Science is Not Great: Problems with the Scientific Method

By Colton Martens

Science Is Not Great

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, politicians repeatedly appealed to “the science” to justify tyrannical policies, and much of the population passively complied. Such compliance stemmed from a deep, religious reverence for science in which people see science as an infallible god. But is science really that great, or is it doing more harm than good? 

In Science Is Not Great, author Colton Martens—a university professor who holds a BS in Biology and a PhD in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology—explores the political biases that dominate scientific institutions and call academia’s politically charged conclusions into question. He discourages people from blindly putting their faith in science, citing problems with the scientific method, past failures of biomedical science, and past vaccine mistakes. The author also takes a somewhat unique stance against advanced biomedical science and discusses the long-term negative effects this will have for our species’ health. The book shows how science has a surprisingly poor track record and should not be worshiped as the be-all, end-all solution to society’s ills. In fact, the author argues that science is being used to create a highly undesirable dystopian future, and he offers suggestions on how to fix science and once again make it a force for good.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Release date: Sep 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9781977269355

Colton Martens

I received my BS in Biology from St. Ambrose University in 2017, and I received my PhD in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from Ohio State University in 2022. I am now a university professor who independently studies the relationship between science and politics in my free time. 

Book preview

Science is Not Great

Problems with the Scientific Method, Scientific Institutions,

and the Dystopian World Science is Creating

All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2023 Colton Martens

v2.0

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Purpose of the Book and Subject of its Criticisms

Chapter 2: Left-Wing Bias in Scientific Institutions

2.1) My Personal Anecdote

2.2) Documented Examples of Universities’ Left-Wing Bias

2.2.1) Left-Wing Bias in University Emails

2.2.2) Left-Wing Bias in Training Modules

2.3) Other Examples of Left-Wing Bias in Academia

2.4) Empirical Research Showing the Left-Wing Skew in Academia

2.5) Problems with Peer Review (and Why it Doesn’t Counter Political Bias)

2.6) Chapter 2 Concluding Thoughts

Chapter 3: Why Science is Biased to the Left Part I: Social Explanations

3.1) Social Pressures that Keep Conservatives Out of Academia

3.2) Social Pressures that Pull Leftists into Academia

Chapter 4: Why Science is Biased to the Left Part II: Philosophical Explanations

4.1) Overview of Scientific Materialism and its Religious and Political Implications

4.2) Materialism Promotes Leftism via Implications for Free Will, Personal Responsibility, and Hierarchy

4.3) Materialism Promotes Leftism by Creating a Broad Pro-Change Mindset

4.4) Materialism Promotes Leftism via Nihilism

4.6) Chapter 3 and 4 Concluding Thoughts

Chapter 5: Bias-Independent Problems with the Scientific Method, Scientific Thinking, and Safety Testing

5.1) Problems with How Statistical Analyses are Used: The Null Hypothesis Problem

5.2) Countering There’s no Evidence Arguments

5.3) Limitations and Insufficiencies of Safety Testing

5.3.1) Safety Testing Evaluates only a Small Portion of Possible Health Outcomes

5.3.2) Problems with Animal and Epidemiological Toxicity Research

5.4) Chapter 5 Summary

Chapter 6: Failures of Science Part I: Health and Disease in Natural vs. Artificial Environments

6.1) Human Health in a Natural World: Did Science Save us From Nature?

6.2) Human Health in an Artificial World

6.2.1) Negative Effects of Pollution

6.2.1.1) Chemical Pollution (Air)

6.2.1.2) Other Chemical Pollutants

6.2.1.3) Light Pollution

6.2.1.4) Noise Pollution

6.2.1.5) Electromagnetic Field Pollution

6.2.1.6) Concluding Thoughts on Pollution

6.2.2) Pollution-Independent Problems with Artificialization

6.2.2.1) Sedentary Lifestyle

6.2.2.2) Health Consequences of Artificial Diets

6.2.2.3) Consequences of Reduced Time Spent Outdoors

6.3) Chapter Summary

Chapter 7: Failures of Science Part II: Medical and Agricultural Mistakes

7.2) Problems with the Pharmaceutical Approach to Disease

7.2.1) Pharmaceuticals are Pseudo-Solutions that do not Address the Root Cause of Disease

7.2.1.1) More Detailed Discussion of Pseudo-Solutions

7.2.1.2) Why Scientists Find Pseudo-Solutions Appealing

7.2.1.3) When are Pseudo-Solutions Necessary?

