The Social World

Tag: Science

  • How scientists misled the world about faith

    How scientists misled the world about faith

    Sometime in 1953, Dorothy Martin was contacted by aliens. They had bad news and they had good news. The bad: Earth was about to be swallowed up by floodwaters. The good: as the leader of a chosen few, Martin would be saved by flying saucers. Mankind had brought this calamity on itself by following Lucifer’s agents – scientists – and abandoning Christ. Over the next year or so, Martin assembled a little flock of disciples who believed their salvation, and the world’s end, would come on December 21, 1954.

    A team of psychologists caught wind of Martin’s prediction. Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter saw in Martin an opportunity to test a hypothesis: when people with strong convictions are faced with incontrovertible evidence that their beliefs are wrong, those believers will increase their proselytizing efforts rather than admit they’re wrong. Festinger and his little flock of scientists covertly infiltrated the religion and had their hypothesis confirmed when neither the flood nor the saucers materialized: faced with dissonance between faith and reality, Martin and her closest followers doubled down on the former. Festinger and his co-authors wrote up the nutty experience in When Prophecy Fails (1956), which became the basis of the theory of cognitive dissonance and scripture in the field of psychology.

    One nitpick: they lied. As the political scientist Thomas Kelly recently discovered, Festinger’s researchers distorted key findings, misrepresented their actions and betrayed basic scientific standards.

    Kelly first read When Prophecy Fails a couple of years ago. The whole thing seemed too neat. He noticed strange inconsistencies. Festinger, for example, claimed that Martin had only around eight true-believing disciples – and even among those eight there were wafflers. A year later, in his seminal A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance he claimed there were “25 to 30 persons” who “believed completely in the validity” of Martin’s messages. So Kelly went looking for the psychologists’ notes. The firsthand accounts of the researchers’ time among Martin’s followers are held at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library. Festinger’s family donated the box but ordered that it be sealed for 70 years. That decree expired this year. And Kelly has cracked the box open.

    In poring over hundreds of pages of notes, Kelly noticed the researchers had left key observations out of the book. For example, they knew that Martin had engaged in serious evangelizing for months – writing to magazines, teaching neighbors and children – prior to the failure of her prophecies. But they leave nearly all of this out of the book to make their hypothesis appear stronger. Toward the end, the authors write that the core of the group emerged from their reality check with “faith, firm, unshaken, and lasting.” There is simply no evidence of this. In fact, Martin spoke to the UFO magazine Saucerian in 1955 – a year before When Prophecy Fails was published – recanting her belief in the UFO rescues. Kelly calls this fact check “trivial” – yet no one had performed it, apparently. “Maybe snobbery,” he says, explains why no other academic has bothered to look this stuff up.

    But these slip-ups look minor compared to the other offenses Kelly uncovered. Any high schooler can tell you that a scientist isn’t supposed to influence his subject’s thinking. The authors of When Prophecy Fails acknowledge that their presence in the group may have had some influence, but they insist that it was passive and minimal – they were little more than flies on the wall.

    It would be a problem then if, say, one of the lead researchers somehow became a de facto leader within the religion. But, whoopsie, that’s exactly what co-author Henry Riecken did. As “the favorite son” of those higher beings, Riecken earned the special title Brother Henry and was called upon to aid the faithful in moments of spiritual crisis. After one of Martin’s key prophecies failed, Brother Henry issued cryptic words to the group that reinvigorated their faith and, as he put it in his notes, “precipitated” their renewed evangelism.

    But that was not even the researchers’ most disturbing act. Just before the world was set to end, a social worker appeared at the household of the Laugheads, some of Martin’s most dedicated followers. Charles Laughead’s sister had called the worker to check on her nieces and nephews, whom she feared were being neglected by the UFO-obsessed parents. A research assistant answered the door and saw the threat this intruder posed to the study’s continuation; she rebuffed the worker and then urged her higher-ups to delay the case. In a particularly twisted note, the researcher claims she’d also done this because she’d grown affectionate toward the Laugheads’ youngest child and wanted to “protect” her.

