Fundamentalists 'threaten scientific progress'

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Wednesday November 30, 2005
The Guardian

An upsurge in fundamentalism is seriously threatening the role of science in shaping the modern world, Britain's most senior scientist will warn today.
In a valedictory speech to mark the end of his five year presidency of the Royal Society, Lord May of Oxford will claim that fundamentalist thought in all its guises, from religious beliefs to the ideologies of green lobby groups, is skewing debates over some of the most pressing issues facing humanity, such as climate change and emerging diseases.

Such is the influence of groups that ignore or misinterpret scientific evidence, that the core values that underpinned the Enlightenment and led to "free, open, unprejudiced, uninhibited questioning and inquiry, individual liberty and separation of church and state" are being eroded, Lord May believes.

In his address to the society, titled Threats to Tomorrow's World, Lord May will criticise groups for putting their own traditions, unsupported beliefs and dogmas above scientific evidence. "Fundamentalism doesn't necessarily derive from sacred texts. It's where a belief trumps a fact and refuses to confront the facts.

"All ideas should be open to questioning, and the merit of ideas should be assessed on the strength of evidence that supports them and not on the credentials or affiliations of the individuals proposing them. It is not a recipe for a comfortable life, but it is demonstrably a powerful engine for understanding how the world actually works and for applying this understanding," he will say.

Click to expand...

Link

You can't fool all of the people all of the time. Three cheers to Lord may for coming out and telling it like is with his parting shot. It looks like anthropologist and novelist Michael Crichton's observation that environmentalism constitutes a new form of religious fundamentalism particularly suited to urban atheists, is well founded. At any rate Crichton and Lord May appear to view things similarly on this particular score. "Enivronmentalism as Religion"

So how do Urbanites feel about this?

Michael Crichton wouldn't know science if it bit him on the ass.

That's no more than common sense. It doesn't add weight to arguments against global warming.

Right wing novelist and titled member of establishment launch attacks on anyone who dares to disagree with them and seek to tar them with language that links them to the current universal bogey of extreme Islam?
What else is new?
May appears to be attacking ad hominem attacks on the pronouncements of the Royal Society and other such bodies. The Royal Society is in the habit of selective presentation of facts - anyone pointing out that they are engaged in selective presentation (usually to bolster the position of the economic-political elite) is now it seems to be dismissed as a "fundamentalist", a somewhat illogical position given May's revulsion at ad hominem when deployed against his institution.
Attacks on opponents from this quarter, and accusations of ad hominem, must be seen in the economic-political context of the current crisis of (Western) capital brought upon by the usual elements of unstable markets, declining rates of profit, competition from NICs, resource scarcity and environmental constraints amongst other things. The role of bodies like the RS, -since its' inception if you look at history,- has been to secure the domain of scientific/technical discourse for the rising (now dominant) class and those elements of other classes that support them (i.e vassal elements of the aristocracy and liberal intelligentsia). The idea that science/technology/philosophy or anything else can be divorced from the class forces, power relations and development stage of productive forces was an idea already ridiculous 130 years ago
Nevertheless, interesting in what it reveals of the line of attack of that element of the establishment against perceived threats to capital accumulation from the green or religious sectors. Now what would really worry them would be if the green critique of modern consumer capitalism became more openly based on an understanding of class and power relations.

There was something along very much the same lines in this morning's Times. Same rhetoric in relation to "environmentalist fundamentalism." The apparance of multiple stories in different papers pushing this line indicates to me a possible PR campaign. The context of the Times story was the Greenpeace action at the CBI the other day.

My guess is that it's part of the big nuclear industry PR push that's going on right now. There are some very serious quantitative scientific arguments against the claims of nuclear to be 'safe, clean energy, with no carbon emissions' so this would be smart PR, dismissing any argument by opponents of nuclear energy in advance as being 'emotional' and 'fundamentalist' in order to avoid dealing with the specific arguments based on hard data.

Yuwipi Woman said:

Michael Crichton wouldn't know science if it bit him on the ass.

Click to expand...

Michael Crichton is a Harvard trained anthropologist and medical doctor, as well as a successful novelist YW. But anyway the point of my post is to show that Crichton's opinion that a lot of what passes for environmentalism today is little more than old style fire and brimstone religion cloaked in the glittering garb of pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo, is one that is increasingly being shared by people like Lord May, for example, who is an outstanding scientists in his own right.

bigfish said:

Michael Crichton is a Harvard trained anthropologist and medical doctor, as well as a successful novelist YW.