7.2.2) The Problem of (Unanticipated) Medical Side Effects

7.2.2.1) Some Broad Statistics

7.2.2.2) Specific Examples of Past and Current Pharmaceutical Failures

7.2.2.3) Concluding Thoughts on Medical Side Effects

7.3) Some Problems with Advanced Agriculture

Chapter 8: Failures of Science Part III: Long-Term Impacts of Scientific Advancement

8.1) The Importance of Death, Disease, and Discomfort

8.1.1) Purifying Selection, Dysgenic Breeding, and the Use-it-or-Lose-it Phenomenon of Biology

8.1.2) Intragenerational Use-it-or-Lose-it Phenomenon and the Importance of Eustress

Chapter 9: Failures of Science Part IV: The Dark Future that Science is Creating

9.1) Dependence on Biomedicine Creates the Potential for Civilizational Collapse

9.2) How Technology is used for Corrupt Purposes

9.2.1) Introduction to Homotheism: The Belief that Man is God

9.2.2) How the Elite Will Attain Immortality, Omniscience, Omnipresence, and Omnipotence

9.2.3) How the Elite Will Recruit Supporters

9.2.3.1) Advanced Propaganda and Brainwashing

9.2.3.2) Use of a Social Credit System and Surveillance State for Coercion

9.3) Nowhere Left to Run

9.4) The Final Ideological Clash

9.5) Chapter 9 Concluding Thoughts

Chapter 10: Solutions: Potential Strategies to Fix Science

10.1) How to Fix Academia’s Left-Wing Political Bias

10.2) How to Fix the Process of Safety Testing

10.3) How to Fix Our Approach to Disease

10.4) How to Counter Dysgenic Breeding

10.5) How to Prevent the Dystopia

10.6) Final Thoughts

References

CHAPTER 1:

The Purpose of the Book and Subject of its Criticisms

IN THE AFTERMATH of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is essential that we carefully evaluate our society’s view of science and how this impacts the policies that govern our lives. Among other things, the pandemic made it clear that our society reveres science perhaps more than anything else. We were repeatedly assured that science was necessary to save us from the crisis, and you could hardly go a day without hearing trust the science coming from someone in power. Likewise, we saw unprecedented use of terms like anti-science and science denier to vilify those who opposed tyrannical pandemic policies, and it was common to see yard signs proudly professing We Believe in Science or In Science we Trust. Such displays demonstrated what many people have long pointed out: our culture has a religious reverence for science, and science has achieved the status of a god in the minds of many.

This deification of science is not without consequence, a fact that was once again demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic response. In the name of science, people were willing to accept the most intrusive and freedom-quashing policies the world has ever seen. We saw entire populations forcibly locked in their homes. We saw governments prevent people from working, and many people were plunged into poverty. We saw mandatory closure of (small) businesses, many of which died as a result. We saw global economic devastation. We saw the implementation of greater population surveillance measures to enable contact tracing and to monitor people’s mask usage and vaccination status. We saw greater censorship under the guise of preventing the spread of medical misinformation. We saw near universal vaccine mandates, and many people were fired from their jobs for refusing to comply. We did away with the requirement for informed consent prior to medical treatment. We did away with people’s supposed right to medical privacy by forcing them to disclose their vaccination status. Anti-lockdown protests were banned in many parts of the world, and protestors’ bank accounts were frozen by governments (1). In some countries, we even saw the government forcibly take people to quarantine camps and hold them there against their will (2).

Lastly, as a sort of climax to the pandemic tyranny, we saw a relentless push for the implementation of electronic vaccine freedom passports. These passports would have essentially expelled unvaccinated people from society and ensnared everybody else. The explicit goal was to make these freedom passports (and the vaccination that served as the initial prerequisite to obtaining the passport) necessary for individuals to shop, go to restaurants, get jobs, attend school, travel, or participate in other normal societal activities. The criteria for maintaining one’s freedom passport would have gradually been expanded beyond mere vaccination to include ever more intrusive behavioral precursors. Before long, any behaviors that deviated from the desires of the ruling elite would have been considered a sufficient cause to deactivate one’s freedom passport. At this point, people would have been forced to forever abide by the elites’ will or face being expelled from society.

Fortunately, enough people saw this coming, and there was sufficient pushback against the freedom passports to prevent their widespread implementation (although they were implemented in many parts of the world). However, now that the pandemic response has subsided and left the news, many people have passively moved on with their lives and have forgotten what we were made to endure during the pandemic. But we can’t let ourselves forget the pandemic response, as there will undoubtedly be future crises that will again be exploited for similar agendas. Likewise, the pandemic response gave us a glimpse of the dystopian future we can expect if we do not change our political trajectory, and remaining cognizant of the pandemic tyranny can provide the necessary motivation to change this trajectory. If we are to avoid similar reactions to future crises and if we are to avoid this dystopian fate, we need to study the pandemic and identify (and subsequently neutralize) the factors that led people to think that such a response was appropriate.

This book will address one such factor: our society’s religious reverence for science. This is arguably the most important factor that enabled the pandemic response to reach the level that it did. After all, the pandemic response was justified the entire way by appealing to the science. This book intends to provide a thorough critique of science in the hopes that it will dissuade people from passively supporting evil done in the name of science in the future. Relatedly, it seeks to do away with the popular notion that there is a united class of unbiased, infallible experts whose political conclusions must always be trusted and followed. This will hopefully prevent political weaponization of science in the future.

Before getting into the critiques, it is important to clarify what is meant by science. What is it that this book actually seeks to critique? Is it the broad idea of science, the scientific method itself, scientists, scientific institutions, how science is represented by its popularizers, the populace’s perceptions of science, what science has done to our world, or the end goals that science is being used to achieve? The short answer is all the above. There is essentially a hierarchy of problems that need to be addressed.

