The Fall of Big Science

You can’t trust what Big Science says
any more. It’s up to individuals
with integrity to rebuild science.

Here at CEH, we routinely distinguish between the good work that individual scientists do and “Big Science,” a cartel of lobbyists, academic deans and journal editors who presume to “speak for science” and who control the narrative of what science is and should be. The Big Science Cartel (BSC) has lost so much credibility, the time has come to expose it, shame it, and actively oppose it. Its members are almost all big government leftists and Marxists who have betrayed the ideals of empirical science for political power. To a person, they are all Darwinians who censor Darwin skeptics. On top of all that, they have been unable to stop a pandemic of fake science.

Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures (Wall Street Journal, 14 May 2024). Scientific publishing has a long history, and was long thought, as long as it was regulated by peer review, to be as clean as a scientist’s white lab coat. No more. Ethics built on the assumption of amoral evolution have allowed fakers with ulterior motives and seared consciences to cheat the system, using tools like AI to enjoy the prestige of “science” and pad their resumes. WSJ reporter Nidhi Subbaraman writes,

Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud.

Subbaraman continues, pointing out that Wiley had to retract 11,300 papers in the last two years and closed four journals, adding that “It isn’t alone.” So what will its high-and-mighty leaders in the Cartel say to the cheaters: “Thou shalt not”? If they were believers in God, they might appeal to the God-created conscience in the human heart that intuitively knows that cheating is evil.* But in evolutionary game theory, cheating is a stable outcome of natural selection. They have no one but themselves to blame.

*Note to BSC: plagiarizing Judeo-Christian ethics when you’re in trouble, if you don’t believe them, is also a sin.

Hearing Wrap Up: NIH Refutes EcoHealth’s Testimony, Tabak Reveals Federal Grant Procedures in Need of Serious Reform (House Oversight Committee, 17 May 2024). It’s no secret now that Big Science did almost everything wrong in response to Covid-19. It favored the untested vaccines, downplayed harms, opposed alternative treatments, supported Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx with their recommendations of shutting down whole economies and schools for weeks and months, gave bad information to governments, treated the UN like a sacred temple of truth, opposed the Wuhan lab leak theory, and supported its own lobbyists, all while trying to stifle criticism (such as the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration), calling anyone who raised questions “conspiracy theorists” and quacks. Well, that was then. Who can trust the Big Science Cartel any more?

Physicists are grappling with their own reproducibility crisis (New Scientist, 17 May 2024). The “reproducibility crisis” in the social sciences has been scandalous for years, but this article says that “physics is in a crisis” too—

Over the past year, a series of research papers claimed to find evidence for high-temperature superconductors – materials that conduct electricity without losses, which could revolutionise global energy use. These were retracted after all efforts to reproduce them failed, and in some cases original data was shown to have been falsified. Now, physicists are sounding the alarm about a wider reproducibility crisis in their field.

“That is just the latest story, it is by far not the only one, or the story that triggered this conference,” says Sergey Frolov at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania who co-organised a meeting for researchers, scientific journal editors and funding organisations. “All these stories that we heard are just the tip of the iceberg.”

What happened to the reputation of the “hard sciences” that revolutionized the world in the days of Newton, Faraday, Joule, Maxwell, and Lord Kelvin? Are today’s reproducibility crises a symptom of scandal and fraud rippling through all the science departments in academia?

Big Science Is Always Leftist and Pro-Marxist

We have repeatedly asked for any sliver of evidence that Big Science ever gives a fair shake to political conservatives. We’re still waiting. Nature openly supported the communist leader of Brazil whose election was shady, and attacks any conservative leader, whether in the Netherlands, Hungary, or Argentina. Please, readers, find anywhere the BSC journals say something nice about Donald Trump (one of the most popular presidents in modern history), or critical of Joe Biden (the most disastrous president in American history, a far leftist). No matter which president you personally support, the imbalance in coverage by the BSC between the two must strike anyone as concerning.

A pandemic agreement is within reach (Science Magazine editorial, 30 April 2024). Conservatives have been sounding strong warnings over the unconstitutional prospect of turning over national response to future pandemics to the corrupt World Health Organization (WHO), led by a Marxist. The treaty would include obligations for redistribution of resources to poor nations in the name of “equity” (which would require western democracies to suffer the most). But the editors of Science are all for it. “The certainty of a future pandemic requires global cooperation for science and equity,” ends this editorial. “Member states have an opportunity to lay a solid foundation that supports this ideal.” Additional evidence of bias includes never mentioning the concerns of conservatives in editorials like this. The editorial paints a rosy picture of a global takeover of healthcare policy. Won’t that be helpful to put such power into the hands of Marxists!

Daniel Dennett obituary: ‘New atheism’ philosopher who sparked debate on consciousness (Nature, 17 May 2024). When one of their own heroes passes, the BSC honors the individual with tributes. Daniel Dennett, one of the “four horsemen” of the New Atheists movement, was a staunch Darwinian. A propaganda trick in such accounts is to mention disagreement by the hero’s critics, but only disagreement from fellow Darwinians and atheists about matters peripheral to the big questions. Would Nature or Science ever bestow such honors to a strong Bible-believing scientist? As shown in the case of Gregor Mendel, concerning a museum erected in his honor, any accolades must first be sanitized of all religion—unless it is atheism.

A scientist for president (Science Magazine, 2 May 2024). The AAAS journal did an extensive story about two female candidates for president in Mexico’s upcoming (June 2) election. The criterion? Whether the candidate will give the “scientific community” (the BSC) everything they ask for without oversight – otherwise, their commitment to “science” comes under fire. This is surprising, given that both women, Sheinbaum Pardo and Gálvez Ruiz, are both scientists! Science calls the current president López Obrador anti-science because he “has strongly backed Mexico’s fossil fuel industry and taken few steps to aggressively address climate change,” the article claims.

