Exhibit A Hinting That Evolutionary Biologists May Be Worshipful Devotees

At the Undark web site (www.undark.org) we sometimes get first-rate examples of science journalism. But a recent article at that site is just an insight as to how bad is the malfunction in a certain branch of academia. It is an article by an evolutionary biologist (C. Brandon Ogbunu), one entitled "What I Learned From Teaching Darwin." 

Throughout the article Ogbunu makes clear that he is a devotee of his 19th century overlord.  The impression of ardent devotion is created very quickly, as we see a photo of a set of six books on a shelf. Instead of being varied, diverse books that would give us broad knowledge, each one of the books on the shelf is "The Origin of Species" by Darwin. It's kind of like what we might expect to see when visiting a fundamentalist, who had a shelf containing nothing but copies of the Bible. 

A properly thinking biologist might write an essay with a title such as "What I Learned From Studying Organisms" or "What I Learned From Studying Cells" or "What I Learned From Studying Anatomy." But evolutionary biologists instead write articles with worshipful titles such as "What I Learned From Teaching Darwin." 

Ogbunu makes these very laughable speculations about what Darwin would say and do if he were living today:

"He would care about the misinformation crisis, climate science, and have opinions about how to live in a world being upended by artificial intelligence and threats to democracy....His computer desktop would have dozens of folders, some with machine-learning papers, others full of ornithology monographs. And he'd read them all."

This is hilarious. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are examples of engineering, being products of software engineering. Darwin had zero interest in engineering. His complete failure to consider matters of engineering are part of the reason he went so badly wrong in his attempt to explain the wonders of the biological world. What we see in the world of biology is endless examples of purposeful engineering. 

A very important principle is that accidents don't engineer things. But Darwin maintained that all of the stupendous wonders of the biological world were the result of accumulations of accidents (unguided random mutations). His deceptively titled book "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" did not actually postulate a theory of selection, because "selection" means conscious choice, and Darwin did not postulate conscious choice as an explanation for the wonders of biology.  If Darwin had honestly titled his main work, he would have given it a title such as "On the Origin of Species by Means of Accident Accumulations." That would have correctly described his theory. "The Origin of Species" used the words "accumulation," "accumulate" or "accumulating" 35 times. 

The problem, of course, is that an accumulation of accidents cannot credibly explain stunning engineering results with a great coordinated wealth of fine-tuned interdependent components, such as we see so very abundantly in the world of living organisms. Darwin swept under the rug this problem by never paying any attention at all to the topic of engineering. So it is  absurd to suggest that Darwin would be interested in today's wonders of technological engineering. 

Ogbunu errs in his attempt to persuade us (in the quote above) that Darwin was an eager scholar of everything relevant to his claims. Darwin seemed to spend zero time studying probability mathematics (so relevant to the credibility of his claims). And he also seemed to pay zero attention to all of the very many reports of paranormal or supernatural  phenomena happening in England while he lived, reports also very relevant to the credibility of his claims. The British scientists of his time who paid attention to such reports included Alfred Russel Wallace and Sir William Crookes, both asserting the authenticity of some of these phenomena. 

Near the end of the article, Ogbunu says, "What I aspire to be, more than anything, is an intellectual child of Charles Darwin."  What an unhealthy-sounding statement that is. You can compare it to healthy-sounding statements a person might make, statements such as these: 

• "What I aspire to be, more than anything, is someone who correctly describes reality and someone who speaks the truth and advises wisely."
• "What I aspire to be, more than anything, is a good person who helps others." 
• "What I aspire to be, more than anything, is someone who teaches the facts of nature correctly, and someone who informs people about the most important facts scientists have learned." 

Guys like Ogbunu think they are walking in the path of Darwin, but they are not really doing that. Darwin was no parroting devotee of any authority. Darwin made conclusions based solely on what he had learned about nature and his own analysis and reasoning, instead of appealing to the authority of any previous thinker.  Those who keep  parroting Darwin's outdated conclusions are not following such a path of independent analysis of nature, but are instead following the "devotion to an old authority" path that is antithetical to the true spirit of science. 

Well-functioning science ends whenever fervent Darwinism begins. 

Postscript: I see that Ogbunu has a series of posts at the Undark.org site. The posts are mostly essays that are better work than the post of his I criticized above. 

Bootlickers of Scientism Claim You're No Good If You Don't Think Like Them

At the atheist propaganda site Big Think, the egos are as huge as the errors. We have one page telling us that those writing at the site (mostly little-known figures) are "the world's greatest thinkers." This is not a statement made in small print, but in a very large font, a font so big you can read it from quite a few meters away. Some of the people referred to on this page have made some very stupid and fallacious statements. 

In a recent article at the site, we have some statements by philosopher and evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci. Pigliucci tries to teach the foolish doctrine of scientism. Scientism is defined in various ways, and the most extreme definition you can give is the doctrine that science is the only way to acquire knowledge. It is just that extreme doctrine that Pigliucci teaches. He states this:

"So, if we’re talking about knowing things about the world as it is, then yeah, science is the only way of knowing. There really is no other way around that."