First, you have the core idea of science, which is essentially that empirical observation is key to understanding reality. This is a relatively problem-free notion, as nobody can deny the importance of observation as a mechanism for acquiring knowledge. The main problem here comes when people begin to downplay the importance of other methods of knowledge acquisition (for example, logical extrapolation from an initial set of observations to arrive at conclusions that were not themselves observed). While empirical observation is an initial and essential step in arriving at truth, there are other essential processes involved in truth derivation, and we should not let proselytizers of science bully us into thinking such processes are unimportant.

Second, you have the scientific method itself. If the core idea of science is that empirical observation is the key to acquiring knowledge, then the scientific method represents a formal strategy aimed at achieving highly reliable empirical observations. The textbook steps of the scientific method include making an initial observation of a system, forming a testable hypothesis and null hypothesis about the system based on that observation, testing the hypothesis (often by experimental manipulation of specific components of the system), collecting and analyzing results, evaluating the hypothesis, and reporting the results. As with the core idea of science, many consider the scientific method to be relatively problem free. We often act as though the scientific method is flawless and that the only place for problems to arise is with rare mistakes made by the scientists who implement it. However, as will be argued in more detail later, the method itself has multiple significant flaws. Specific problems with the scientific method include unwarranted bias favoring the null hypothesis and the fact that statistical approaches utilized in science force claims into the discrete categories of true or false based on whether or not they reach a somewhat arbitrary significance threshold. These problems and their associated consequences will be discussed in more detail in a subsequent chapter, but for now, the key point is just that the method itself has problems. Even if it were implemented perfectly, it would still have serious shortcomings and lead us to many incorrect conclusions.

While the broad idea of science and the scientific method both have problems, they are minor compared to the problems brought on by scientists. While many criticisms of scientists will appear throughout the book, this introductory chapter will focus only on the most important: their rampant and unchecked political and philosophical biases.

For the purposes of this book, scientists are simply considered to be the class of professionals who ‘do’ the scientific method for their career (although most of the criticisms here will be broadened to academics as a whole). They are the ones in charge of implementing the scientific method. They are largely in charge of deciding what research questions get addressed, how to test them, how to analyze results, which results they will try to publish, which results they will ignore, and how to interpret the results. They decide whose research grants will be funded and which new research faculty will be hired. They also play editorial roles in academic journals and are in charge of peer reviewing each other’s work. This gives them power to inhibit or facilitate the entry of particular results, observations, or ideas into the official scholarly literature. They also largely control which students will be allowed into their institutions, what those students will be taught, and which students will receive training grants and awards from their institution. This allows them to strongly influence the trajectory of different students’ academic careers. In this way, they effectively decide who will (and who won’t) be future scholars and academics.

As you can imagine, there is tremendous opportunity for the biases of scientists to influence these decisions and shape academia. By controlling the types of people who get into academia, which research questions are funded, and which conclusions are published, they control which beliefs and ways of thinking predominate in academic institutions and in the scholarly literature. Any bias or corruption that enters academia thus has the potential to self-amplify and pervert the whole institution.

A common belief is that while scientists may be biased, their biases don’t significantly affect the conclusions that emerge from academia because the scientific method contains regulatory mechanisms that keep their biases in check. However, few if any of the abovementioned ways in which scientists’ biases could influence academia are curtailed by the scientific method. It does not prevent biases from influencing which faculty or staff will be hired, which grants will be funded, who will receive awards, which results will be ignored, etc. Additionally, while peer review (whose shortcomings will be discussed in the next chapter) is often considered a purifying process through which any biased or unfounded conclusions are prevented from being published, the process is only as unbiased as the people conducting it (i.e., scientists). Thus, arguing that scientist-conducted peer review nullifies the biases of scientists is circular reasoning.

Some may concede that while scientists indeed have the potential to shape academia in accordance with their biases, they generally don’t do so, because they are objective pursuers of truth who are willing to put their biases aside in the name of science. This is evidently not true, and there are many blatant examples of explicit and intentional biases influencing academia. For example, there are cases in the literature (discussed later) where researchers explicitly argue that certain research questions should not be investigated due to the potential political implications of the expected results. In such cases, there is a conscious effort to avoid investigating questions whose answers would discredit their preferred political narrative, and such scholars are clearly willing to put their ideology ahead of truth. Such examples will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.

Explicit political bias also occurs in academia with respect to the hiring process. Decisions of who to hire or promote are often made with explicit reference to the political views of the candidates. This includes fellowships, grants, and job applications requiring essays that address politically charged questions (e.g., express your commitment to enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in science). Additionally, many fellowships and grants are preferentially given to people based on characteristics not directly related to academic ability (for example, gender- or race-specific fellowships). Of course, such identity-based fellowships and grants constitute a deviation from meritocratic principles, and they are exclusively offered to those groups that lean heavily to the political left. It is thus easy to interpret the existence of such opportunities as an attempt to preferentially empower those of a left-wing ideology. The goal is clearly to artificially fill academia with left-wing partisans so that any and all bias operating in academia benefits that ideology.

