Capitol Ideas: Politically Incorrect Science
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS TOM BETHELL Politically Incorrect Science fl FADERS MAY HAVE NOTICED that science has been my preoccupation lately. That is be-cause I have been writing a book. Regnery...
...By the way, don't they know we haven't even been able to get robots to move around the room without bumping into the furniture yet...
...That has been the most ambitious play of all, because the scare scenarios are such that we would have to put the environmentalists in charge of the U.S...
...Complexity morphed into consciousness at a certain point...
...The New Yorker spread the word...
...The alternative "is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature maybe ruptured, that miracles may happen...
...THERE'S ANOTHER CATEGORY of politicized science, in which it is not so much the crisis as the solution that is hyped...
...Agenda-driven scientists can choose the facts they want and present them in a certain way, send out press releases, and let the media take it from there...
...More government will be needed to solve whatever crisis has been spotted by the radar of science...
...A rising brand of utopian science believes that relief from these conditions can be bio-engineered...
...But if stem-cell cures are just over the horizon, how come Bill Gates didn't fund a biotech company himself, rather than support the California proposition that put taxpayers on the hook for $5 billion...
...When you think about it, more government is not a particularly "scientific" response to any crisis...
...Respond how...
...Their strange concern is that robots will become conscious and "evolve" faster than us, becoming our lords and masters...
...economy...
...His guru was Ray Kurzweil, whose futuristic book The Age of the Spiritual Machines showed how smart people can be devoid of common sense...
...A key step is the proclamation of an approaching crisis...
...I refer to disease, aging, and death...
...But that isn't the way we tend to look at it...
...Hire more Fish and Wildlife agents right now...
...You give us a crisis and we'll play it up," the journalists tell the scientists...
...The consequences of drug taking (at home) and a ruined public health infrastructure (in Africa) were blamed on a virus, and literally billions of dollars were pried loose from taxpayers as scare stories spread without check or balance...
...I have several chapters on genetic engineering, cloning, stem cell research, and the rest...
...In that sense it's the same old story...
...Thousands (or millions) of species are endangered...
...But "miracles" do happen...
...Don't rule it out...
...The original player was Rachel Carson, a biologist with the U.S...
...They wouldn't mind that, of course, but it was too much even for Republicans to go along...
...It is this philosophy that has been the main support for evolution...
...Regnery Publishing is putting out a "Politically In-correct Guide" series, and mine is the third, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science...
...But slowly, incrementally, year by year, they learned what was to their advantage: discern a crisis, setup a hue and cry, send out press releases, and so on...
...Machines do things right now that require great conscious effort on the part of humans...
...Check with Anthony Fauci of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been warning us about "avian flu," the latest scam...
...By increasing government spending...
...AIDS, and then African AIDS (in which no infectious agent was needed to make the diagnosis) proved to be the great 20th-century triumphs of empire-building public-health agencies...
...Fish and Wildlife Service before she published Silent Spring in 1962...
...I have two chapters on it in the book...
...When we "reason," our conclusions are foreordained, and would be known to a computer fully acquainted with our antecedent brain state...
...Step by step, the teachers and their unions learned they could put their own welfare ahead of the students...
...Dozens of such articles are published every year...
...Such computers are coming...
...That never changes...
...But the government workers were certainly helped...
...Guides to American History and to Islam are already out...
...Meanwhile a handful of inventors and capitalists have shown an opposite, dystopian tendency...
...Normally, we think of science as being above politics...
...The EPA didn't even exist in Rachel Carson's day...
...They happen every time we decide to do one thing rather than another...
...That has been the most ambitious play of all, because the scare scenarios are such that we would have to put the environmentalists in charge of the U.S...
...It turns out that small doses of all these chemicals are good for you...
...The recent events in New Orleans suggest that government poverty programs succeeded, over the years, merely in locking the underclass in-to the welfare system...
...Our "free will" is an illusion...
...Give us the readers and you will get the funding...
...The New York Times at that stage was not in crisis-mongering mode the way it is today...
...The full-time equivalents have kept themselves fully employed...
...His argument might have come from the Unabomber Manifesto, and it was ready-made for the Aspen Institute...
...He said: At the moment, computers show no sign of intelligence...
...A few recent headlines: "Tight Budgets Force Lab Layoffs," "Bush Victory Leaves Scars—and Concerns About Funding," "A Dangerous Signal to Science...
...CAPITOL IDEAS T O M B E T H E L L Politically Incorrect Science fl FADERS MAY HAVE NOTICED that science has been my preoccupation lately...
...And that suits the scientists just fine...
...From that time on it has been an article of faith (masquerading as science) that minute traces of toxic substances threaten our health...
...In many fields of science there is great uncertainty about the facts—as there has always been—and therein lies an opportunity for those who would connect science to the great money machine of politics...
...Hawking thinks humans are nothing but chemicals that self-assembled over the eons into ever more complex molecules...
...T HE MEDIA COOPERATE with the scare stories, partly because they, too, have an unswerving devotion to government spending as the cure for all ills...
...They will become "more evolved" and smarter than us in every respect...
...The claim that we only have an illusion of freedom and that our decision was determined by our chemical and electrical brain states belongs to the realm of philosophy, not science...
...When it sinks in that genetic and stem-cell engineering is beyond our ken, the anticipated downloading of our minds will also be postponed—indefinitely...
