“We have always been at war with Eurasia.” There’s that famous scene in which an orator is giving a lengthy wartime speech at a political rally, praising the heroic ally of Eurasia and denouncing the arch-foe of Eastasia, but then is quietly handed a note partway through and completely reverses himself, vilifying the former and hailing the latter. It’s been decades since I last read George Orwell’s 1984, but portions of that classic dystopian novel have become part of our common political culture. Hoover Institution: “Michael Behe, John Lennox, and Steven Meyer are three of the leading voices in science and academia on the case for an intelligent designer of the universe and everything in it (including us).An Orwellian Reversal on the Origins of Covid Next Post Uploaded: By Design: Behe, Lennox, and Meyer on the Evidence for a Creator If we assume that Earth is fine-tuned for life, we shouldn't find that too surprising. Previous Post Earth’s ecosystems became complex much earlier than thought after Permian extinction Functionally Specified Complex Information & Organization.
Computing, AI, Cybernetics and Mechatronics.Of course Sabine Hassenfelder points out that lots of so called science is not science. Why? It has no known political implications. There is plenty of science that gets done without a complaint from anyone. Science is objective if it doesn’t have any political implications.Īs soon as it does, the conclusions must be in sync with the politics. CommentsĪn article from two years ago on the virus by Wade. You may also wish to read: Will the war on objectivity in news media spread to science? Has it already? Trust in science will deteriorate if, like many journalists today, scientists come to see objectivity as worth sacrificing in order to achieve other goals. See also: How Twitter cut off a reasoned discussion of the COVID response. Scientists playing fast and lose with reality were able to leverage public panic among simple-minded people demanding lockdowns, crackdowns, shakedowns, and freakouts against anyone who had the good sense to question the crazy – or worse, wonder just what DID happen in Wuhan. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. Virologists like Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.” This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: They were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” they said, with a stirring rallying call for readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease.Ĭontrary to the letter writers’ assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of virologists and others wrote in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. These statements were not at first examined as critically as they should have been. Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Flipboard Print arroba Emailįrom early on, public and media perceptions were shaped in favor of the natural emergence scenario by strong statements from two scientific groups.
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