    Look through these files – which Kelly has put online as open-source – and one thing you’ll notice is the contempt in which the researchers hold their subjects. Martin’s followers are called “idiots” and “pigs.” These are not the words of neutral observers.

    The irony in all this would be funny, if it weren’t so sad. For decades, When Prophecy Fails has been used to bludgeon religion. In New Testament studies, for example, many academics take it for granted that Christ’s resurrection did not occur, and they’ve used the book’s analysis to explain why evangelism took off even after this anticlimax. These scholars have showered condescension on those they believe hold unexamined – which is to say, non-atheistic – convictions. Never mind that these same intellectuals have fallen victim to the false prophets Festinger, Riecken and Schachter for the past 70 years, or that When Prophecy Fails is just one of a spate of major social-science studies to be debunked in recent years. The prophets of this reigning pseudo-religion – psychology – seem to be failing. Will their followers see the light? Or double down on their delusions?

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • The elimination of motherhood

    The elimination of motherhood

    Scientists at the Oregon Health and Science University have created the beginnings of a baby using not human eggs, but skin cells. My reaction upon reading this news was to try to fold it up and tuck it away deep in some mental crevasse where I’d be sure never to see it again, because the implications are just too grim, the potential for suffering too much to bear.

    To create children who have never had a mother of any sort is to conjure Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

    What the lab has done is devise a way to persuade human skin cells to behave like sex cells (eggs and sperm) and to divide using not only mitosis, which replicates all 46 chromosomes, but meiosis, which results in just 23. Once they’ve discarded half their chromosomes, the skin cells can then be fertilized with sperm, just as if they were human eggs. The scientists created 82 potential little skin cell babies this way and seven survived, dividing and developing, dutifully becoming embryos.

    A few days later, in accordance with embryo ethics, they were discarded and everyone involved proclaimed themselves satisfied, excited for the future. “We achieved something that was thought to be impossible,” said Professor Shoukhrat Mitalipov. “Exciting proof of concept!” said scientists around the world. According to the Economist, the future market for these skin cell eggs is so big and so potentially lucrative that already a great egg race has begun between different rival start-ups.

    From one perspective this is exciting news. If you can’t conceive using your own eggs, Mitalipov’s breakthrough means that one day you might still be able to have a biological baby of your own, however ancient you are, however unwell. It doesn’t have to be a skin cell you use to make your baby, as it happens: any cell will do. You could have a child born of your liver cells, or a pair of eyeball twins, why not? What it also means is that quite soon, and without any doubt, any two humans of the same biological sex will be able to make a baby out of their combined genetic material. Two men will be able to have their own genetic child, one of them donating a cell that cosplays as egg and is fertilized by the other’s sperm.

    And what this means then is that we’re on the verge of eliminating motherhood, quite breezily and easily and without much thought. In a few decades there might well be a rising tide of motherless children. I don’t just feel sentimentally sad about this, I feel dread and grief.

    From our very earliest days, humans have celebrated motherhood. The earliest known sculptures are “Venus figures,” often pregnant, all hips and breasts. The Venus of Hohle Fels, a pregnant female form carved from a mammoth tusk in Germany some 40,000 years ago, is the oldest known work of human art. Think of the mothers in literature, in lullabies, in paintings, in films. Now imagine a child born of a skin cell becoming gradually aware of mothers and the celebration of motherhood all around.

    “Where’s my mother?”

    “You never had one.”

    They say you can’t miss what you never had. I wish that were true. Samantha Weissing, an American woman who grew up with two decent fathers but no mother, has written: “I felt the loss. I felt the hole. As I grew, I tried to fill that hole with aunts, my dads’ lesbian friends and teachers. I remember asking my first-grade teacher if I could call her mom. I asked that question of any woman who showed me any amount of love and affection. It was instinctive. I craved a mother’s love even though I was well-loved.”