Click to expand...

Being a social scientist and a doctor in no way makes you an actual hard scientist. As for Harvard, I've worked with people from Harvard that couldn't spell "received".

If you look at his written works, he has done massive damage to science in the name of making a buck. Almost inevitably, his books involve some small bit of up and comming science, that he twists into nothing resembling real science. It always involves some science project gone bad, ie. science is evil. It's scaremongering for dollars.

I especially enjoyed the one with a lost race of superintelligent white gorillas.

Bernie Gunther said:

I especially enjoyed the one with a lost race of superintelligent white gorillas.

Click to expand...

The alien spaceship under the ocean for 300 years was my favorite.

Crichton *is* a fundamentalist - he believes in the core teachings of the American Right rather than considering actual scientific evidence that challenges holy writ. Political correctness? He's the poster boy.

Bernie Gunther said:

There was something along very much the same lines in this morning's Times. Same rhetoric in relation to "environmentalist fundamentalism." The apparance of multiple stories in different papers pushing this line indicates to me a possible PR campaign. The context of the Times story was the Greenpeace action at the CBI the other day.

My guess is that it's part of the big nuclear industry PR push that's going on right now. There are some very serious quantitative scientific arguments against the claims of nuclear to be 'safe, clean energy, with no carbon emissions' so this would be smart PR, dismissing any argument by opponents of nuclear energy in advance as being 'emotional' and 'fundamentalist' in order to avoid dealing with the specific arguments based on hard data.

Click to expand...

So what you seem to be implying here is that Robert May is doing the "Devil's" work of counter-environmentalism PR for the Nuclear mob! Nice slander... I don't suppose you can put any meat on the bones of your insinuation can you?

His accomplishments have already been widely recognized in the United Kingdom and abroad. In 1995, he was named the Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government and was knighted the following year. In 2000, he was appointed President of the Royal Society of London, a position with a rich tradition and one of the most esteemed in the world of science. In July of this year, he was bestowed with the title of Lord for his numerous contributions in the field of science. He is making good use of this elite standing to promote solutions to a wide range of issues, including ecological preservation, other urgent environmental problems such as global warming, and various problems related to medicine and biology.

http://www.af-info.or.jp/eng/honor/hot/enr-may.html

Click to expand...

bigfish said:

So what you seem to be implying here is that Robert May is doing the "Devil's" work of counter-environmentalism PR for the Nuclear mob! Nice slander... I don't suppose you can put any meat on the bones of your insinuation can you?

Click to expand...

What sort of thread do you think this is?

Both Robert May and David King are competent scientists, but there are valid scientific arguments against nuclear as a solution to climate change and as a solution to the UK's energy needs. The subject of this thread though, is the attempt by a couple of recent newspaper reports to paint environmentalists as fundamentalists. There are some environmentalists for whom this is true, the deep greens might deserve that label in some cases. However, many environmentalists base their objections to nuclear power on quantitative arguments. For example, here's a reasonable statement of the main scientific objections.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-climate_change_debate/2587.jsp

Bernie Gunther said:

There was something along very much the same lines in this morning's Times. Same rhetoric in relation to "environmentalist fundamentalism." The apparance of multiple stories in different papers pushing this line indicates to me a possible PR campaign. The context of the Times story was the Greenpeace action at the CBI the other day.

My guess is that it's part of the big nuclear industry PR push that's going on right now. There are some very serious quantitative scientific arguments against the claims of nuclear to be 'safe, clean energy, with no carbon emissions' so this would be smart PR, dismissing any argument by opponents of nuclear energy in advance as being 'emotional' and 'fundamentalist' in order to avoid dealing with the specific arguments based on hard data.

Click to expand...

How dare you argue with a Lord, Bernie?

The fact that anti-terrorism legislation is being increasingly used against environmentally-related protestors seems relevant to me here as well; it's obviously in the interests of the government to promote the idea that AR people, environmentalists, anyone disagreeing in general is a "fundamentalist", ergo their ideas and statements are basically irrational and not worth paying attention to. Plays on the the themes raised previously when talking about Muslims, doesn't it? Wouldn't want to repeat one's own propaganda.

Here's an interesting article about the nuclear industry's current PR push.

http://www.prwatch.org/node/3679

There is a potentially sane argument for using nuclear as a bridge fuel, although I personally would advocate cutting energy consumption and focussing on sustainable energy sources, which nuclear is definitely not.

