Austin Ruse. Fake Science. Regnery, 2017.
Read Fake Science as a companion to Inconvenient Facts, Gaia’s Limits, and The Arts of Truth but covering more topics. Just this week an article in the Wall Street Journal complained about the politicization of science, especially in academic circles. Fake Science details how much of the “received science” is really a certain political orthodoxy and has little to do with the real world or the scientific method.
The three books mentioned above deal with questions of global warming and overpopulation and how the “received science” on these topics is overblown, if not downright deceptive. Fake Science also takes on those two subjects along with a chapter on each of the following: skewed polling data, transgender claims, homosexuality, abortion, the sexual revolution, divorce, food regulation, poverty programs, and pollution.
The chapters dealing with the consequences of the so-called sexual revolution are the most revealing. Actual statistics belie many claims that are touted by promoters of the revolution. For example, although there are claims that children raised by homosexual couples are no different from those raised by heterosexual couples, studies have shown this is not the case. Long term studies have been stymied because there are very few homosexual couples, especially the males, that have had sustained relationships. Anecdotally, the female couple that brought about the first American court case legalizing same sex marriage have divorced, and one of the women said that she was pressured into the whole thing.
Similarly, we know now that the Roe vs. Wade case was based on false testimony. The “Roe” in Roe vs. Wade was not raped. The “Doe” in Doe vs. Bolton never wanted an abortion. She sought a lawyer to get custody of her children, but her lawyer was seeking someone to build a test case on abortion. Both women would become pro-life advocates.
A pattern emerges. These causes are all radical. They promote centralized authority at the expense of the individual and the family. They have significantly altered jurisprudence and behavior worldwide. (The United Nations is one of the biggest advocates of various means of controlling population and so-called global warming.) Ruse suggests that these things are more of a power play than anything else.
In some cases the power play is scary. In others, especially in the correlation between depression and sexual activity, the power play is tragic. California recently enacted a law legalizing sodomy between adult men and children as young as fourteen—as long the act is “consensual” and the ages are no more than ten years apart. And we wonder why California is burning up! The epicenter of California’s 1994 Northridge Earthquake was at a movie studio that specialized in pornography. Are we getting more messages now?
There is a lot to read here. Today’s newspaper noted that Americans under 35 generally believe in global warming. They were often taught it in school as gospel truth. Those who are older are more skeptical. Many of us are old enough when the fearmongers were worried about global cooling! We have also seen that so many of Al Gore’s “scientific” predictions have not come true. Unfortunately, when we are faced with a real challenge such as the coronavirus, people become skeptical because they have heard scary stuff from “science” that proved to be false.
Fake Science’s title also suggests a secondary theme. People say they advocate these different behavior changes because of what science says, in many cases forcing others to go along with them even if the behavior is against their consciences. Here the author examines the studies and claims. In many cases the media simply latch onto one study when there are numerous studies that together form a different perspective.
Karl Marx claimed his theories were “empirical.” When I first read The Communist Manifesto in eighth grade, I had to look up that word.1 It is simply a synonym for inductive, that is, using the scientific method. Now, the scientific method tells us that if we repeat an experiment we should get similar results, and after making multiple observations, we can draw a conclusion.
A problem noted in many sources, including Fake Science, is that a lot of published results in scientific journals and papers cannot be duplicated.
Ironically, now that we have had over a century and a half of observing Communism, one would think that intelligent people using empiricism would avoid it. It clearly does not work and makes a country miserable, with the side result of murdering and brainwashing millions. Why does it still have appeal? Power.
Fake science is attempting the same kind of thing in the Western world. We should learn to say, “Show me the study!” Let’s try to get in touch with reality. Readers may not agree with everything in Fake Science, but we guarantee that it should get them reassessing their view of things going on in the world.
1 I should note that while I attended an academically rigorous public junior high and high school, it was a very left-wing education. I read The Communist Manifesto three times in those years but never once studied the founding of the United States. I cannot imagine what they are pushing now.