    But at least children who grow up apart from their biological mothers can go in search of them. At least they have mothers to find. To create children who have never had a mother of any sort is to conjure Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

    “In brief,” the Director summed up, “the parents were the father and the mother.” The smut that was really science fell with a crash into the boys’ eye-avoiding silence. “Mother,” he repeated loudly rubbing in the science; and, leaning back in his chair, “These,” he said gravely, “are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most historical facts are unpleasant.”

    I recently heard a professor at the London School of Economics, Emily Jackson, speak about how rapidly embryo science is advancing. Professor Jackson had none of my qualms, but even she thought how strange it is that no one in Britain or in America seems to realize the significance of what’s being cooked up in labs, and how very serious the ethical, cultural and legal implications are. “My claim would be that developmental biology is raising issues that are just as significant as AI,” said Jackson. “We need people to be thinking about this.”

    Yes, we do. And I’ve been casting about trying to figure out who might best lead the way. It seems to me that it’s for Christians to fight this battle. Who cares more about motherhood than believers in a God who was born as a baby to a human mother? The Catholic Church, with Mary at its heart, should have spoken up at the first whisper of Mitalipov’s success. But to date there’s been no stirring message from Pope Leo or any comment from our Archbishop of Westminster. The Catholic Herald reported the story only as a “scientific breakthrough.”

    So, perhaps just because she’s in the news, I’ve unexpectedly, desperately, lit on the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, as my great hope. It’s a mistake to look for moral leadership from the muddled, anxious Church of England, I know, but Mullally has already spoken up against the assisted dying bill. She understands the speed with which a policy intended to benefit a suffering few can become a national tragedy. And more to the point, just as motherhood itself comes under threat, she will become the first mother ever to lead the C of E.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • Is the age of ‘de-extinction’ upon us?

    Colossal, a $10 billion biotech firm with a knack of grabbing headlines, has announced it is on the way to de-extinguishing the dodo, the very icon of extinction. Like most of Colossal’s announcements, this one included a hefty helping of hype. All the firm’s scientists have actually done on this occasion is prove they can grow primordial germ cells of pigeons, one of many necessary steps – and not the hardest one – in reviving the fat and flightless bird of the pigeon family of Mauritius that was the dodo.

    In a couple of years, Ben Lamm, who runs the company, will probably present us with a fat and flightless pigeon with a funny beak and say: “Look, a dodo!” That’s roughly what he did last year when he made a big white wolf with just 20 genetic edits, which looked a bit like the dire wolf, an extinct species – and claimed that’s what it was. Hmm.

    I have no connection with Colossal but I am an adviser to Revive & Restore, the non-profit organisation that started the de–extinction movement. Some in the organization are dismayed by the way Colossal raises expectations unrealistically.

    Other extinct birds are even closer to coming back. The passenger pigeon genome has been sequenced. Ten years ago, I convened a meeting in Newcastle in England to discuss the possible de-extinction of the great auk, which is – remarkably – the only European-breeding bird species to have gone globally extinct in 500 years. The size of a penguin, it was a flightless cousin of the razorbill, driven to extinction by the 1840s as a result of its feathers being used to stuff pillows.

    As we planned our meeting, we thought we would need to begin by debating how to find a way to read the great auk genome, but Tom Gilbert, director of the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics, arrived to tell us he had already more or less done that, from cells in great auk guts preserved in alcohol in a Danish museum. Later he began work on a well-preserved dodo that was brought alive to Holland in the 1600s, preserved at Gottorf Castle in Germany and captured by Danish forces in 1702. This specimen was then passed to Colossal, and the deciphering of its genome sequence began.

    We also thought we would need to find a way to foster great auk primordial germ cells inside the ovaries and testes of a surrogate species of bird – but Mike McGrew, a group leader at the Roslin Institute, arrived from Scotland to tell us he had developed a way to replace embryonic duck germ cells with chicken germ cells, so ducks could father chickens. In short, two of the hardest jobs were already nearly solved.

