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Fabrication of Australian Science
Dear Quadrant,
I sent the essay off a few days ago. It’s a fine feat of ham-fisted sophistry. Actually, it’s ludicrous, and not even particularly well argued. In silly arguments reeking of cane toad, it reckons human genes should be engineered into all manner of crops and organisms.
The swung torch scatters seeds
In the umbelliferous dark
And a frog makes guttural comment
It conflates food crops with pharming. And it’s laden with bogus “facts”, like CSIRO’s plans to engineer human genes into cows and wheat to prevent cancer, and mosquitoes to help stop malaria. (I nearly wrote how important that this was with climate change, and the consequent rise in mosquito populations, but then I remembered, Quadrant, that you’ve long been a refuge for climate-change deniers.) None of the CSIRO ‘plans’ mentioned in the essay are, as far as I know, bona fide.
The essay is rife with outrageously stupid arguments. For example, it accurately reports that GM Golden Rice is bound in 70 patents and it’s natural for those companies to expect returns — yet it also argues (parroting biotech industry spin) that Golden Rice was developed for altruistic reasons, to solve third world malnutrition problems. Leaving aside the reductionist nutritionism and blinkered agronomics, and leaving aside the health, social and environmental hazard potential of Golden Rice (not to mention other traditional non-GM crops that could do the trick), if Quadrant fails to see the absurdity of this argument, if it fails to scrutinise utopian claims of biotechnical ’solutions’ to social, political and environmental problems, it’s not alone. Much science reporting tends to see anything labelled ’science’ as apolitical and unproblematic, existing outside the social.
This, dear Quadrant, is why the essay is so wrong; it is precisely why we need the fourth estate principles to scrutinise the way these products and utopian claims are promoted in the name of ’science’. It is precisely why my arguments might seem plausible to an uninquiring editor, journalist or reader.
And Quadrant, the very constructivist arguments Windschuttle and this essay deride are used in your own climate-change denial articles! Have you never thought about that? To really get a handle on this (and other issues surrounding this hoax), have a read of this wonderful essay by David Demeritt.
I’m hoping you’ll agree with essay’s argument that Rudd ministers, journalists and the public aren’t scientists and therefore shouldn’t have a say in regulating how ’science’ is applied. This thinking, Quadrant, fails (to quote Professor Demeritt) to make a “distinction between the scientific work of discovering new facts and the political work of the values to regulate them.”
My essay sets up strawman objections to GM and then bludgeons them with nonsense. It also argues that the forces shaping ’science’ are somehow beyond public and media scrutiny, because, well, science is empirical. Always. Full stop. And just too complicated for us pundits (including journalists). And beyond our moral comprehension. Much evidence contradicts this: many studies suggest that the more educated people are about science and technology, the less likely they are to uncritically accept new products peddled in the name of ’science’. When it comes to these products, people tend to be good at sniffing out a daft notion when they see one.
Considering Windschuttle’s fixation with academics’ footnotes (and the 98 media articles this fixation reportedly spawned), I thought I’d include some bogus ones of my own, and see if he bothers scrutinising those. Some of the footnotes are completely fabricated. Others are genuine references to science articles, but have nought to do with what’s asserted in the essay.
Lastly, I make some claims which are laughable. For example, the made-up stuff about epigenes. I’m no scientist (didn’t even do Year 11 science), but I don’t imagine epigenes do the stuff I said they do. Even if they did, the essay totally ignores hazards like horizontal gene transfer, unpredictable novel proteins, etc. But hey, if you say you’re a scientist, you can get away with saying anything. Scientists, see, are a one-size-fits-all authority.
How did that wonderful intellectual adventure that is science become so abused in your pages, Quadrant? Here’s what Windschuttle wrote of the Sokal hoax:
Anyone with a familiarity with high school science should have seen the article was a spoof and the assertions so nonsensical that they were self-evidently untrue. The fact that the editors of Social Text failed to recognise it for what it was, and published it in all faith as a serious academic article, demonstrated the paucity of their understanding of the very field of which they had long been critics.
Here’s what Tim Lambert said about Quadrant:
Quadrant, Australia’s other pseudo-science magazine (besides Nexus), has published an HIV/AIDS denial piece by Bauer. And they also published an extremely positive review of Bauer’s HIV/AIDS denial book. The author of the review, one Sev Sternhell, also has an AGW denial piece in the latest issue of Quadrant. (It’s not online, but it’s the usual stuff, falsely claiming that the IPCC have dropped the hockey stick down the memory hole, and recommending junkscience.com as the place to go to learn about the science.)
Anyhoo, Quadrant, that’s just a short summary of what a stinking pile of fraudulent nonsense the essay I sent you is, and of the issues surrounding many truth claims made in the name of ’science’.
Sharon More »
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