The issue here though, at least in my opinion, is a PR industry attempt to paint all environmentalists as crazed irrational true believer types, rather than dealing with quantitative objections to nuclear energy that they raise.

FridgeMagnet said:

How dare you argue with a Lord, Bernie?<snip>

Click to expand...

Well, if he's still a scientist, then I'm sure he'd have no objection to a legitimate scientific debate.

FridgeMagnet said:

Crichton *is* a fundamentalist - he believes in the core teachings of the American Right rather than considering actual scientific evidence that challenges holy writ. Political correctness? He's the poster boy.

Click to expand...

As a trained anthropologist and medical doctor Crichton ought to be more than capable of "considering actual scientific evidence that challenges holy writ," not withstanding his political leanings... and the same goes for Robert May too, and for all of us. Rather than writing people off and pigeon holing them -Crichton as a American right wing fundamentalist, May as a supposed backer of the Nuclear industry -we should look carefully at what they say and discuss it freely. That's what I think anyway.

Ought to be, but judging from his public statements and media position as the Scientist Who Agrees With Bush, apparently isn't. I'm sure he's not thick, or poorly educated, but then many fundamentalists aren't.

I've read quite a bit of his public pronouncements (not, as yet, any of his books, I admit) and I've always found them to contain elements of both barefaced partisan slander and some very dubious hole-filled argument. Actually, there *are* quite serious sections of the environmental movement who are pretty irrational - I have no time for millennialists - but those are not just the people who are being harmed here.

The position of Crichton in the overall media strategy is to provide a pseudo-scientific ("he's got an ology! he uses long words!") rationale that enables people to, at best, dismiss arguments that their chosen representatives are doing the wrong thing as "controversial" - i.e. "there's no consensus so I'll just go along with the status quo" - and at worst, dismiss counter-arguments as simply wrong. None of which has anything to do with science. It's media play based on public position and some fairly irrelevant qualifications.

A media debate is a much safer option for the nuclear industry than a scientific debate I think. PR is effective in a media debate. In a real scientific debate it's not, which is why it's not in their interests to have one. Sucking the public tit and telling lies is what's got the nuclear industry where it is today, why should they get involved in a perilous test of their claims by science when they can just call their critics 'fundamentalists' in several major newspapers and avoid any substantive debate. After all, they've got Tony Blair onside already ...

FridgeMagnet said:

How dare you argue with a Lord, Bernie?

The fact that anti-terrorism legislation is being increasingly used against environmentally-related protestors seems relevant to me here as well; it's obviously in the interests of the government to promote the idea that AR people, environmentalists, anyone disagreeing in general is a "fundamentalist", ergo their ideas and statements are basically irrational and not worth paying attention to. Plays on the the themes raised previously when talking about Muslims, doesn't it? Wouldn't want to repeat one's own propaganda.

Click to expand...

In the last month or two I've seen three news programs devoting anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour on "environmental terrorism." I've seen no equal time from actual activists.

Jo/Joe said:

That's no more than common sense. It doesn't add weight to arguments against global warming.

Click to expand...

But it does add weight to the arguments against such Malthusian mumbo jumbo as the holy trinity of "Peak Oil" "Peak Soil" and "Peak People" -and the supposed cataclysmic consequences of them coming together unless we... well, unless we turn round and march back to some sort romanticized 15th century feudalism.

FridgeMagnet said:

("he's got an ology! he uses long words!")

Click to expand...

What is it with conservatives who try to legitimize scientific claims with anthropology degrees? Michael Savage uses his anthro credentials to make such weird claims about race that it's pathetic (and pathetically racist).

Anthropology isn't a hard science. It in no way qualifies you to talk about physics and chemistry related topics. The same is true of medicine. They are both diciplines, not sciences.

bigfish said:

But it does add weight to the arguments against such Malthusian mumbo jumbo as the holy trinity of "Peak Oil" "Peak Soil" and "Peak People" -and the supposed cataclysmic consequences of them coming together unless we... well, unless we turn round and march back to some sort romanticized 15th century feudalism.

Click to expand...

Who are they? Where are they?

I don't really see them, seems to me like an example of trying to discredit everything that is connected to environmentalism by looking at one tiny part of it, that happens to suit.

Yuwipi Woman said:

In the last month or two I've seen three news programs devoting anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour on "environmental terrorism." I've seen no equal time from actual activists.

Click to expand...