    Many ecologists hate the idea of de-extinction and grasp at any argument to denounce it

    That left two more hurdles: how to edit a razorbill genome into a great auk genome; and how to raise great auk chicks and release them into the Atlantic Ocean without parents to guide them. The first problem requires maybe up to a million precise spelling edits to a billion-letter genome. Gene-editing technology has made rapid advances in accuracy and volume since then but it’s a long way off achieving something on that scale. Still, you would not bet against it getting there in the next decade, perhaps through a series of semi-great auks.

    As for the second problem, we find ways to raise and release red kites, white storks and sea eagles, so why not great auks? There are plenty of mackerel to feed them, and islands off Britain, Iceland and Newfoundland on which to release them into holding pens and then the open sea. I think there is every chance it will be doable in the next 20 years.

    But that does not mean it will happen. There is a fifth hurdle that will have to be cleared: human negativity. Many ecologists hate the idea of de-extinction and grasp at any argument to denounce it – one reason Colossal’s hype is unhelpful. There is a reason the great auk went extinct, they say fatalistically: it probably could not survive in the North Atlantic now. But the reason was that we killed them to stuff pillows; if we choose not to do that, they should thrive as other auks – puffins, guillemots and razorbills – do today.

    The critics also say that if we de-extinguish extinct species, people will stop trying to save endangered ones. Really? Think it through: those of us battling to keep curlews on the Pennine moors because we like their song are hardly likely to shrug and say let’s let them go extinct and then spend millions struggling to bring them back later.

    The dodo announcement brought this sniffy response from an Oxford University biologist, Richard Grenyer: “It’s a huge moral hazard; a massive enabler for the activities that cause species to go extinct in the first place – habitat destruction, mass killing and anthropogenic climate change.” But climate change opens up feeding grounds slightly further north than where great auks lived in the 1800s. Anyway, says Andrew Torrance of the University of Kansas, reviving an extinct species is like mending something you broke – a moral imperative.

    This is when the penny dropped. I suddenly realized what we are dealing with here: a philosophy that is all too common in the environmental movement, namely that being pessimistic about a problem is so lucrative that they hate solutions, or what they call technical fixes. I recently interviewed a brilliant Dutch entrepreneur of Croatian descent, Boyan Slat. Shocked at the plastic he met with when scuba diving, he set out to solve the problem – rather than just wail about it.

    He founded Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit that has developed ways to catch and dispose of vast quantities of plastic in rivers and the sea. It is proving spectacularly successful, but he is baffled by the resistance he meets in the environmental movement. It is as if plastic in the ocean is not something they want to remove; it’s something they want to use to raise money. “Technology is the most potent agent of change,” he wrote a few years ago. “It is an amplifier of our human capabilities.” Yet for many greens, technology is the enemy.

    I also met Michael Stephen, a British entrepreneur who developed a simple ingredient to add to plastic during its manufacture that turns it into a biodegradable substance. Exposed to heat or sunlight, this “oxobiodegradable” plastic decomposes and turns into food for bacteria. But Stephen finds himself stuck between a plastic industry that does not want to change and an environmental movement that wants to ban plastic: neither likes the idea of continuing to use and manage plastic but have it rot naturally if it is littered.

    Once you see this mentality of preferring the problem to the solution, you notice it is everywhere. Nuclear power might solve climate change. Can’t have that – emoting about it is far too lucrative! Fertilizing the ocean might reduce carbon dioxide levels – therefore let’s not even try it.

    Bringing back the dodo, great auk or passenger pigeon would be the ultimate technical fix and will therefore meet opposition. And it’s not just about birds. As for mammals, Andrew Pask at Melbourne University has sequenced the genome of the thylacine, an extinct marsupial predator known as the Tasmanian tiger. Then there’s mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses.


    This article was originally published in     The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • The cultification of math and science

    The cultification of math and science

    My, how we laughed, nearly 30 years ago, when the physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed a social science journal into publishing a paper “liberally salted with non- sense” (in his own words) but that “flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” Its title gave away the joke: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Little did we in the truth-seeking enterprise known as science realize verbose and vapid social deconstruction was coming for us too. In a landmark new book, called The War on Science, edited by the astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, 20 scientific scholars lament the corruption of their field by left-wing ideological nonsense. Whereas once a book with this title would have raged at the conservative right pushing creationism and sexism in the teeth of truth, now they are raging at the woke left pushing identity ideology and intersectionality at the expense of reason.

