[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Welcome. I'm your host, Emily Kurlinski. And today we have an opportunity to speak with Dr. Michael Egnor about scientists and the idea of scientific consensus. Egnor is a professor of neurosurgery at Stony Brook University and he is well known for his work in pediatric cases. He is also a senior fellow at the Walter Bradley center for Natural and artificial intelligence. Dr. Egnor, we're so glad to have you with us.
[00:00:36] Speaker A: It's a pleasure to be here.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: In September of 2019, you wrote an article on evolution news called Apocalypse More Things Scientists would like you to forget. I'm wondering if you could share with us some examples of these sort of world ending disasters that scientists have predicted, even in just for example, the past 50 years.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: Sure. Well, science has a tendency over the past couple of centuries actually to predict apocalypses. Probably the first apocalypse was the Malthusian apocalypse. It was predicted by Thomas Malthus back in the late 18th century that the human population would outrun the food supply and that we'd all starve to death. That in fact influenced Darwin. Darwin, about 50 years later, credited Malthus with giving him some of his ideas about natural selection. But Malthusian apocalyptic hysteria has been clearly shown to be wrong.
Humanity is today probably better fed than it has ever been. The food supply, because of human ingenuity, has increased at a much higher rate than human population has. So scientists were wrong about that. Although they still have Malthusian hoaxes going on. People still are warning us about overpopulation, although it hasn't really turned out to be a problem directly from Darwin's theory. Eugenics was a scientific apocalypse. The concern among eugenicists in the late 19th and early 20th century was that people of what they felt to be a lower quality were reproducing at a higher rate than people of a higher quality. Of course, the scientists defined people of a higher quality as people most like the scientists themselves. And so it always seems to work out that way that when you get into the, the business of defining large numbers of people as being either good or bad, you always end up defining the good ones as just like me.
[00:02:36] Speaker B: Imagine that.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Yeah, but the scientists told us that if we didn't control the breeding, they called it, of the lower classes of people, that humanity would become overrun by the lower classes of people. That was the basis of eugenics. Basically. Eugenics grew out of the Darwinian understanding of man, that man was just the consequence of natural selection. And if we were Too nice to people who were on the lower end of the social or economic scale. They would survive too easily and reproduce too much and it would ruin humanity. Well, that was another science apocalypse that didn't come true. There was, of course, the overpopulation hysteria of the 1950s and 60s, which was related to the Malthusian ideas. There was the hysteria about pesticides and ddt, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring that led to the banning of DDT worldwide, which led to the resurgence of malaria and still is killing about a million people a year, whose lives could have been saved if we had used these pesticides that were banned. And then of course, there was global cooling, and then now there's global warming. And we just keep seeing these science apocalypses and frankly, they've all turned out to be hoaxes.
[00:03:53] Speaker B: You talked about that, actually in your article, if you don't mind me reading this direct quote. You say scientific apocalypses can only be understood in context. The context is that there have been a lot of them, there are a lot of them. There no doubt will be a lot of them. And they're always wrong. End quote. And I'm just thinking to myself, someone might argue with you that the reason the world hasn't ended due to famine or acid rain or like a new ice age global warming, as you mentioned, is because the these predictions from the scientific community have maybe compelled people or governments to work together in preventing catastrophe. And I'm wondering how you would respond to this idea.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: Well, that's a good point. I mean, one can always make the claim that my theory that the world was going to end was true. And it was true because maybe somebody listened to me and corrected things. But after that happens repeatedly, when you say, well, the world is going to end if you don't do X. And realistically speaking, for example, with Malthusian ideas, what the Malthusians wanted to do was to give birth control, particularly to people in poorer countries. But that has really turned out to be unnecessary. Meaning that there are countries who have very high rates of birth that are prospering. Generally speaking, public policy was not altered in major ways due to these apocalypses. The reason that the apocalypses didn't come true was because the science behind them was not good science.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: You've made a case that so many of these past theories have indeed proven false. And I'm wondering if you might share with us why you think scientists are still willing to make such extreme claims if you have this liability that they're not going to come true.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: Well, very much the same Reason that people who are trying to sell you a particular brand of car are trying to convince you that you really need their kind of car, or people who are trying to sell you a particular kind of soda are trying to convince you that their that kind of soda would really make your life better if you buy it. It's marketing. Let's face it, if you're a scientist and your field of study, as with most scientists, is a rather obscure field that people don't pay much attention to, you can open up the money spigot by convincing the public and the government, the press and so on that the survival of humanity depends upon the particular research that you're doing. If you are, for example, a biologist who's studying some fairly insignificant animal out in the wild because it's what you like doing, and it's kind of interesting, it might be hard to get funding for that. But if you can find a connection between your study of that animal and global warming, if you can claim that global warming is causing the population of the animal that you're studying to decrease, you get a lot more funding for that work. So it's marketing. And science apocalypses are scientists way of saying what we're doing is really important and you better listen to us and you better give us money to do our work.