...They enjoy lifetime tenure, and more money helps to separate them from the problems they are supposed to be addressing (which is the way they like it...
...Again, however, the government is expected to foot the bill...
...NOVEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 45 CAPITOL IDEAS cell hullabaloo is really about: getting the federal government to pay the bills...
...Here, the great tendency is to over-promise...
...Scientists, we are led to suppose, can see it coming even if we cannot, because they have the measuring devices and the early-warning systems...
...One field in which scientists have played the game is toxicology...
...Underlying the thinking of both optimists and 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2005pessimists is the assumption of materialism...
...Joy's gloom was fashionable, at least for a while...
...The globe is warming...
...So far, 55 deaths worldwide have been attributed to avian flu, but it could do wonders for the budget of public health agencies if they can add a few zeroes to those numbers...
...The maintenance of 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2005 government spending at undiminished levels is perhaps its leading preoccupation...
...It is a neutral field in which facts are observed, theories are tested, and so on...
...More disease surveillance officers are needed and the CDC budget should be increased...
...Such predictions are placed close enough to our own time to seem impressive, and yet far enough in the future to be forgotten when they do not come to pass...
...They are more interested in their own funding, tenure, and security than in any detailed accounting of progress or decline in their own field...
...Only material causes impinge on humans...
...My own prediction is that neither the utopian nor the dystopian future will materialize...
...is a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...This is not surprising, because our present computers are less complex than the brain of an earthworm...
...Seven people have come down with a strange flu in Ho Chi Minh City...
...Most people can't follow what's going on anyway...
...It has declined in quality, even as the taxpayers' money spent on it has dramatically increased...
...They have learned to "game the system," in other words...
...These days, government science is also devoted to spreading false alarms about infectious disease...
...The federal budget is a major topic, scrutinized by editors week after week...
...Scientists sup-port evolution rather than creation or intelligent design, Richard Lewontin argued, "because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism...
...Government spending does help some people, including the recipients of government grants, and those who ad-minister them...
...economy...
...A problem is discerned, or invented, the government steps in, and then the problem seems only to grow more seriT O M B E T H E L L ous...
...I have chapters on such hot topics as global warming, cloning, stem cells, endangered species, AIDS in Africa, the need to bring back DDT, and of course Intelligent Design...
...She "alerted us," so it was said, to the dangers of chemical pesticides...
...So we must heed their warnings—they are our white-coated priesthood—and respond accordingly...
...Notice what the stemThe globe is warming...
...The beneficial effects of poisons in small doses is called hormesis, and I am grateful to the New York Times for letting me have a virtual exclusive on that story...
...Scientists didn't start out that way, any more than the teachers did...
...Think what they will be able to do when they become more complex...
...Here, the "crisis" is real enough, in a sense, as it is embedded in the human condition...
...But Science and other publications promoted the issue with very little acknowledgment of the underlying controversy...
...But it seems to me that if very complicated chemical molecules can operate in humans to make them intelligent, then equally complicated electronic circuits can also make computers act in an intelligent way...
...And more...
...some-times they can do them better (beat the world chess champion, for example...
...Humans exist, therefore they must have evolved (how else could we have appeared...
...The reigning guru of science, Stephen W. Hawking, flaunted this philosophy in all its wondrous folly in 1998...
...By 2029, machines will "claim" to be conscious and these claims will be "largely accepted...
...Today the agency's budget approaches $8 billion, with over 17,000 employees ("full-time equivalents," as they are called...
...More straightforwardly, crises sell newspapers...
...A highland sheep has died of an undiagnosed disease...
...Drops of mercury have been found in a school basement...
...There was great concern in this last editorial because the EPA and the National Science Foundation "actually had their funding reduced from FY 2004 levels...
...Bill Joy heard all this from Kurzweil in a bar one night and became a believer on the spot...
...Bill Joy, the co-founder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, wrote an article for Wired in 2000 ("Why the Future Doesn't Need Us") in which he argued that rapid technological progress threatens the human race...
...We are indubitably here, so how did we get here if not by atoms randomly bumping into one another...
...President Bush himself was played for a sucker by the education lobby when he called for "no child left behind...
...For years, the decline in public education has been construed as just another indicator that more money is needed...
...Increasingly, though, science has been politicized...
...And that materialism is "absolute," for "we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door...
...Soon we will be able to download our minds onto computer hardware, then slog on indefinitely as software, Kurzweil fantasized...
...It was "only a small step to a robot species—to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself...
...But the AIDS story may have run its course and the empire builders will need a new infectious disease before too long...
...The cheerleaders of government science have recognized this simple truth: crises work to our professional advantage...
...Look at Science magazine...
...Science is going down the same path...
...How come...
...Or take public education...
...The toxic-alarm story has continued in serial fashion, with officials detecting traces of dioxin and PCBs in places like Times Beach, Missouri, and the Hudson River, leading to immensely expensive clean-up mandates...
...And get away with it...
...So the relationship is symbiotic...
...Tom Bethel...
...Readers should adopt a default position of disbelief whenever they see articles about these marvels...
...When it sinks in that genetic and stem-cell engineering is beyond our ken, the anticipated downloading of our minds will also be postponed—indefinitely...
...How many problems are solved by government spending...
...Matter is all there is...
Vol. 38 • November 2005 • No. 9
