Political subversion of science – the way of the ichneumon wasp

The death of a science due to politicization is analogous to a caterpillar being parasitized by the injected eggs of an ichneumon wasp. The eggs hatch into larvae which eat the caterpillar from the inside, hollowing it out. Eventually only the dead husk of the caterpillar remains but the multiple offspring of the ichneumon hatch forth into the world.

Thus what was once climate science now only has the appearance of a science from the outside; but it is full of larvae of political activists which are busy destroying the functional and living elements of the science. Essential foundations such as climate records, and even logical structures such as falsifiability and the null hypothesis, are being destroyed. Geological climate reconstructions are being magicked into conformity with pre-ordained CO2 dogma. Soon all that will be left are the names and logos of scientific societies and journals and universities, but no science, only activists.

And this has not happened only to climate science. It happened previously to radiation biology when it was decreed that the science must serve the political function of shutting down the nuclear industry. This was to be achieved by inflating the dangers of ionizing radiation and birthing the corrosive fiction of the linear no-threshold radiation carcinogenesis (or mutagenesis) hypothesis-fact. This burdens the nuclear industry with needless and costly regulations and redundant measures, renders politically impossible the disposal of nuclear waste and allows activists to say with affected innocence “nuclear is interesting – but way too expensive”.

Now this ichneumon parasitization is being injected into another science – biological evolution. Ironically the arguments of creationism are being turned against classical Darwinian evolution not by bible-belt evangelicals, but by (equally religious) scientists concerned about the political correctness of evolution. The language and paradigm of life from natural selection and sexual reproduction are an awkward fit with current emerging political narratives, particularly that concerning gender, trans-gender and sexual orientation. The question for instance of what – if anything – is a woman, or a man?

So the new synthesis brings in a crowded and confused narrative of apparently new (but generally not new) ideas and mechanisms, such as epigenetics and statistical models of group selection. By the familiar smoke-and-mirrors wave of a wand, these new arguments sufficiently confuse the evolutionary and selective basis of living organisms to allow activists to effectively deny the need to acknowledge biology in political decisions, definitions and power structures.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_evolutionary_synthesis

So science after science is being hollowed out by the ichneumon larvae of political activism. Any science that causes any kind of obstruction to the advancement of the progressive political empire must be wasp-injected in this manner. More and more, science is servile to politics. As Russell Brand puts it so well – “don’t follow the science because the science only follows the money”. Science must be shaped to serve and not oppose new political mandates. And they’ve now got an efficient mechanism of changing science from the inside. Ironically it borrows from the same nature whose truths it so fears – the subversive, deadly genius of the ichneumon wasp.