Scientists Are Their Own Worst Enemies

You might argue that, say, Christianity is false. But at least the people teaching it sincerely believe it.

Whereas the people teaching that fossil records "prove" evolution, and certainly those writing the textbooks, know that it is false, not because they have any doubts about evolution, but because they understand perfectly well (don't they?) that a fossil record cannot in itself prove anything (it is data for analysis, not the analysis itself), and that the fact that two species inhabited the same piece of ground at different times and looked quite alike does not in itself prove anything at all, still less that the later species was descended from the earlier one.

This is not why they believe in evolution (is it?). It cannot be, if they have any education, or even raw reasoning power. Yet they continue to teach this transparent falsehood in schools. And then they wonder why, when you take out our much more numerous Don't Knows (who can't be what the scientists want), there are proportionally about as many creationists in Britain as in the United States. What did they expect? The wonder is that there aren't even more.

For all that most people care, dogs could be descended from daffodils, or vice versa. For almost all of the rest, this is of purely academic interest, though of course none the worse for that. But the idea that human beings are of one blood with animals, and thus animals of one blood with human beings, is morally repugnant to enormous numbers.

As well it might be, since it is morally ruinous, just as much as was and is the related denial that all human beings are of one blood with each other: if we are all just naked apes, but apes all the same, then unless you suggest that a gorilla or a chimpanzee is your equal, then you need not suggest that ... well, we know the rest. And it hasn't gone away.

This is the easiest thing in the world to remedy, thereby killing off creationism almost entirely. No specific other species (so to speak) from which we are demonstrably descended has been ever been identified, still less has any with which we share a common ancestor.

For all that anyone knows scientifically (and if the known facts change, then science simply changes with them - that is in many ways its glory and its strength), no such common ancestor might exist. If people, not least in schools, were presented with this bald fact, for so it is, then the well of creationism would dry up with staggering rapidity?

So why aren't they? Because the real agenda are economic, social, cultural and political. No one could accuse me of being without economic, social, cultural or political agenda. But I don't deny it, and I don't understand why anyone else does.

Specifically, the idea that human beings and animals are completely incomparable for moral purposes threatens the power of those whose malign influence is probably worst in Britain, although the competition is stiff. They are busily turning this United Kingdom into a rogue state which even tolerates human-animal hybridity (an invitation to every loony on earth to come and set up a laboratory here, no doubt at public expense) because "the scientists" say so. Only the ones who shout the loudest.

And only the ones who either do not understand science's wider intellectual, moral and cultural context, or who understand it perfectly well and are therefore determined to stop anyone else from doing so.