By Donald W. Miller, Jr.
Ethics in science and society “describe appropriate behavior according to contemporary standards” (Friedman, 1996). Two standards that scientists follow for writing grant proposals are 1) Keep it safe and survive, and 2) Don’t lie if you don’t have to. Pollack (2005) addresses the first ethic, noting that the paramount motivational factor for scientists today is the competition to survive. A scientist’s most pressing need, which supersedes the scientific pursuit of truth, is to get her grant funded-to pay her salary and that of her staff, to pay department bills, and to obtain academic promotion. The safest way to generate grants is to avoid any dissent from orthodoxy. Grant-review study sections whose members’ expertise and status are tied to the prevailing view do not welcome any challenge to it. A scientist who writes a grant proposal that dissents from the ruling paradigm will be left without a grant. Speaking for his fellow scientists Pollack writes, “We have evolved into a culture of obedient sycophants, bowing politely to the high priests of orthodoxy.”
Paradigms in the biomedical and climate sciences that have achieved the status of dogma are, A) Cholesterol and saturated fats cause coronary artery disease. B) Mutations in genes cause cancer. C) Human activity is causing global warming through increased CO2 emissions. D) A virus called HIV (human immunodeficiency) causes AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). E) The damaging effects of toxins are dose-dependent in a linear fashion down to zero. Even a tiny amount of a toxin, such as radiation or cigarette smoke, will harm some people. F) The membrane-pump theory of cell physiology is based on the concept that cells are aqueous solutions enclosed by a cell membrane. Scientists who question these state-sanctioned paradigms are denied grants and silenced (Moran 1998). Read more here.
Scientific Alliance Newsletter - February 22, 2008
Readers of the Telegraph will have seen this week a report that the United Kingdom is actually only capable of supporting 17 million people rather than the nearly 61 million currently living here. This rather worrying conclusion comes from a report published by the Optimum Population Trust, a think tank which, in its own words, “ campaigns for stabilisation and gradual population decrease globally and in the UK.” The majority of people will probably simply ignore this, but it is worth digging a bit deeper to see what lays behind this. The feeling that the Earth is overpopulated (with human beings, at least) is widespread, particularly in the mainstream environmentalist movement. In their view, reducing the number of people would be beneficial for the planet. At the extreme, there are those who would prefer to see the extinction of human life.
Such views are not new. Perhaps their best known exponent was Mathus, who put forward his influential arguments at the turn of the 19th Century, when the world’s population was still less than one billion. His thesis was essentially that populations increase geometrically, while food production can only increase arithmetically. The result would be inevitable mass famine and an automatic cap on population, similar to that for other species.
Paul Ehrlich wrote “The Population Bomb” in 1968, when the population was 3.5 billion. This expanded on an article published a year earlier, from which this often-used quote is taken “the battle to feed all of humanity is over ... In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” More recently, Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse” argued that a number of civilizations had failed because they had simply used up all their natural resources.
Malthus was wrong, Ehrlich was wrong, and there is considerable evidence that Diamond was wrong, but their views remain influential. What the Optimum Population Trust and other neo-Malthusians forget or ignore is that nothing is static. They make the mistake of assuming that because food production (or any other variable you care to mention) was X at a certain point and Y in the present, it will continue to evolve smoothly along the same path (or meet an upper limit because of a known constraint). This view takes no account of innovation and progress. Ehrich also wrote “India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.” When he wrote that, India’s population was about 0.5 billion. Now it is over 1.1 billion. By most measures, food security has increased markedly over that period. Average energy intake per capita continues to increase, and the proportion of undernourished (though still unacceptably high) is falling slowly. Read more here.