[00:07:02] Speaker B: In your article you draw a connection between these apocalyptic type predictions and the idea of scientific consensus. And when I hear that term, scientific consensus, and I'm just a layperson, I'm thinking to myself, these are the smartest, most educated experts. So obviously if they've studied something and they agree that it works in a certain way, then it must be true, right? And isn't that a good thing that we can have such a high level of certainty?
[00:07:28] Speaker A: Well, consensus is a political concept, it's not a scientific concept. Every widely held wrong scientific theory in human history has been supported by a consensus until somebody came along and showed that it was wrong. The idea that heavier objects fell faster than lighter objects was a scientific consensus really for all of human history until Galileo showed that that wasn't really true.
So every time somebody comes along and gives us a true theory of nature, they overturn a consensus. So that the number of scientific consensuses that have been wrong is simply uncountable. It's equal basically to every scientific theory that has been proven right. Because every theory that's been proven right overturned some kind of consensus.
There was a consensus, for example, going into the early 20th century, that there existed an ether in empty space through which electromagnetic waves passed and Einstein to overturn that consensus with the theory of relativity. But before Einstein, virtually all physicists believed in the existence of the ether. So scientific consensus really doesn't even have anything to do with science. Scientific consensus is a political thing where a group of scientists get together and agree either explicitly or implicitly on a particular viewpoint. My impression is that scientific consensus is. Is driven more by political and financial sorts of considerations among scientists than it's driven by actual scientific data. That is that, you know, scientists say things because it makes them comfortable with their peers. Science is driven very much by peer approval. And it's a way of staking out viewpoints that in order to be a member of the club, you have to kind of join. So scientific consensus is not science. Science intrinsically is a search for truth irrespective of the consensus. And virtually every major scientific advancement has been done in spite of the consensus, not because of the consensus. And if you think about it, genuine scientific consensus, it is. Scientific consensus that's true, is called engineering. But actual science itself, you know, research on new scientific ideas almost by definition doesn't involve consensus.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: If scientific consensus is more of a tool that could be used either wisely or foolishly to get things done, then how should scientists think about their profession that would allow scientific consensus to be a tool used more wisely rather than foolishly?
[00:10:19] Speaker A: Well, I don't think scientific consensus should be used. I think that the whole point of science is to keep the questions open and to keep looking. Scientific consensus is the end of science. It's not a part of science. I think people should continue to ask questions. And if a scientist finds himself agreeing with a scientific consensus, the first thing he ought to do is sit back and say, where have I gone wrong? Because you should always be challenging what's out there. I think scientists shouldn't engage in behavior that reflects a consensus. They should always be questioning, always be asking.
[00:10:55] Speaker B: Dr. Egnor, many who are familiar with Discovery Institute and with our center for Science and Culture will already know where we're headed when we say that. Perhaps the most significant example of scientific consensus masquerading as science are the claims that everything in our universe is only material and that it only came about by chance. When it comes to these issues, how do you see scientific consensus getting in the way of actual science? And what do you think we can do on all levels, from primary school to graduate school, in thinking about the next generation of scientists to change this?
[00:11:25] Speaker A: It's a really good question, and it's an awfully difficult problem to some extent, the materialist bias in science today just reflects materialist bias among the general public, although most of the public are not materialists. The idea that reality is just made of physical stuff extended in space is fairly widely accepted, either explicitly or implicitly, and that bleeds over into the scientific community. Obviously, I think that changing what our children learn in school about such things would be a very good idea, but that's awfully hard to do. The scientific establishment and the educational establishment are very devoted to a materialistic viewpoint and frankly, often to an atheistic viewpoint. Changing that is awfully hard, even though I think the vast majority of parents would like to see it changed.
[00:12:18] Speaker B: Dr. Egner, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:12:21] Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you.
[00:12:22] Speaker B: Dr. Michael Egner is a professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at Stony Brook University, joining us from there. He is well known for his research and his work as a physician, and he serves on the scientific advisory board of the Hydrocephalus association and has lectured extensively throughout the US and Europe. You can read Egnor's September 2019 article, Apocalypse Now, More Things Scientists would like you to Forget,
[email protected] Also, if you'd like information about what Discovery Institute center for Science and Culture recommends about teaching the next generation of scientists and other learners, you can visit teachingevolution.org I'm Emily Kurlinski. Glad to have you with me for this episode of ID the Future.
[00:13:04] Speaker A: This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. ID the Future is copyright Discovery Institute. For more information, visit IntelligentDesign.org and IDTheFuture.com.
