I’ve sold out
SCIENCE is in crisis at the worst possible time and needs a hero. Not Elon Musk. Would you let someone who smokes weed on YouTube send you to Mars? Not me. I want my feet planted firmly on the ground.
Just as I still want science to be grounded in my accountable reality, not time-sharing with tripping boffins and their psychedelic dreams.
When I say crisis, I mean the rapid dismemberment of factbased inquiry.
This is important because the rest of humanity is turning away from facts and embracing everything from conspiracy forums to authoritarianism in their search for plug’n’play trust. This is what we do. It’s what any religion offers; a prescription for your life where facts matter less than a shared belief system that cannot be proven one way or another.
We’ll put our faith in something bigger than us and allow that system to dictate our decisions.
How we treat each other. (No killing!) What we eat. (No bacon!) Even what we might be permitted to think. (No questions!)
In many respects, religions and political ideologies stop us exploring new concepts and ideas because, by definition, they are prescriptive.
Science, at its best, frees us from the slavery of ideology by saying: “Look, we’ve sent a rocket around the earth and it really is a lumpy sphere.”
You might believe otherwise, but good science has convinced me the earth is not flat.
Junk science, on the other hand, is the clickbait corruptor of a scientific method meant to deliver trust but, instead, divides and conquers us with volumes of contradictory findings.
The very thing science invented, its own version of the tree of knowledge called the internet, is the marketplace for exponential distrust.
There’s no doubt food industry mavericks fund junk science as a form of press release, to grab the headlines and counter the negative spin of adverse studies. (Is red meat good or bad for you?)
The media then gets trashed for quoting “breakthroughs” when the jury is not only out, but hasn’t been selected.
Websites abound where any quack can upload their own back-ofthe-fag-packet proofs and publish them for a modest fee, complete with impressive formatting where everyone involved is known by their initials, rather than their names.
There’s no source of truth, just a cacophony of disagreement that sows distrust in our experts.
The biggest, zillion-dollar battlefield for this chaotic information war of attrition is what matters most to us — food and medicine.
From the healthy food pyramid (now a circle) to the rise and fall of an antibiotic empire, what is good one day is demonised the next, spawning superbugs in hospitals or in our guts. The confidence we have in our doctors, in our surgeons, in our nutritionists is eroding, replaced by fads and anyone with a podcast.
I’m not immune from this. I’ve had my fair share of hypochondriac moments and have been gluten free for the past five years to manage a host of digestive and muscular symptoms. It took a qualified nutritionist and the fodmap diet from Monash University to give me the best years of my life, freed from wheat and its inflammatory hand grenades. My body is still grumpy, bent out of shape and I suspect it is still in the grip of some underlying inflammatory condition that science has yet to solve for me. So, I strayed. I watched YouTube videos. I listened to podcasts. Science kept telling me not to eat eggs. The conspiracy nuts told me to eat more. I tried some. They were nice. So, I tried paleo, which really did help. (Who doesn’t want permission to eat bacon and eggs?) Science scoffed, but I felt good. I couldn’t stick to it because there are too many rules. I’m turning my back as I write the intro to this column. Today is Day Two of my carnivore diet. All is lost.