Thursday, 22 May 2025
The science is never settled?
The Myth of “Settled Science”
Be it global warming, COVID shots, Darwinian evolution, neuroscience, or even physics, there is no such thing as “settled science.” The late great physicist Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) agreed. He wrote:
Any physical theory is always provisional. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory.
Stephen Hawking, A brief history of time: from big bang to black holes. Random House, 2009.
If that is true even for physical theories, Hawking’s claim certainly applies to softer sciences like neuroscience, epidemiology, climate change, and evolution.
Those Who Claim a Science Is Settled Are Doing So on Faith
Mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) said there is a “God-shaped vacuum” in every person. Those who believe that there is such a thing as settled science are members of the Church of Scientism. Some are filling their God-shaped vacuum with a belief in science.
That’s one of the reasons I like being an engineer. Scientists embrace a theory, place it on a throne and worship her like a queen. Engineers make the queen step down from the throne and scrub the floor. And if she doesn’t work, we fire her.
Some physical theories are better supported by evidence than others. Drop a pencil, and you observe direct evidence supporting the theory of gravity.
Everyone believes in gravity, right? Yet the Newtonian model of gravity as action at a distance was shown by Einstein to be caused by spacetime curvature. Scientists are still exploring relativistic gravity waves. Questioning models and finding alternate or deeper truths is the beginning of scientific progress.
What About Consensus Science?
If the term “settled science” is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, a more meaningful phrase is “consensus science.” On that view, science reflects broad agreement but does not claim a corner on truth.
Michael Crichton (1942‒2008), a medical doctor and author of science fiction classics like Jurassic Park, Westworld, and The Andromeda Strain — and the creator of the TV series ER — shared this view. In a Caltech lecture, the master storyteller gives consensus science a gut punch. He said,
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.
Michael Crichton, “Aliens Cause Global Warming” Caltech Michelin Lecture, January 17, 2003
Unfortunately, as John West, author of Stockholm Syndrome Christianity (Discovery Institute Press 2025), has pointed out, the U.S. government tends to almost exclusively fund consensus science. One outcome may be that members of the Church of Scientism take no prisoners in defending their turf and this practice. Anything contrary to their view is dubbed polarization and misinformation. From that comes a conceited sense of superiority as evidenced by Anthony Fauci’s claim that “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.” A more accurate quote would be “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on consensus science.”
Crichton’s cutting critique of consensus science is supported by history.
What We Can Learn from History
Below is a list of discredited scientific theories dating from the 20th century. Each was once widely accepted as established science at some point during that period. And some who bucked the scientific consensus have made world-changing discoveries.
Ulcers: For a long time, the medical consensus was that peptic ulcers were caused by stress and lifestyle factors. Two Australian researchers, however, came to believe ulcers were caused by bacteria. Barry J. Marshall and Robin Warren’s claim was so far outside of consensus that no scientist believed them. Great discoveries come from Johns Hopkins, Harvard and MD Anderson. Not from Perth, Australia.
To prove the theory, Marshall underwent a gastric biopsy to demonstrate that he had no ulcer. Then he infected himself with bacteria and formed an ulcer. When he cured himself with antibiotics and bismuth salt regimens, the theory was proved. Marshall’s dedication to disproving the consensus was, as they say, beyond the call. Marshall and Warren were awarded a Nobel Prize for ignoring consensus science and thinking and acting creatively outside the box instead.
Famine: In 1970 Professor Peter Gunter defended an alarming claim with an appeal to consensus:
Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable…. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.
The consensus was wrong. There have certainly been famines since Gunter’s prophecy. But they sporadically occur locally due to droughts, war and politics. Gunter’s gloomy prophecy about global famine was wrong and he will be primary remembered in history for the wrongness of his consensus-based claim.
Relativity: Or take the consensus science rebel Albert Einstein (1879–1955) who — at the tender age of 26 — challenged consensus in his development of relativity theory. For one thing, the speed of light was widely viewed to be relative to the speed of the observer with respect to the light source. Inspired by the Michelson‒Morley experiment, Einstein abandoned this consensus. He theorized that the speed of light was a constant, independent of the relative speeds of the light source and the observer.
Further, it was known that sound waves need air or some other medium to propagate. Scientists during the time of Einstein believed that electromagnetic waves like light need some similar medium in outer space. Thus they assumed that something called aether was the propagation medium. Einstein correctly hypothesized that there was no such medium as aether. From his breaking out of the box of consensus, the theory of relativity was born.