    In 2022, Nature magazine, at the pinnacle of the scientific establishment, published an editorial stating that from now on it would refuse or retract papers that “could reasonably be perceived to undermine the rights and dignities of an individual or human group on the basis of socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings.” The editors went on to reassure readers that they would consult “advocacy groups” before doing this, just as they once had to consult popes before denying that the earth circles the sun. This was an open invitation to activists to censor science they did not like.

    Sure, scientists always had their prejudices, ideological biases and blind spots, but almost by definition they regarded those as bad things to be minimized, not good things to be magnified. Here was a manifesto for deliberately injecting bias into science.

    As I said, back in the 1990s we laughed off this threat. The structure of DNA, the charge of an electron, the distance to Andromeda – these were neutral facts, not social constructs and always would be. Foucauldian gobbledygook could be ignored as a disorder of the humanities and sociology. Then the ramparts of anthropology were overrun by those who insisted science must come second to cultural hypersensitivity when discussing indigenous peoples. Then much of psychology went the same way: the sensible compromises between nature and nurture that every sane person had accepted were thrown out in favor of the outdated fable of blank-slate social construction.

    But surely biology was safe, let alone chemistry and physics? How naive we were! Gender became the new front line. Journals were falling over themselves to declare sex a spectrum and any other view a heresy, despite the fact that all animals divide neatly into a sex with large, immobile gametes and a sex with small, mobile gametes – and there are no other sexes, just some rare develop- mental anomalies. Deviate from this new Lysenkoism by saying there are two sexes and you will be excommunicated.

    Richard Dawkins once pointed out innocently in a tweet that a mostly white woman had been pilloried for “identifying as black,” which seemed puzzling given that race is a spectrum in a way that sex is not. Why is it all right for a man to identify as a woman but not for a white person to identify as black? Just for raising the issue, he was retrospectively stripped of his Humanist of the Year award by the American Humanist Association. They accused him of implying “that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity.”

    So biology fell, but physics and math? Incredibly, yes, they too are battlefields for this nonsense. In 2023, a physics journal published an article on “observing whiteness in introductory physics, a case study” and a math conference heard a talk on “undergraduate mathematics education as a white cisheteropatriarchal space and opportunities for structural disruptions to advance queer of color justice.” Hilariously, the ideologues have painted themselves into an awkward corner in their attempts to decolonize mathematics. They demand non-western slants on algebra and algorithms, which are words of Arabic origin, while rewriting exam problems to replace adding up grocery bills (which “carry the ideological message that paying for food is natural”) with calculating how many aboriginal people can fit in a tipi, which is patronizing to the point of racism. One right-on mathematician admitted this change was insulting, but only “because indigenous people would not divide themselves in the way stated… relational and spiritual factors would dominate.” Meanwhile, New Zealand now requires schools to teach indigenous Maori “ways of knowing” as equivalent to scientific ones. So creationism is fine if brown people do it?

    Many scientists continue to do good work unperturbed by this revolt against critical thinking. But the sheer volume of funding, publishing and attention that is being siphoned off into this pathology represents a massive opportunity cost. Grants are being spent, papers retracted, scientists sanctioned, hiring practices altered and peer-reviews corrupted, while scientists are self-censoring to prevent their cancellation. Four-fifths of students say they self-censor, many more than at the height of McCarthyism.

    It is clear that embracing ideology over truth directly led to scientists misleading us during the pandemic. In an open letter published in 2020, more than 1,200 academics argued with a straight face that the mass protests about George Floyd’s death during lockdown were safe, while visiting a dying relative in hospital was not. This helped torpedo the reputation of science. Science has always behaved like a cult to some extent, enforcing dogma and persecuting heretics, but it has grown far worse with wokery. Science as a philosophy is still great, but science as an institution is about as true to its philosophy as the church was under the Borgias, and as ripe for reformation.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • Xi and Putin dabble in vampirism

    “They’re vampires” was my first thought. I had just heard the news that Putin and Xi were discussing how to prolong their lives, as they walked toward their places at the Tiananmen Square military parade. 