Thus, far from being a perfectly meritocratic institution filled with unbiased pursuers of truth, academia is often explicitly biased in favor of one specific ideology (leftism). Again, while the examples described above will be discussed in more detail later, the point here is just that scientists are not these noble people who make some superhuman effort to put their biases aside. Instead, they often intentionally work to maximize the effects of their conscious political biases. They are not hiding this, and they are not apologizing for this. They are patting themselves on the back for this because they think it makes them virtuous.

But aren’t the biases of scientists constantly challenged by other scientists? Again, while this is a popular belief, I would suggest that academia is a nearly air-tight echo chamber as it pertains to political and philosophical beliefs. They all have basically the same ideology. There are plenty of disagreements, rigorous debates, and bias-checking as it pertains to specific scientific claims, but the dominant philosophical biases present in academia are rarely challenged. In fact, as mentioned, their philosophical biases are often reinforced by beliefs of their peers and by politically charged seminars and training modules they must participate in. It’s hard to find a single conference or research event that doesn’t sneak in at least one blatantly left-wing seminar (e.g., a session on the importance of affirmative action during the lunch break). The point is that there is no attempt to expose and counter each other’s political biases to make sure they don’t corrupt academia. Instead, they sit around reinforcing each other’s political biases and are openly hostile toward anyone who disrupts the echo chamber.

While scientists largely aren’t countering each other’s political biases, one could imagine that people outside of science are challenging scientists and keeping them honest. While this is certainly more common than scientists challenging each other on these issues, I would suggest that it is also rare (and definitely insufficient). For one, people are intimidated by scientists and often feel unworthy of challenging them. Even if outsiders do challenge them, scientists often do not feel obligated to engage with such criticism, because it is coming from the uneducated populace who surely couldn’t have anything valuable to say. Additionally, criticisms directed at science or scientists are often intercepted by the popularizers of science (e.g., fact checkers or professional skeptics), who then attempt to counter the challenge so that actual scientists don’t ever have to personally deal with criticism from outsiders. The popularizers’ job is to act as a sealant to maintain the impregnability of academia’s echo chamber. It is very difficult for external criticisms to break through and reach actual scientists.

Taken together, it is inappropriate to believe that scientists are unbiased or to believe that their biases are effectively neutralized by the scientific method, other scientists, or non-scientists. Scientists are biased, they are almost all biased in favor of the same ideology, and there is basically nothing countering this bias. The roots of this political bias in academia (i.e., why scientists and academics are mostly on the political left) will be extensively discussed later, but for now, it is just important to realize that the political conclusions of scientists are largely made a priori based on the biases that are running rampant in academic institutions. You do not have to commit intellectual suicide to disagree with a scientist on a political issue.

The next rung down on science’s hierarchy of problems is the presentation of science to the populace by science popularizers. Popularizers would be people like Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, professional skeptics, fact checkers, politicians, celebrities, and (most importantly) the mainstream media. Popularizers are those who, as self-declared representatives of science, seek to explain to the populace what science is and what conclusions the science has reached. They appoint themselves as being responsible for disseminating academia’s supposed conclusions to the wider populace. They are also in charge of instilling in the population a deep reverence for science. They have depicted scientists as all-knowing demigods, and they have portrayed science as an infallible and all-encompassing method of truth acquisition. Finally, they attempt to manipulate the behavior of the populace by pressuring them into certain beliefs or conclusions. They do this by suggesting that the science demands certain behaviors and that anyone who disagrees is foolish and immoral. They consider themselves masters of reasoning, knowledge, science, and logic, and they bully people into doing what they want by chastising them if they refuse.

It goes without saying that popularizers rarely portray scientific observations fairly, and they repeatedly employ deceptive tactics to misrepresent empirical reality. They intentionally oversell the evidentiary merit of some claims, while they undersell the merit of others. This is done to mold the populace’s worldview (and thus behavior) in a way that is conducive to the political goals of the popularizers.

Their tactics for overselling a claim’s scientific merit are often simple and blatant. For example, we’ve all seen left-wing talk-show hosts obnoxiously trot out a group of people in lab coats and exclaim that 99% of scientists agree with them on a particular political issue. The science-worshiping fraction of the populace is easily swayed by such displays, and they will come to accept the claim of interest with an aggressive fervor. No debate will be had. It is just an underhanded attempt to manipulate the beliefs of the populace. Other times, they will selectively present one or two scholarly papers that support their favored conclusion while ignoring the many opposing studies. Such false depictions of the academic literature again lead people to accept certain claims as being heavily supported by science when they are not.

Their strategies for underselling the scientific merit of a claim are even simpler. They often just assert that there is absolutely no evidence that the claim is true. Then they act as though anyone who continues to believe the claim is out of touch with reality and deserving of mockery. They do this with basically everything they want people not to believe, including beliefs about health consequences of certain manipulations to our environment (e.g., water fluoridation, pesticides, genetically modified foods, electromagnetic field pollution, or vaccines), beliefs about a corrupt, conspiring ruling elite, beliefs about the existence of advanced ancient civilizations, beliefs about the existence of anything supernatural, beliefs about the existence of God, etc. It doesn’t matter if there is a deep and unambiguous academic literature supporting a belief (as with, for example, health consequences of certain pesticides). If the popularizers of science declare a belief to be worthy of mockery, the science-worshipping fraction of the population will pounce on anyone who dares to consider the belief and will relentlessly ridicule them.

