Fake Science Amplified by Science ‘News’ Sites

Take a dumb idea. Get it on the ‘science news’ train and it will go viral – no questions asked.

Here’s why you need independent science reporting. The science news industry is blind, deaf, and dumb. Any press release from a university science department, assuming it is not obviously politically incorrect, will be be promptly distributed around the world automatically – no questions ask. If it mentions Darwin or evolution, its chances go up tenfold. Science journalism is dead.

Here’s how it works. First, the scientist or scientific team comes up with a hypothesis or speculation that is beyond empirical verification, such as something that the Stuff Happens Law did millions of years ago. Since few people read abstruse journals, the institution writes a fluffy press release for the authors, showing them in white lab coats with smiling faces next to their equipment. If the press release writer can include something about evolution or climate change, all the better.

These press releases, which are already biased to make their professors look good, feed into channels like EurekAlert, Science Daily, Phys.org, and others, which borrow any supplied artwork and send it into the science news blogosphere, unchanged except for putting their own banner over it. Other science popularizer sites like National Geographic, NPR, or Space.com, with their writers poised like guppies under a waterfall waiting for the morsels to appear, feed on the fake science and regurgitate it with little change except for a little creative writing. Within a day, the entire world is saturated with what some press release writer at the University of Wazoo put out for the purpose of making their local prof or grad student look good.

This is why the science world gets just one voice. No debate. No critique. No analysis. All the reporters in this process simply assume that peer review was done, so whatever was said is the truth. Science news today looks and sounds like a pool of rubber ducks who all quack alike, some a bit bigger and louder than others, but all singing the same chorus. Science journalism is dead.

Here are a couple of examples.

Luna Tunes

Three buddies at the University of Mexico had an opportunity to perform divination on Apollo moon rocks, and found that the oxygen isotopes from different locations were not as similar as once thought (to some statistical measure of error). What does this mean? It can only mean that some female asteroid named Theia came from the outer solar system and walloped the early Earth billions of years ago, giving us our moon. If you are puzzled by this association of cause and effect, be encouraged; you still have some sanity left. None of the news media do. There is no logical or necessary connection between the observations these guys made, and the story being told about how our moon got here. Variations of this impact story have waffled back and forth since the 1990s. This latest interpretation, published by Nature Geoscience, will most likely change again. But this week in March 2020, it is the scientific truth!

When the press release went out from UNM, it was dutifully replicated with only minor changes to the headline by Science Daily, Phys.org, Science Alert, EurekAlert, United Press International, Money.Yahoo.com, UK’s Daily Mail, Breitbart News, the Stock Market Herald, The Times of India and who knows how many thousands of other lazy media sites. With minor modifications, the ideas were echoed (or even fluffed up with jazzy cliches) by New Scientist, Nature, Scientific American, Space.com, The Conversation, Fox News, Popular Mechanics, Flipboard, and dozens (if not hundreds) of more sites. A few samples of over-the-top headlines:

• Surprise! Earth and the moon aren’t made of exactly the same stuff (Space.com)
• How the moon formed: New research sheds light on what happened (Phys.org) – complete with artwork
• New Moon sample analysis points to collision between Earth and Mars-sized cosmic object (International Business Times) – complete with animated infographic
• How the moon formed – new research (The Conversation)

Feel the burn: three scientists, who weren’t there billions of years ago to see an impactor hit the Earth and make the moon, let alone to know it went by the name Theia, changed the world in one week! That’s power.

If anyone can find any secular science news site that criticized this theory, or offered a different opinion, please notify us. We don’t have time to read all the thousands of hits this story got within 24 hours.

Critical thinkers would have asked questions. Critical thinkers would have studied the history of the Impact Hypothesis, and asked why it was conjured up in the first place after decades of conflicting theories from Apollo findings (10 March 2018, 17 July 2019). Critical thinkers would have checked with other scientists about this latest story, because there are always those “in the know” who disagree and have other ideas. Critical thinkers would have noticed that last year, Nature published a different scenario concocted by storytellers in Japan: “Moon might have formed from blobs of a molten Earth.” Was that true then? Is it true now? What happened? Critical thinkers would have pointed out the difference between observational science and historical science. None of this kind of responsible journalism took place. The world swallowed the story whole.

Reptilian Groupthink

Examples of automated viral reporting involving Darwinism are so common, we only have space for one example. Yesterday (9 March 2020) when Washington University at St. Louis wrote “Hot time in the city: Urban lizards evolve heat tolerance,” the story showed up instantly all over the place. It didn’t matter that the story was just a minor example of microevolution within a single genus – an uncontroversial nothingburger compared to the major transformations and innovations Darwin had in mind. The media ran with it uncritically, hyping it to the skies. “Natural selection favors plastic trait — a ‘hidden superpower’” exclaimed WUSTL press release writer Taglia Oglioreat breathlessly. The world’s media went wild with it:

• Hot time in the city: Urban lizards evolve heat tolerance (World News Monitor)
• Tiny Godzillas: City lizards developed heat-resistant bodies (MSN).
• Lizards in Different Cities Evolve the Same Way (Inside Science).

Ogliore got her fame for the day by appearing to praise Charles Darwin. The university evolutionists got good press around the world. That’s how dead science media works. It’s not about truth. It’s not about logic. It’s about clicks.

Par for the Course

These examples are not unusual. It happens all the time, especially with subjects like climate change, evolution, early man, dark matter, the big bang theory, fossils, millions and billions of years, the origin of life, and ‘politically-correct’ ideas like abortion, anti-Trumpism, or LGBT issues. The world falls hook, line and sinker for the latest fake science emanating from press rooms of universities (which, as Dr Jerry Bergman showed (20 June 2018), are overwhelmingly staffed by Leftists and Darwinists.

Science journalism is dead. It has been replaced by totalitarianism – not the kind where reporters are told by dictators what to say, but by groupies who willingly participate in their own slavery. They are products of an education system that indoctrinates students into a common secularist worldview that has taught them that their duty is to advance the regime’s ideology. That is morally good. They have practiced and honed their skill for years at decorating boilerplate handed to them. They have learned who the enemies are, and have learned to practice the two-minute hate against them each day, or better yet, to completely ignore them. They are the willing slaves of Groupthink Academy, worshiping each morning at the portrait of Charles Darwin on the wall.

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Cartoon for CEH by Brett Miller. All rights reserved.