    On the official news footage, Putin’s translator could be heard saying in Chinese: “Biotechnology is continuously developing.” And then: “Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and [you can] even achieve immortality.” Xi responded: “Some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old.” Kim Jong-un was there too, but is not known to have contributed to the conversation.

    Maybe the blood-sucking image came to me because I was, when I heard this news, giving blood. My next thought was that it is the quintessence of secular individualism, to plot an attempt at immortality. It is a statement that one’s life is an entity unto itself, isolated from human community. Also, vampirism was an image favored by Karl Marx, in his description of capitalism. 

    In Capital, for example, he describes capital as “dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” So it is interesting that these three men grew up under communism. It would seem that the ideology had no real substance, no moral force.

    By the way, I rather enjoyed giving blood. After a nice summer break, things were feeling a bit oppressive over here in London, a city of strangers, elbowing each other out of the way. And it cheered me up, a friendly chat with a nice young nurse, and a sense of local community, of shared values. I’d feel differently if I was being paid for my blood: I’d feel resentful of the person who could afford to buy it from me. I’d feel that we were rivals, competing for resources.

    The immortality story featured on the evening news, as part of the general coverage of the military parade. The next item was our head of state, King Charles III, visiting a hospital in Birmingham, a visit delayed by his own cancer treatment. Unlike those Oriental despots, our monarch displays the vulnerability that he shares with the rest of us. 

    If he and his son William were overheard discussing prolonging their lives through organ donation, the monarchy would be over. He said to one patient: “Hips don’t work so well, do they, once you get past 70?” I might live in a palace, he was saying, but I share your knowledge of bodily infirmity, vulnerability.

    I was also reminded of another king, David. He committed a sort of act of vampirism, bedding another man’s wife, and getting the man killed in battle. It was an act of total selfishness, a denial of common humanity. And he repented, and his change of heart resulted in the poetry of the Psalms, an ur-text of common human vulnerability. Let these men have a change of heart, one that does not involve literal organ transplants.

  • The new eugenics dilemma

    The new eugenics dilemma

    What comes to mind when you think about the maximum amount of love a parent can have for their child?

    For me, I think of Dick Hoyt pushing his son Rick, who had cerebral palsy, in a wheelchair through the Ironman World Championship course. I think of the parents of Nick Vujicic, born without arms or legs, raising Nick with confidence, and cheering him on as he became an international motivational speaker. I think of the mother of a child with Down Syndrome, choosing each day to recognize the absolute gift of their child. I think of the parent at the dinner table comforting a child upset by a ‘C’ on their report card.

    Noor Siddiqui, founder of Orchid Biosciences, sees things differently. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Siddiqui made it clear that the “maximum amount of love and care” a parent can have for their child comes in the form of choosing which child they would like to bring into the world prior to their birth – a choice that is now possible through genetic selection technologies that screen for traits like susceptibility to disease, height and even IQ.

    Genetic selection technology is becoming more advanced and widely available. Orchid Biosciences, as well as other companies like Herasight, Nucleus Genomics and Genomic Prediction each offer services that take cells from IVF-created embryos, and run the DNA of those cells through databases that link gene patterns to certain outcomes. Each embryo is given a “polygenic score,” which is basically a probability estimate for different traits. Parents are then shown a chart giving them information like “Embryo A will likely be the tallest, Embryo B has the highest predicted IQ…” and so on. After this, parents choose which embryo to implant based on these scores.

    At the societal level, what can we expect as this technology becomes more mainstream? To start, we must consider the quasi-eugenic consequences of genetic selection – how choosing certain traits could, over time, reshape the population. As parents begin to choose only those embryos who will have higher IQs, other parents will fear their children will be left behind, gradually creating social pressure to select for higher IQs, and marginalizing children with lower scores. Genetic selection advocates argue that screening for these traits is a matter of parental autonomy, not a matter of government control. Thus, the improvement in the intelligence of the human race would resemble governmental eugenicist experiments, but because the motive is private rather than state-directed, it resembles eugenics in effect, if not in intent.