It’s a simple ‘deny and mock’ strategy, and it has been highly effective up until recently. They used to be able to simply label a belief as a baseless conspiracy theory, and the belief would quickly be ridiculed out of existence. Now, however, the populace is realizing the ruling elite actually do conspire. They are constantly working cooperatively and covertly to gain more power for themselves, and they don’t care if this comes at the expense of the wellbeing of the populace. This has become clearer in recent years with events such the pandemic response, the publicized death of Jeffry Epstein, intelligence agencies covertly working with social media companies to censor discussion of certain topics, etc. While there are some people who are still dissuaded from investigating topics labeled conspiracy theory, most people are no longer afraid to talk about topics that would have previously been met with mockery. Conspiracy theorists have been vindicated repeatedly in recent years, and nobody is afraid of being called a conspiracy theorist anymore. At this point, calling someone a conspiracy theorist is more of a compliment than an insult.

As the ‘deny and mock’ strategy has lost efficacy, the popularizers of science have established a new method to downplay the merit of a claim. They simply choose not to report on the evidence for that claim, and they advocate for the censorship of those who do. In other words, the death of the ‘deny and mock’ strategy has given rise to an ‘ignore and censor’ strategy. If they don’t want the populace to believe a particular claim, they will start by ignoring it to try to keep it off the populace’s radar. They don’t want to bring attention to it. If, however, such a claim gains popular momentum, the science popularizers will work to have the evidence censored, and they will attempt to cancel anyone who has spread such evidence. After they censor the evidence and those who promote it, they will then revert to the deny and mock strategy, and nobody will be left to defend the claim or to contest the popularizers’ assertions that the claim is false.

Additionally, they will try to change the populace’s moral paradigm such that the claim that was once deemed undesirable is now perceived as something worthy of celebration. It goes from ‘deny and mock’ to ‘ignore and censor’ to ‘yeah it’s true, but it’s a good thing’. This happened with censorship, for example. First, they considered you a foolish conspiracy theorist if you pointed out that conservatives were being widely censored online. Then they attempted to hide their censorship and prevent people from pointing it out. Now they celebrate censorship, demand more censorship, and openly express their fear of returning to a world in which conservatives can spread their ideas.

The ultimate consequence of these false portrayals of science by the popularizers is a wildly inaccurate perception of reality by the populace. This incorrect perception is the next rung down on science’s hierarchy of problems, and it is probably the most serious. After all, it is largely at the level of the populace’s behavior that the many problems of science are converted into real-world effects. People who passively follow the science are the ones who provide the political impetus necessary for vaccine freedom passports, digital IDs, social credit systems, carbon taxes, locking people in quarantine camps, etc.

They are convinced beyond all doubt that they know what’s best because they think that science is infallible and that they are on science’s side. They basically experience a type of arrogance by proxy, where their massive confidence in their beliefs comes not from an in-depth personal knowledge on the topic but from the belief that they have synchronized their conclusions with those of the omniscient experts. By synchronizing their beliefs with the so-called experts, they convince themselves that they know as much as the experts, which leads them to be extremely overconfident in how knowledgeable they are. They don’t have to personally know anything about a topic to be convinced beyond all doubt that their beliefs about it are correct.

In this way, people who blindly trust science are simultaneously approaching the asymptote of ignorance and the asymptote of arrogance. They will do whatever the science popularizers tell them to do, and this is allowing our society to be pulled in a very dark direction. Science and technology are now causing many problems and are being used to create a highly undesirable world. We largely have the complicit, ill-informed, science-worshipping fraction of the populace to thank for it.

This undesirable world being brought about by science and science-dependent technologies is the final rung down in science’s hierarchy of problems. As is discussed in multiple subsequent chapters, science is responsible for creating wildly unhealthy artificial environments in which people are more sedentary, have poorer diets, have worse sleep, are more exposed to toxic pollutants, are more stressed, get less sun exposure, etc. As a result, many lifestyle-based chronic diseases are increasing in frequency at alarming rates, and we are becoming a sickly and decrepit species.

Additionally, even the supposed benefits of science (e.g., medicines and advanced agriculture) are often accompanied (and potentially outweighed) by unexpected side effects, extremely serious mistakes, and outright intentional misuse by corrupt corporations and governments. Additionally, even achievements that almost everybody considers a victory for science, such as reducing infant mortality and staving off predation, starvation, and infectious illnesses, have had the adverse effect of enabling unparalleled dysgenic breeding and causing our species’ genetic health to rapidly decline. Likewise, technological advancement is directly and indirectly responsible for extensive damage to the natural environment, which is obviously problematic given our dependence on nature for long-term survival. The point is simply that science’s track record is not as great as people think, and the many downsides of technological advancement are rarely given proper consideration.

