The Science is Settled

 When the ancient Athenian statesman Solon visited the great temples of Egypt, he recounted to the priests there tales of Greek mythology, spanning many years from the Flood of Deucalion all the way to the founding of the city he called home.  To this, the most senior of the priests replied: "All you Greeks are children, there is no such thing as an old Greek", and then proceeded to regale Solon with the tale of the great island of Atlantis, which flourished tens of thousands of years ago before it was sunk into the sea.  So goes the story recounted in Plato's Timaeus; regardless of its accuracy, I think we can all appreciate the point that was trying to be made here.  Solon was a highly learned man for his time, and the Greek civilization is certainly one of the most ancient civilizations in the world.  Yet even a scholar such as Solon could not know everything there was to know about the world.  At the time when Agamemnon led the Greek army over the sea against Troy, and even further before that, when Theseus sailed to Crete to fight the Minotaur, or when Hercules performed his labors, or when Jason sought the Golden Fleece, the pyramids of Egypt had already stood for millennia.  Solon, assured of his knowledge and even attempting to boast by telling the priests of the temple the most ancient thing he can think of, is shocked when the priests respond with history the likes of which he is never heard.  The message is clear: one man cannot know everything, and it is the height of folly to act as though he can.  So why, over 2500 years after Plato wrote his dialogue, are the errors of Solon repeated, especially by those so-called "experts"?

I will confess in the interest of full disclosure that I am what would normally be called a "scientist" in modern culture.  I study chemistry, specifically the synthetic organic field.  At the same time, conducting high-level academic research has helped temper my own arrogance and put everything into perspective.  I think Charles Osgood put it most succinctly: "The more we come to know, the more we realize how little we know. The more we understand, the more clear it is that everything we have learned is nothing compared to what we have yet to learn. Behind each locked door we have managed to open are still more doors and more locks, and so on ad infinitum. So science is not an arrival, but a journey. It is not a fixed body of knowledge or growing shelf of facts and theories, but an infinite series of questions. The most brilliant of scientists have been those who have sought not the right answers to give, but the right questions to ask."  To the ordinary citizen whose knowledge of the physical sciences extends no further than the latest Bill Nye special, it might be shocking just how uncertain the field of scientific research actually is.  Scientists with PhDs from the most prestigious universities in the world, at least in my field, spend their entire lives trying to figure out, to use an example from my field, how certain molecules orient themselves during a reaction and why they do so.  Before I first attended university and got started in research, I was certainly guilty of the sin of Solon, but now I understand further, just like Osgood, how little I know.  It is not without reason that the principles of science are called theories, not facts: you cannot shrink yourself to micro-size, or shrink a camera to that size and watch a chemical reaction occur, any more so than you can position yourself in outer space over the course of 200 years and watch Neptune revolve around the sun.  Our "scientific facts" are, in the purest sense of the word, educated guesses based on the things that we can actually observe.  Many of the most groundbreaking discoveries of the last hundred years come with the side effect of disproving the commonly-accepted knowledge.  Science is not a monolith; instead, it changes with new knowledge.  But that concept seems to be alien in this day and age.

It is most ironic that those people who claim to have outgrown God will proceed to worship Science (tm) like a god itself.  It is even more ironic that those same people possess little to no knowledge about the workings of science.  I have to admit my mother was one of those people.  When I was younger I was diagnosed with all sorts of mental health issues.  She was truly trying to look out for me, but her way of doing that was to read all sorts of books and articles where a smiling, white-coated doctor would recommend the latest fad diet.  Needless to say, it never worked.  More than once, I expressed skepticism about how she could be so credulous, and her response was always the same: confusion and disbelief, sometimes ranging into anger and sadness.  How couldn't I understand, she would say in between tears; didn't I know she was doing the best she could for me?  It was what the experts said!  How could I be so ignorant?  The science is settled, she would repeat.  My mental problems never really got better until I was admitted to the care of an excellent psychiatrist who tailored his treatment to my actual symptoms until I was able to function somewhat normally in society again.  And although my relationship with my mother has always been great, she's never apologized for the years of quackery, and I don't think she ever will, because in her mind she never did anything wrong.  After all, the science was settled.  I wonder if that was the same thing that was said to the men participating in the infamous Tuskegee experiments or the schoolchildren subjected to nuclear radiation in the 1950s?