    Even if genetic selection remains voluntary, the cost – ranging from $6,000 to $50,000 – means that only the wealthy could afford these advantages. Over time, this economic barrier could turn into a genetic divide, with the rich consolidating genetically superior traits like IQ, creating a new type of caste system in which the less affluent fall behind, with little chance of rising the ranks with the passing of each generation. Any dwindling form of meritocracy would thus transform into an aristocracy. When asked about these implications, Siddiqui does not shy away from the concern: she hopes that “we’ll be able to mobilize enough excitement… so that it’s something that’s going to be covered for everyone.”

    In other words, widespread genetic selection could very well create a new caste system – unless society mandates universal access through government programs mimicking socialism.
    But let’s say the government did decide to step in and pay for genetic selection for all. And let’s even say that this goes economically and politically well. Where does this leave the family unit? Where does it leave each individual child?

    Sophocles once said that “no one loves the child for what he will become, but because he is already theirs.” Parental love is unconditional affection, protection, sacrifice and commitment. Genetic selection, however, brings a child into the world with a set of conditions and expectations. If a parent selects an Embryo B because of Embryo B’s predicted IQ, what happens if Embryo B turns out to be not so smart after all? It’s hard to comprehend how immense the psychological pressure will be for a child to live up to the person his parents chose him to be.

    When a child is chosen through control rather than accepted as a gift given through love, children become commodities and a means to an end for their parents. Love is characterized by service to another, but by allowing only those children we choose to come into the world, we risk treating children more as extensions of our will than as gifts to be loved.

    Even if we screen for certain attractive characteristics, we cannot select for the very qualities that make someone a force for good or evil in the world. We cannot screen out traits like pride, greed, cruelty, apathy and delusion. We cannot choose traits like kindness, integrity, humility, perseverance, hope and courage.

    We can select embryos predicted to be the healthiest, strongest or smartest – but can the parents, who feel compelled to screen their children, truly raise them to use those gifts for the flourishing of humanity?

  • How justified is climate-change alarmism?

    How justified is climate-change alarmism?

    For decades, the picture of Earth’s future – as laid out by journalists and climate scientists alike – has been bleak. By 2070 we will see famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us, melted icecaps, flooding, extreme hurricanes and ever-present tropical storms. “Vast swathes” of the planet will be inhospitable for human life. And Greta Thunberg, in her late sixties, will wear a gas mask as she sits on the steps of Swedish Parliament with a cardboard sign declaring, “I told you so.”

    Advocates have poured gasoline on the climate-alarmism fire earnestly, backed by reports declaring, “There really is no serious scientific debate remaining about climate change.” At the behest of the Al Gores of the world, the United States has spent $166 billion between 1993 and 2012 to mitigate our effect on the planet. Former president Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act allocated another $132 billion toward climate-change reduction, clean energy and environmental protection. While the total climate-change expenditure is hazy, it has cost several times more than the entire Apollo program. Americans want to know what their money has done and why the government thinks the spending is necessary.

    The Department of Energy recently released a 151-page review on what current data shows about the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions and how this data compares to the conventional story surrounding climate change. This report joins a list of others challenging Biden-era orthodoxy, including the gender-dysphoria-treatment report and the Make America Healthy Again report, commissioned and released by new department administrators.

    The DoE report finds that while long-term global warming exists, it has been weaker than expected, and we do not know how much of it is due to human-generated greenhouse-gas emissions. The report also argues that higher levels of carbon dioxide are good for plants: it increases their water-efficiency and photosynthesis and is beneficial for plants such as rice, wheat and barley. The authors reevaluate humans’ influence on the carbon cycle and take a skeptical stance toward claims that electric-vehicle mandates effectively and substantially reduce carbon emissions.  