Lastly, and most concerningly, science is now being used to bring about a global, technocratic, dystopian nightmare. Surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence technologies, brain–computer interface technologies, and biomedical technologies are all advancing at an accelerating pace, and these technologies are increasingly being centralized and used by the elite to oppress us and gain more power for themselves. If we don’t change our trajectory, we will soon find ourselves living in a surveillance state in which the elite have complete control over us and the entire planet.

To summarize, there is a hierarchy of problems related to science, and this includes problems with the broad idea of science, the scientific method, scientists and academic institutions, popularizers of science, perceptions of science by the populace, and the world that science is being used to create. To avoid a highly undesirable future world, we must stop treating science as a god, and we must uncover and remain aware of the many problems with science. Once again, highlighting these problems (and offering suggestions on how to address them) is the purpose of the book.

Notably, the book does not address the problems in the order described in this introductory chapter. Instead, the problems will be discussed in the order in which I personally became aware of them. Thus, it begins with a discussion of science’s political biases, which will draw heavily on my recent experiences in academia along with documented examples and empirical research demonstrating such a bias. This will be followed by an in-depth exploration of the potential reasons for this political bias. This includes a discussion of social pressures that keep conservatives out of academia and that pull leftists in. It also includes a discussion of common worldview tenets that simultaneously (and separately) beget a proclivity for leftism and a desire to be an academic.

Next, the book discusses bias-independent problems with science and academia. This includes problems with the scientific method and how it is employed. In particular, it focuses on problems with safety testing of new drugs and artificial compounds (which has clear implications for whether vaccine mandates were appropriate), and it highlights reasons that scientists habitually underestimate the side effects and harms associated with new technologies or advancements that they introduce.

The book then evaluates science’s track record and exposes past and contemporary failures of science. This includes an overview of how artificial living conditions (indirectly brought to us by science) are worsening our physical and mental health, past examples where scientists falsely assured us that new chemicals were safe only for them to turn out to be seriously toxic, examples where drugs were mistakenly classified as safe, examples of corrupt corporations knowingly selling contaminated products and medicines, examples of corrupt and incompetent regulatory agencies failing to protect the population from toxic compounds, and more. It also discusses the long-term danger posed by the dysgenic breeding that scientific medical advancements have allowed to flourish.

The book then describes the dystopian future that science is being used to create and how this will actually be welcomed (and aggressively defended) by most people. Finally, the book discusses some potential ways to solve the problems outlined above. It will require radically altering our approach to health and disease, radically altering our academic institutions, radically altering our global political trajectory, and more. A strong case can be made that science is ruining the world, but we can potentially turn things around and transform science into a net force for good.

CHAPTER 2:

Left-Wing Bias in Scientific Institutions

NOW THAT I’VE laid out the specific aspects of science that this book seeks to critique, we can actually begin the criticisms. I first want to talk about the political biases running rampant in Western academia, as it seems that most of the other problems with science are downstream of these biases.

As mentioned above, we often assume that academia (and particularly science) has sufficient quality-control mechanisms in place to keep preconceived ideological biases from negatively influencing the observations and conclusions that emerge. We assume that scientists work diligently to put their own biases aside and that the scientific method and peer review process further act as a purifying filter to catch and prevent any unwarranted bias-induced speculation from entering the literature and masquerading as a scientifically verified truth. Because of these perceived bias-nullifying mechanisms, many people are confident that scholars’ political beliefs are indeed grounded in high-quality empiricism, which gives such people great confidence in the factual correctness of those beliefs. These people then develop arrogance by proxy, and they are easily swayed by appeals to authority with respect to science-related political issues, such as the merits of lockdowns, mandatory COVID-19 vaccination, political responses to climate change, etc.

The problem, as alluded to in the previous chapter, is that scientists are in fact massively politically biased. They investigate reality, interpret their observations, and (selectively) report their data in accordance with this bias. Their conclusions then reflect this bias and the influence it had on their research. And the bias is not relegated to a few outlier partisan scholars; it pervades entire academic institutions and is relentlessly encouraged in a top-down manner by university leadership through emails and mandatory political training modules. This is done to ensure complete ideological conformity. There is extreme social pressure not to step out of line, and doing so could jeopardize one’s career. Thus, the reason the left is able to constantly claim that the science backs their worldview and policy decisions is because of an unchallengeable left-wing bias within academia that will not tolerate dissent.

The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate that this left-wing bias indeed exists throughout Western academia. This will involve a brief anecdote of my time in academia and how this shaped my thinking, a compilation of emails and training modules that reveal my former university’s left-wing bias, examples of similar biases demonstrated by other scientific institutions, and empirical research showing a left-wing political skew in academia. It will also involve a brief discussion of peer review to dispel the suggestion that this process prevents political biases from corrupting the academic literature.

Before starting, I have to mention that the following sections, due to the fact that they deal with highly political content, contain a lot of controversial information. Again, my primary goal is to report academia’s political biases as I have experienced them, meaning I must discuss the particular politicized topics from both the conventional academic perspective (i.e., the left-wing perspective) and from alternative perspectives. For example, the vast majority of the bias I experienced had to do with race; it usually consisted of demonizing the white race as being inherently evil and glorifying other races and portraying them as sacred, eternal victims. In order to demonstrate that academia has a particular ideological bias with respect to this issue, I have to explain how this topic is viewed from other ideological perspectives, and I have to point out some of the problems with mainstream academia’s perspective. This in turn requires that I point out problems with this racial narrative, which requires the occasional defense of the white race and the occasional criticism of the alleged victim races.