Setting the scene. The same thing is happening over here. There are very few actual "I want to blow you all up" terrorists and the cops don't know how to find them anyway, but that was never the point; use a scare word, redefine it to include people who are bad for business, and go from there. Anti-terrorism legislation has seen far more use against protestors than anyone else.

Some years ago, Greenpeace detected a ridiculously over the limit emission from Sellafield's big waste pipe (so bad their wetsuits were classified as nuclear waste, presenting them with a unique problem) they decided to take action and blocked the pipe with marine cement. They got fined 50 x as much as Sellafield did for grossly exceeding their radioactive pollution limits.

If they did that now, under current law, I'm pretty sure they'd be classified as terrorists.

I refer you to the AAAS statement:
http://ideas.4brad.com/node/303

*ahem*

and James Lovelock on nuclear power

and pretty much anyone arguing from personal authority in a field that is not their field of expertise.

FridgeMagnet said:

Anti-terrorism legislation has seen far more use against protestors than anyone else.

Click to expand...

Like the "Jill Dando" anti-stalking law: seen no use against stalkers, lots against campaigners...

Bernie Gunther said:

Both Robert May and David King are competent scientists, but there are valid scientific arguments against nuclear as a solution to climate change and as a solution to the UK's energy needs. The subject of this thread though, is the attempt by a couple of recent newspaper reports to paint environmentalists as fundamentalists. There are some environmentalists for whom this is true, the deep greens might deserve that label in some cases. However, many environmentalists base their objections to nuclear power on quantitative arguments. For example, here's a reasonable statement of the main scientific objections.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-climate_change_debate/2587.jsp

Click to expand...

Well I'm pleased we've established Robert May's scientific credentials. But with all due respect, this thread isn't about the nuclear energy option (I'm completely opposed to it, by the way), it's about the pervasion of science by religious and environmental fundamentalism and the damage this is liable to do in terms of retarding our collective future to which science is essential.

We live in a world of growing abundance Bernie, despite pronouncements to the contrary by environmentalists and anarchist's alike - who nearly everywhere preach looming resource scarcity and ignore the evidence of abundance all around. In the 1960s, a libertarian anarchist wrote that he saw no evidence of overproduction because millions of people were dying of hunger in Africa. What he was really doing, though, was ignoring the evidence that we live in a world of contradictions. Of course, it is true that the world population is large and that people are starving, but it's also true that millions of tons of food is being destroyed each year –an ugly fact, but true nonetheless. Yet, despite all of the privations, the large size of the human population itself is nothing more than an artifact of the evolutionary success of mankind over the last 4 million years or so. In any event, the world population is set to begin falling in absolute terms somewhere around the middle of this century. It seems inconceivable to me therefore that having made it this far our species wont be able to muddle through for another 40 or 50 years until then.

The way you tell it -that depleting finite fossil fuel (sic) will lead on to a collapse in agricultural production, compounded by increased soil erosion and a rising population, and therefore to a profound downward pressure on the human species due to growing food scarcity etc., etc., -rests on a number of assumptions which do not appear to reflect anything tangible or real in nature. Rather the whole construct appear designed to induce a particularly fearful and paralyzing sense of hopelessness in those who might succomb as believers.

Yuwipi Woman said:

Anthropology isn't a hard science. It in no way qualifies you to talk about physics and chemistry related topics. The same is true of medicine. They are both diciplines, not sciences.

Click to expand...

So why does the Oxford dictionary define anthropology as: the scientific study of mankind, especially of human origins, development, customs and beliefs, and not merely as a "discipline" then?

By the way, Alfred Wegener was a meteorologist by training -which, as you say, "in no way qualified him to talk about" geology. Thankfully, however, he didn't let that stop him from inventing the concept of plate tectonics. It took the geology establishment another 70 years to finally get round to accepting plate tectonics and acknowledge Wegener's great achievement. But then as Galileo wisely pointed out: "In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."

bigfish said:

You can't fool all of the people all of the time. Three cheers to Lord may for coming out and telling it like is with his parting shot. It looks like anthropologist and novelist Michael Crichton's observation that environmentalism constitutes a new form of religious fundamentalism particularly suited to urban atheists, is well founded. At any rate Crichton and Lord May appear to view things similarly on this particular score.

Click to expand...

Eh? May and Crichton appear to disagree on the causes of global warming. Why do you like Crichton? That's poor even for you.

Where's the pervasion of science by "environmental fundamentalism" anyway? I don't se any. All I've noticed is a few weak attempts by religious fundamentalism and the more important problem of oil companies and the like funding research.