Quantum mechanics: Einstein, in turn, did not believe in quantum mechanics. In response to his quote (paraphrased) “God does not play dice with the universe!” quantum mechanics pioneer Niels Bohr (1885–1962) purportedly responded “Einstein. Quit telling God what to do!”
Here were Einstein’s thoughts. Consider rolling two dice. The outcome can be predicted using precise physical mechanics, accounting for the throw’s dynamics, air resistance, and the dice’s interactions with the table surface. But treating the dice throw outcome as probabilistic is a simpler more tractable model. This is the jist of what Einstein believed about quantum mechanics. The randomness in quantum mechanics was a probabilistic model describing underlying non-probabilistic laws.
As demonstrated by Bell’s inequality, Einstein was wrong. Quantum mechanics does not follow the principle of “local causality.”
God apparently does play dice with the universe.
Many Other Centuries-Old Science Beliefs Have Been Discredited
Below is a list of discredited scientific beliefs from before the 20th century, beliefs that were once considered consensus science. Today they seem silly, prompting reflection on whether any of today’s consensus science beliefs will seem equally foolish in a century.
Bleeding: The belief that bloodletting gets out the bad blood and lets you heal more quickly. (This is how Geoge Washington died.)
Spontaneous generation: The belief that living organisms (e.g., maggots, microbes) arose spontaneously from non-living matter, like rotting food.
Phlogiston theory: The belief that combustion and rusting were attributed to the release of a substance called “phlogiston” from materials.
Miasma theory of disease: The belief that diseases like cholera and the plague were spread through “miasmas” (bad air) from decaying matter or foul environments.
Caloric theory of heat: Heat was once thought to be a fluid called “caloric” that flowed from hot to cold objects.
Geocentrism: The belief the earth is the center of the universe.
Static Universe: The belief the universe was eternal and static, neither expanding nor contracting.
These flawed theories have been abandoned in large because of the courage and insight of those willing to buck consensus.
Learning from History
Smart people learn from history. If history has shown numerous cases where consensus science was wrong, should we not be somewhat skeptical of today’s consensus science? While we know more now, greater humility and less arrogance are still essential. We don’t have all the answers and no one has a corner on truth.
Current worship of absolute “settled science” ropes off sections in the arena of ideas. No one knows the answer to many of the currently argued topics in science. But we do know that by limiting debate and censoring minority scientific viewpoints, “settled science” keeps spinning wheels, stuck in the mud on the open road to scientific progress.
Learning from History
Smart people learn from history. If history has shown numerous cases where consensus science was wrong, should we not be somewhat skeptical of today’s consensus science? While we know more now, greater humility and less arrogance are still essential. We don’t have all the answers and no one has a corner on truth.
Current worship of absolute “settled science” ropes off sections in the arena of ideas. No one knows the answer to many of the currently argued topics in science. But we do know that by limiting debate and censoring minority scientific viewpoints, “settled science” keeps spinning wheels, stuck in the mud on the open road to scientific progress.
On why there will never be a planet of the apes.
Bombshell: New Research Overturns Claim that Humans and Chimps Differ by Only 1 Percent of DNA
How many times have you heard it said that the human and chimpanzee genomes are so similar that they are only “1 percent different” at the level of their DNA? This shows, we were told, not only that humans and chimps share common ancestry, but that humans aren’t all that special, which is a common talking point in science journalism and other public discussions. After all, we’re just slightly modified chimps! This “fact” has been discussed so much that it has become what the late biologist Jonathan Wells famously called an “icon of evolution.”
But now, new data reported in a recently published Nature paper by Yoo et al. has overturned this previous claim. The new findings reveal that human DNA is far more different from chimp DNA than previously thought.
That should be major news in the science world, yet those involved don’t seem interested in highlighting their discovery. More on that later.
Many times over the years, I’ve discussed how this 1 percent claim about humans and chimps is likely wrong. It is also misleading. No matter how similar humans might be to chimps at the genetic level, anyone who has been to the zoo knows already that chimps and humans are vastly different. After all, we’re the ones writing scientific papers about them—not the other way around. So common sense alone dictates that there is something misleading about that number and how it is used. But the new data show that the previous statistic isn’t just misleading. It’s flat-out false.
As I will elaborate in a subsequent article, this team of researchers has published “complete” sequences of ape genomes that were created ‘from scratch’ rather than using the human genome as a template. As a result, for the first time we can attempt a much more accurate assessment of the true degree of difference between the human and chimp genomes.