Likewise, much of the political bias I observed was related to LGBTQ+ and gender issues, and exposing this bias requires politically incorrect criticism of specific groups and topics. The goal is not to be unnecessarily mean to any groups or individuals, but, as I hope to demonstrate, these political biases in academia are so dangerous to our civilization (and world) that we have an obligation to confront these issues even if it means stepping outside of politically acceptable dialogue and making people uncomfortable. Furthermore, it should be noted that the following section (and the controversial statements it will inevitably contain) is a reaction to the actions of academia. If it seems like I’m fixating on race, it is because I’m fixating on the politically charged content that my university sent us, and this content overwhelmingly fixated on race.

It is also important to note that I did not enter academia with the intent to seek out examples of anti-white prejudice or instances of institutional black favoritism; rather, such examples were quite literally forced in front of my face (via emails and mandatory training), and I would have had to close my eyes and plug my ears to avoid arriving at the forthcoming conclusions. If you have a problem with the views expressed in the remainder of this chapter, you should blame my former university. They made these views inescapable.

Lastly, while referring to topics of race, mainstream academia will often use terms such as people of color, minorities, underrepresented communities, historically underrepresented groups, underserved communities, marginalized communities, or diverse peoples. I will occasionally use such terms, but as they tend to create ambiguity, sugar coat the true meaning, and generally be inaccurate and imprecise, I will often just use the terms nonwhites, blacks, and whites to be as direct as possible. Again, the goal is not to use some outdated politically incorrect term in order to be mean. The goal is simply to give the reader the most vivid understanding of what beliefs academia is peddling pertaining to race. I’m not going to try to tiptoe around the ever-changing rules of political correctness to try to save face or spare the comfort of the readers. The discussion will be as frank as possible. Finally, I often cannot show university emails for privacy reasons, but I will occasionally quote them and will include references to the university’s relevant public webpages as often as possible.

2.1) My Personal Anecdote

I first became aware of academia’s left-wing political bias in 2017, when I enrolled in a doctoral program in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Ohio State University (OSU). I entered graduate school with optimism for what I thought would be the first step in a career doing biological research. I didn’t imagine politics would come up that frequently in a program of the natural sciences, but it didn’t take long for OSU’s political bias to become clear.

The morning of our first orientation day, we were subjected to a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) seminar. This would be the first of many such seminars I would have to sit through during my time at OSU. In case you have never had to attend a DEI seminar, they basically consist of a token presenter talking about how we need to increase the number of people of color (nonwhites) in the institution and how we need to elevate them to higher-status positions within the institution. This of course means (and many times the presenter will explicitly state this) that we must decrease the number of white people in the institution and artificially restrict their chances for career advancement. The reasoning given for the demotion of whites and supplementation of nonwhites is that white people have created an oppressive world and are rife with unique privileges that must be artificially countered to bring about fairness.

Depending on the DEI presenter, they may also discuss the importance of decreasing the number of men and increasing the number of women as well as reducing and improving (respectively) their chances for career advancement. Additionally, DEI seminars increasingly advocate for the artificial elevation of LGBTQ+ individuals. The idea that we should artificially remodel people’s career trajectories in a race-, gender-, or sexual-orientation-dependent manner was a consistent theme throughout my time at OSU, and ensuring that all incoming graduate students got the message was the reason we were subjected to a DEI presentation so immediately.

Right away the seminar is blatantly left wing, as only people on the left think we should give preferential treatment to women, nonwhites, and LGBTQ+ people. The right has repeatedly discussed the dangers of breaking the meritocracy (although these arguments are now outdated and are rightfully being replaced by reactionary, defensive ethnocentrism on the part of white people¹), while the left evidently wants some sort of queer gynocentric melaninocracy (which would be decidedly not meritocratic). People on the right also regard the notion that nonwhites are relentlessly oppressed by privileged, malevolent white men (or the social system created by such individuals) to be completely absurd. The opposite, in fact, much more accurately reflects our world. As should already be evident to anyone paying attention and as will be supported in later examples, powerful academic institutions, government policies, the celebrity class, entertainment industry, Big Tech, the mainstream media, and the corporate elite—basically all institutions with significant societal power—are intentionally working to maximally inhibit the success of white people and to artificially supplement the power of nonwhites. If powerful societal institutions and the rules they impose on the population constitute the system, then the system is overwhelmingly anti-white and pro-nonwhite.

Even if other races had historically been oppressed in white nations (and probably some groups were, although it is difficult to know the true extent of this oppression given the media’s historical and contemporary lies regarding the issue), why would anyone expect this not to have been the case? The people who found a nation invariably intend the nation to be the possession of their progeny and racial kin, and, starting from this objective, it would have been rational for them to have ethnicity- and race-related rules and restrictions regarding who could have power in the society’s institutions.