    Influencing the carbon cycle is, it turns out, more difficult than simply buying a hybrid and taking cold showers. One of the report’s contributors, Ross McKitrick, a University of Guelph professor specializing in environmental econometrics, told The Spectator, “The carbon cycle is very, very large and many times larger than human emissions of greenhouse gases. And so any adjustment that we make to our emissions is just changing a tiny little margin of the flows of carbon in and out of the biosphere and the atmosphere and the oceans and the ground.”

    The report questions how effective international treaties are that require countries to meet emissions targets by set deadlines. For example, it references research by Dr. Tom Wigley, who modeled the effect of the Kyoto Protocol and found that the results in emission reductions were negligible. The Kyoto Protocol was the first legally binding commitment that required industrialized countries to reduce their CO2 emissions by varying percentages. Though it cost the US billions, “the result is you hardly notice a difference after 100 years,” McKitrick said. All the Kyoto Protocol would accomplish, he explained, is to delay the CO2 levels the world would have reached in 2100 to 2105.

    The fundamental problem of policy designed to negate climate change, he said, is that to do anything that stops CO2 levels from rising is too costly to warrant it. McKitrick and his coauthors did some routine calculations with motor-vehicle emissions and found that even if the government removed every vehicle from the road, the change would not have the effect on the climate promised by the EV mandate’s designers.

    The European Union, South Korea, Japan and other nations have committed to achieving effectively net-zero fossil-fuel use by 2050. “Look at all the ways that fossil fuels are involved in the modern economy, and immediately it’s apparent that that’s just not going to work,” McKitrick said. The only way net zero would become realistic, he explained, would be if someone invented a way to burn gasoline or use fossil fuels without releasing CO2. “In the absence of that technology, though, to build a net zero means no fossil-fuel use, and that’s just not realistic,” he said.

    Dr. Steven Koonin, another contributor to the report and former DoE advisor to President Obama, said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change‘s R6 report from 2023 contains quantitative and qualitative misunderstandings about extreme weather events and rising sea levels. These misunderstandings have inflamed climate alarmism.

    Extreme weather is not getting more extreme, Koonin said. “There’s a table in there in the back of the [R6] report, certainly not in the front of it, which shows about 30 different kinds of extreme weather events: droughts, floods, storms, et cetera. And the table says whether we have seen a trend in that particular event, and almost all of the entries in the table are blank. And the IPCC cannot find an observable trend in almost all kinds of weather events,” he said.

    Koonin also addressed environmentalists’ concern over rising sea levels. From NASA’s 30-year record of satellite measurements, global sea levels have increased on average three millimeters a year, which is a foot a century. “This is not a catastrophe,” Koonin said. We have adapted to that kind of rise easily over the last century or so.”

    For the last 20 years, the rise has accelerated, but there were comparable accelerations in the 1930s, when human greenhouse-gas emissions were much smaller, Koonin said, adding, “So again, sea level rise – not a catastrophe.”

    Though the DoE report largely points at what climate scientists don’t have conclusions on, Koonin confirmed, “I think we know for sure that increased CO2 exerts a warming influence on the planet.” One major uncertainty comes from feedbacks, which are secondary effects of global warming. “If it weren’t for feedbacks, it would be about a degree. Not much to worry about at all. But it’s these feedbacks that we don’t understand that create the uncertainty. So that gives me some sense that we’re certainly having some influence on the climate, at least as far as the temperature goes,” Koonin said. The report concludes with the need for “more nuanced and evidence-based” climate science to accurately inform climate policy.

    He has a message for climate debaters on both sides of the aisle: “Stop using the words ‘existential crisis,’ ‘catastrophe,’” Koonin urged. “The science does not support that.” And if you’re a skeptic of climate policy, “I would say stop using the words ‘hoax’ and ‘conspiracy.’ Climate change is not everything, but it’s not nothing.” 

    So is environmentalist rage justified? The short answer is probably not, at its present levels. But if I were Greta, I would be seething too if I grew up believing my generation was destined to death by fossil fuels, when I could have had a normal, guilt-free, press-free childhood. Perhaps we can give that to the Earth-lovers who come after her.