The results are groundbreaking:
At least 12.5 percent and possibly up to 13.3 percent of the chimp and human genomes represent a “gap difference” between the two genomes. That means there’s a “gap” in one genome compared to the other, often where they are so different, they cannot even be aligned.
There are also significant alignable sections of the two genomes that show “short nucleotide variations” which differ by only about 1.5 percent. We can add this difference to the “gap difference,” and calculate a 14 percent to 14.9 percent total difference between human and chimp genomes. This means that the actual difference between human and chimp DNA is 14 times greater than the often-quoted 1 percent statistic.
It’s true that large portions of the human genome are still only about 1.5 percent genetically different from the chimp genome. We’ll explore what that means in a subsequent post. But the new data reveal just how little this one fact tells us about the overall picture. We now know that major portions of the two genomes — 12.5 percent to 13.3 percent of the human genome, in fact — are so different that arguably the sections are unalignable and/or not directly present in one genome or the other.
Burying the Lead
One very peculiar thing about the research just published is that nowhere in the technical paper is this bombshell discovery clearly reported, and nowhere is it stated clearly that human and chimp DNA is some ~14 percent different. Even an explainer article in Nature — which usually do a great job of translating technical findings for the average scientist — does not mention this huge finding. You have to dig deep into the Supplementary Data to find it, and even there it is opaquely stated in technical jargon.
This data has huge implications for the long-quoted statistic that we are only 1 percent genetically different from chimps, and many people are interested in this question for its implications regarding evolution, origins, and the exceptional status of human beings. Yet the papers almost seemed like they want to obscure the numbers, making them hard to find for the reader, whether a scientist or layman.
How hard would it have been for the original Nature paper or — even better — the explainer article to say that this new data shows that the human and chimp genomes are more like 14 percent to 15 percent different rather than 1 percent?
And yet for some very strange reason they did not do that. In journalism, this is called “burying the lead” — putting the main point of your reporting, the most notable fact, under a heap of less important verbiage. Sometimes this happens due to incompetence. Other times, it is deliberate.
Remembering the Icon
As Jonathan Wells taught us, “icons of evolution” are arguments for evolution that get recycled over and over again — yet are not true. How do we know the 1 percent statistic is such an icon? Science popularizer Bill Nye, “The Science Guy,” provided a great example when he wrote in his 2014 book Undeniable:
As our understanding of DNA has increased, we have come to understand that we share around 98.8 percent of our gene sequence with chimpanzees. This is striking evidence for chimps and chumps to have a common ancestor.
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The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s website likewise states:
DNA is thus especially important in the study of evolution. The amount of difference in DNA is a test of the difference between one species and another — and thus how closely or distantly related they are.
While the genetic difference between individual humans today is minuscule – about 0.1%, on average – study of the same aspects of the chimpanzee genome indicates a difference of about 1.2%.
Similar statements are found in the Smithsonian itself — the nation’s museum! — visited by nearly 4 million people yearly. I took this photo in 2023 when I visited:
A caption below declares that: “DNA evidence … confirms … that modern humans and chimpanzees diverged from a common ancestor…”
David Klinghoffer provides a nice rundown of other sources that have cited this statistic:
“We share more than 98 percent of our DNA and almost all of our genes with our closest living relative, the chimpanzee.” (Nature)
“[A]bout 99 percent of our DNA is identical to that of chimpanzees.” (Kevin Williamson, National Review)
“Most studies indicate that when genomic regions are compared between chimpanzees and humans, they share about 98.5 percent sequence identity.” (Scientific American)
“Humans and chimps share a surprising 98.8 percent of their DNA.” (American Museum of Natural History)
“[H]umans share about 99 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, making them our closest living relatives.” (Science)
“Chimps, Humans 96 Percent the Same, Gene Study Finds.” (National Geographic News)
This “1 percent human-chimp genetic difference” statistic has been widely promoted and is widely believed. It’s undeniably an icon of evolution. But Dr. Wells also noted that these icons are like “zombies” — they don’t die easily. Instead, they keep being repeated, long after they’ve been refuted.
If that’s true, then don’t expect the 1 percent statistic to go away anytime soon. In fact, as I mentioned, the new Nature paper makes it very difficult to dig up the figures I’ve quoted here, so I suspect we’ll continue to see zombie numbers quoted, despite what the newly published data shows. I’ll explain all of that in more detail in a subsequent article. For the moment, suffice to say that the old 1 percent difference statistic is the latest icon of evolution to fall. May it rest in peace.
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