Such stringent ingroup favoritism would have been necessary in a time of widespread imperialism and international conflict. You can’t form a new nation, be surrounded by expanding powers, and immediately have an open-border welfare state in which anyone from anywhere can enter your society and occupy any role. Such policies would have immediately killed the fledgling nation by opening it up for subversion by opportunistic outsiders. Every nation born out of the natural struggle for existence must start with strong ingroup favoritism until they build up sufficient wealth and stabilizing resources to the point where they can buffer against the dangers of potentially pathological intergroup interactions. At this point, they can open themselves up a bit and become more tolerant of outsiders. Race and ethnicity will inevitably be major defining features of the ingroup due to the historical, cultural, religious, behavioral, and ideological commonalities that would correlate highly with racial similarity.

The historical context of widespread cutthroat civilizational struggles is difficult for many of us to imagine today, and perhaps greater appreciation for such contextual factors would help us realize that the principles and actions supported in past societies were not as irrational or malevolent as we now imagine. The world was not always a soft, safe, cushy, and decadent place in which people faced virtually no meaningful physical threats, and we should not judge our ancestors’ actions from the perspective of this modern condition. They usually did what they did because their situation demanded it for the survival of their nation and group. So yes, white societies used to have mechanisms in place to ensure that they remained dominated by ethnic Europeans because our ancestors would have viewed failure of this objective to mean that their civilization had been conquered by their competitors. Every other race has had similar strategies for prioritizing the ingroup in their societies, yet only one race is currently expected to pay the price for this contextually necessary ancestral act. The white race has moved mountains to try to improve the status of other races (certainly more than making up for whatever historical harm whites have caused them), but despite this unparalleled altruism and similar levels of harm done by other races in the past, white people are by far the most publicly chastised group.

The right also views DEI as an attempt to shift the political leanings of organizations or institutions to the left. There is a massive political divide along the lines of gender, race, and LGBTQ+ identity. Specifically, women, nonwhites (particularly black people), and LGBTQ+ people are all much more likely to be on the political left than are white males. Thus, the artificial demotion of white males and the artificial supplementation of women, black people, and LGBTQ+ people is simply an obvious attempt to artificially fill our societal institutions with leftists. Leftists are basically using DEI to cheat their way to victory in the culture war by unjustly giving positions of power to other leftists. It’s basically ideological nepotism.

Finally, the right views the DEI rhetoric (and the anti-whitism it stems from and fosters) to be particularly dangerous given that virtually all white nations have sub-replacement fertility rates, meaning our populations are not reproducing enough to replace those of us who die (3). We are thus technically on a trajectory for extinction, and the push to ethnically diversify white nations and to expel white people from power in their own civilizations is particularly unacceptable when seen from this perspective.

Relatedly, there truly is an intentional effort to use mass immigration of high-birthrate, nonwhite migrants into the West to replace European people. The ostensible reason for this is that Europe (and white countries outside of Europe) don’t have enough young laborers to support their aging populations (because we aren’t reproducing enough), and they will either need to increase their fertility, increase immigration, or postpone retirement age in order to obtain enough workers to financially support the aging members (4). This has created the desire among our rulers to import young, high-birthrate immigrants, which will have the inevitable effect of replacing the previous population.

Replacement migration was first discussed as it pertains to many European countries in a document produced in the year 2000 by the United Nations (UN) Population Division titled Replacement Migration: Is it a Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations? (4). There have since been many other scholarly articles discussing replacement migration into Europe (5-7), and some simulations suggest that immigration into Europe would have to be so intense that by 2052, 72% of the population of European countries would be immigrants or descendants of immigrants (8). While this simulation was an extreme scenario and the demographic change won’t happen that quickly, it is undeniable that replacement migration is a real phenomenon and that is destining Europe for ethnic destruction.

As it pertains to the United States, we know that (due mostly to immigration) white Americans are projected to be a minority in the United States by the year 2045 (9). In 2015, Joe Biden himself infamously stated that due to an unrelenting stream of immigration, Folks like me who are Caucasian, of European descent, for the first time in 2017 [presumably referring to new births] we’ll be an absolute minority in the United States of America. Absolute minority. Fewer than 50% of the people in America from then and on will be white European stock. That’s not a bad thing. That’s a source of our strength (10). This open admission of the reality of replacement migration was ironically made in a speech aimed at combatting extremism.

This is the situation in which we find ourselves. The white race is being intentionally driven to extinction by people who hate it, and our rulers often explicitly state that this is a desirable objective. Anyone who expresses opposition is simply labeled a racist and has their life ruined. We are thus forced to either accept our intentional eradication or be called the word racist, and because the left’s linguistic propaganda has been so strong, most people have evidently chosen the former. Anyways, the fact that DEI is being promoted so aggressively in white countries (and at such a vulnerable point in our civilizational cycle) can only be interpreted as a hostile attempt to kick us while we are down and to try to solidify our extinction trajectory. Keep our extinction trajectory in mind as specific examples of academia’s push for ethnic diversification of white nations are discussed below.

The next topic in a DEI seminar is inclusion. In the DEI seminars I’ve attended, inclusion is usually not given its own section but is instead just glossed over and put forth as a prerequisite to achieving diversity. There is no defense or argument that inclusivity is