US restores handful of wildlife protections axed by Trump (Phys.org, 30 March). This article is mentioned only as an example of persistent drumbeat in the Big Science Media that anything Trump did is bad, and anything Biden does to undo Trump’s work is good. There have been too many examples in the last 7 years to mention. Please find us an exception, where the BSC says anything good about Trump’s policies. Like all other Democrat groups, they hate him.

How religious scientists balance work and faith (Nature, 20 May 2024). At first glance, this “career feature” article by Anne Marie Conlon might appear as a peacemaking overture to “people of faith” by the BSC. Oh, but that would be a misreading of the intent. It is actually a targeted attack on Darwin skeptics. Conlon shares various stories of how some scientists integrate “faith” with their scientific work (see “people of froth” in the Darwin Dictionary about how the term “people of faith” is a misnomer). Conlon shows that you can get along within “the scientific community” if you are a Muslim or a Hindu and keep your practice of “faith” to yourself.

The one thing that the “scientific community” cannot tolerate is any scientist who teaches that God created the world, or that there are problems with Darwinian evolution. For those, the only path to reconciliation with the BSC is to renounce such heresy, earn a D-Merit Badge, turn liberal, and worship the Bearded Buddha. With those requirements checked off, some measure of God-talk can be tolerated, since it does not threaten Darwin’s pre-eminence as the Guru of All Understanding of Nature. An example is given of one such heretic who repented:

Mikaela Lee, a technical instructor in biomedical sciences at Solent University in Southampton, UK, says that her strong Christian faith informs her world view. “The way I approach science, personally, is as a way to glorify God and find out more about his creation,” she adds.

Raised in California as an evangelical Christian, Lee experienced how a more conservative set of beliefs can be in conflict with science. “I grew up believing in creationism, that God created the world. Evolution was kind of like a dirty word in my church,” she says. “But I also believed that we, as human beings, had almost an obligation to study the natural world and discover things about it, especially for medical research. And as I got older, I decided that you couldn’t take bits and pieces: you either had to accept all of the science or none of it.” This led her to adjust her religious beliefs to accommodate scientific evidence.

“The evidence that I saw was quite convincing. When we studied evolution in school, it kind of clicked in my brain. And it doesn’t just make sense. It’s beautiful. It’s elegant. That was the tipping point for me.” Lee found herself re-examining many of the conservative beliefs that she’d been taught growing up. After moving to the United Kingdom for university in 2018, she joined the more liberal United Reformed Church, which, she says, has many scientist members.

Why, she must have learned all about finch beaks, peppered moths, junk DNA and the whole menagerie of Zombie Icons. Maybe she learned about vestigial organs and poor design as well along her journey to the understanding that the Stuff Happens Law explains everything. It was beautiful. It was elegant. She couldn’t take bits and pieces of all this science; she had to accept all of it! Did you catch her either-or fallacy? How about the equivocation? The glittering generalities?

Now that she she has renounced “creationism” (defined here as believing that “God created the world”—nothing about Genesis, six days or a Flood), and since she showed her obedience by leaving the company of evangelical Christians, and has been baptized into the BSC by joining a liberal church where theistic Darwinists who celebrate Evolution Sunday can keep watch over her, the Darwin Party has tentatively accepted the penance of this useful idiot and has given her some room to share her testimony, perhaps hoping she can influence other ill-equipped evangelicals to follow her path to Enlightenment.

We remind readers that the BSC and its materialist media support unlimited abortion, unrestricted research on human embryos, censor doubters of the Green Agenda, stifle all criticisms of Darwinism in the public schools, promote global governance by Marxist leaders, endorse the LGBTQ+ agenda, support DEI, honor atheists, hate creationists, hate intelligent design, support all the policies of the Democrat party and oppose all the platform of the Republican party, define science in materialist terms, and push pseudoscience (chemical evolution, astrobiology, SETI, dark matter, the multiverse, etc.). They are indistinguishable from Far Left globalist materialist communists and the Democrat Party. There is not one conservative policy they approve of, and not one liberal policy they reject. Their science is scientism, and their political program is to get all the tax dollars they can without interference. If they don’t like some of these labels, let them publicly denounce Marxism and the other ones. Don’t hold your breath.

We said in the intro that the BSC must be opposed. The way to do it is at the ballot box. Vote out candidates who kowtow to the BSC. The public treasury does not “owe” them anything; they can raise their own money or seek rich benefactors if they want to study crawfish on treadmills. To get tax money, they must make a case that it is in the public interest to fund their projects; many times, such a case can be made—but not always. Let the BSC rid their own house of corruption, waste and fraud. Let them become more politically balanced, hiring Republican and conservative professors till parity is achieved. Let them stop censoring those who believe in a Creator God or who have legitimate doubts about Darwinian evolution.

Another way to oppose them is with information. Speak out about the bias in Big Science and Big Science Media. Expose their abandonment of the ideals of science publicly, till they are ashamed. One way to do this is to tell more people about Creation-Evolution Headlines on social media (X at @crevinfo) and by sharing links to our reports. But as long as tax money flows into their coffers, they are unlikely to change, because power corrupts. Let’s dry up the teat on the government sow, and then they might start thinking about what they’re doing wrong.

Once again, we want to applaud the individual scientists who continue to do honorable research each day with integrity. In this article, we were addressing the corrupt leaders and lobbyists who pretend to “speak for science” and favor only their materialist friends. They are no more to be trusted than the corrupt Labor Bosses who take union dues and send it to Democrats who promise them goodies. They are destroying the esteem of science. A major housecleaning is long overdue.