With the advent of the deadliest viral pandemic in history (one that has an over 99.5% survival rate, but keep that hate fact to yourself unless you want to be publicly crucified), it seems that this whole country has become my mother, in turn repeating the sin of Solon.  The science is settled, chant the hordes as one of their overlords such as the always execrable Anthony Fauci comes on the television screen to tell us that we should not go to concerts, baseball games, restaurants, or do anything fun until the Deadliest Virus Known To Man is eliminated.  Don't mention his remarks at the start of this pandemic about how you don't need to wear masks and the deadliness of the virus is exaggerated.  Because the science is settled.  Hydroxychloroquine is listed as one of the WHO's essential medicines, used to treat malaria, arthritis, and a host of other conditions.  As soon as President Trump endorsed studies showing that it was effective for the treatment of the novel coronavirus, suddenly the medicine became poison to the greater medical community.  Why?  Because Orange Man is bad, and he can never be right.  The science is settled.  After weeks of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo howling about how having more than 3 guests over at holiday dinners would kill everyone and instituting the strictest lockdown measures in the nation, coronavirus deaths in his state continue to rise, in contrast to Florida, one of the most open states.  Surely, you might think, that makes a case for the ineffectiveness of lockdowns?  Not according to our social betters!  Instead, even more pearl-clutching, outrage, and stricter lockdowns ensued in blue states.  In Quebec, police dragged a family from their home for having too many people over on New Year's Day for dinner.  Anybody expressing skepticism over the effectiveness of the lockdowns is publicly named and shamed.  Cities institute hotlines for citizens to snitch on their neighbors for having Grandma over at Christmas.  In some cases, lockdown skepticism gets people fired.  All that's missing from the shame treatment is forcing skeptics to wear a dunce cap and taping signs that read "PEON" to their backs.  Why go to these lengths?  Because the science is settled.  When one uses data to back up claims that go contrary to coronavirus orthodoxy, they are "fact-checked" or outright told the numbers don't matter.  Research from the first 150 patients in Alaska to receive the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine showed that one patient suffered from a severe allergic reaction and had to be hospitalized (for comparison, the severe anaphylactic reaction rate for proven vaccines such as the TDAP is somewhere in the range of 1 in 4 million).  A nurse fainted away live on TV after receiving the same vaccine.  Other reports suggest that the vaccine could lead to male infertility, and a vaccine developed in Australia caused its trial subjects to test false positive for HIV.  Of course, dissent against the vaccines being developed, just by simply stating that they were rushed out and not properly tested for side effects, will not be tolerated, just the same as dissent against the lockdowns will not be tolerated.  It would be remiss to end this section without mentioning the "protests for racial justice" that shook America in the throes of the harshest lockdowns.  After months of hearing that setting one foot outside our houses would kill whole cities, we were suddenly told that it was not only okay but necessary to march in the streets in close proximity to thousands of others in protest of an apparent racism problem.  I'm glad to know that the coronavirus is intelligent enough to not infect Good People.  Just like God passed over the blood-smeared doors of the Israelites, the virus passes over the raised fists of those looting a Target standing in solidarity to end racism.  After all, the science is settled.

"The science is settled".  I wonder if that was the same thing that Svante Arrhenius was told by his superiors at the Swedish National Institute of Technology.  Arrhenius, if you might recall, was about to be fired from his professor position for proposing the completely radical idea that ions might dissociate in water.  One hundred years later, this is common knowledge that high schoolers are taught.  When Heinrich Schliemann set out to discover the legendary city of Troy, he was told that it was obviously a myth and that he was a fool to try such a thing.  The science was settled.  Looking back on his discovery and how he found not just the city of Troy but one that had been rebuilt nine times, it's safe to say that the science was not settled.  It will never be settled no matter how many arrogant cretins continue to act like their word, or the words of whichever high priest of Science (tm) is trending, is the gospel truth and any dissent against them is heresy.  Even in the face of "The Greatest Pandemic in History" and the greatest consequences for disbelief of the gospel truth of Science (tm) in history, your mind and its power to ask questions is something that can never be taken away from you, no matter how hard someone else can try.  So the next time someone like the always lovely spokes-puppet Greta Thunberg comes on the television crying about how the world will end by 2025 if we do not ban airplanes and meat, just roll your eyes and continue to have faith in your own thoughts.  Why?  Because the science is not settled.