision of world domination. (Where are Mrs Peel, the man from UNCLE and Maxwell Smart when we really need them?)

The crimes and subterfuges undertaken in this doomed and cynical cause have led to widespread political paranoia, with the result that the NSA and GCHQ have to keep a lunatic vigil for any sign that honest citizens might be about to find them out.

Eugenics and fascism once more burst from their fetid drains and life is set against life in a sad remake of old tribes in conflict. New tribes are born, or come to prominence to propitiate and appease the great machine. Agnostics and atheists, unbelievers in a personified god, become militant fundamentalist don’t-knows, screaming denial of their own essence from the rooftops and shouting down the blasphemers who claim there is more to life than unthinking mechanisms.

Art teachers tell students there are no new ideas; science teachers that there are no ideas at all. Pseudo-Darwinism is preached in the Machine’s faith schools as the Only True Religion, self-gratification as the Only True God.

What was natural has been poisoned and perverted by Darwinian exploitation and scientific genius. Vital bees killed with insecticide, wild flowers shrivelled, whole swathes of the Earth scorched in commercially-driven wars, food and drink rendered indigestible, poisonous fluoride added to drinking water, toxic sweeteners to children’s plastic laden drinks, farm animals tortured and degraded, deprived of light and life, oceans contaminated and denuded of fish and, as a supreme achievement of the great new godless world, women and children destroyed wholesale by the drones, bombs and chemicals of the unhinged and the cowardly.

If global warming, or ‘climate change’ is Man-made, what manner of Man is making it? The fully formed spiritually mature Man, who understands life, who is conscious of his responsibility to himself and others, as well as to the legacy of future generations?

Or is it the Man who denies life, consciousness, the human spirit, creativity, diversity, the lessons of the past and the hope of the future?

Which kind of Man has raped, stolen, burned, murdered, adulterated, subdued and poisoned this Earth that was once so fair?

The one with the belief and the ethics, or the one with the licence to frack?

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depostory