This is nonsense. There are, of course, many other ways to learn about things other than by scientific inquiry. For example,  I may learn that a relative is feeling very sad, and that is an important truth I have learned without using science. Or I may read on an online news site that a war has just broken out in Asia, and that the number of wars now raging in the world has just increased by one. That is a very important truth I have learned about the world without using science.

Below are a few very important ways of acquiring truth that are not science:

• Personal experience: You can learn all kinds of important truths through personal experience, such as learning of the death of your mother. Personal experience is not science. You can also learn important truths about the world through personal experience. During cardiac arrest, a person may have an out-of-body experience in which his soul floats out of his body, and observes things he never could have seen while in his body. Later the details of his observations may be confirmed. Many such cases are discussed in my post here. A personal experience such as that does tell you something very important about the world: that the world does not work the way dogmatic Darwinists such as Pigliucci claim that the world works.  If a person is very careful to record any anomalous experiences that he has, and any spooky things that he observes, and to ponder such experiences, they may collectively tell him something very important about the world, that is does not work the way that materialists claim that it works. 
• History:  From history we can learn some important things about the world. But history is not science. 
• Journalism:  Journalism is the reporting of events now occurring in the world. Journalism obviously can tell us very important things about the world. But journalism is not science. 
• Scholarship. By doing enough reading of books and other material (not necessarily scientific papers), you can learn important things about reality, and by studying first-hand testimony by others, you can learn that the world does not work the way evolutionary biologists like Pigliucci claim that it works. 
• Reason and logic:  Reason and logic can tell us very important things, including important things about the world. But reason and logic are not science.  By using reason and logic, you can exclude some of the claims that Pigliucci makes about the world, some of which are illogical and irrational. 
• Mathematics: Mathematics can tell us very important truths.  But mathematics is not science. By a sufficient use of a type of mathematics called probability mathematics, you can learn a very important thing about the world: that the world cannot possibly work the way that evolutionary biologists such as Pigliucci claim that it works, because that would require endless occurrences of things too unlikely to ever occur by chance or unguided processes in the history of the observable universe. 

The Big Think article attempts to teach a false and indefensible doctrine that people cannot be good unless they think like an atheist.  The article has a headline of "Why you must be logical and scientific to be a good person."  Of course, at this site we can be sure that by "logical and scientific" what is meant is "thinking like a proper atheist thinks." 

The doctrine is nonsense, like so much of the teaching at the Big Think site, where the self-described "world's greatest thinkers" often sound like the world's silliest thinkers.  Intellectual virtue is something very different than moral virtue. The world is filled with hundreds of millions of different types of very good people who believe very silly things.  There is little relation between thinking logically and scientifically and behaving morally. 

We have in the article some paragraphs in which Pigliucci tries most clumsily to defend this very stupid doctrine that you have to think logically and scientifically to be a good person. It is rather hilarious that this "you can only get truth through science" person mentions no science at all, but merely appeals to the writings of a mathematician and an ancient philosopher.  First he mentions an essay by some little-known mathematician named Clifford, as if that counted for much of anything; and then he mentions something he claims was said by the ancient philosopher Cicero, without even giving us a quote to show the claim is true.  Since when do you show something these days by claiming that Cicero said it?  That's the kind of thing people would do in medieval times. Read Cicero's De Natura Deorum, and you will not find someone teaching like what Pigliucci teaches.  There we read quotes like this:

"In explaining these things, I think that I have shown clearly enough how much superior is human nature to that of all the other animals. From which we must infer that such a shape and arrangement of our limbs and such a power of intelligence cannot have been the work of chance alone."

Trying to  defend a thesis that science is some moral guide, Pigliucci fails utterly, offering only the clumsiest argument. Science is no moral guide. Science is morally neutral. When you know through moral insight that it's wrong to kill the innocent, that's an example of knowing something with the knowledge not coming from science. Such examples further show the folly of Pigliucci's scientism.  A study of the misdeeds of Communist materialists will provide no support for any claim that thinking as an atheist is good for morality. On the page here of The Black Book of Communism, we read this estimate of state-caused deaths in communist countries:

U.S.S.R.: 20 million deaths

China: 65 million deaths

Vietnam: I million deaths

North Korea: 2 million deaths

Cambodia: 1 million deaths

Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths

Africa: 1.7 million deaths

Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths

Pigliucci has written much about what he calls a "demarcation problem" involving science, and his writings on this topic have been very lacking in insight. The underlying assumption he has made seems to be the simplistic assumption that basically there is some line between "science" and "pseudoscience," and that once that line is drawn, pretty much everything on the left side of the line must be damned, and pretty much everything on the right side of the line must be blessed and accepted "hook, line and sinker."  The idea is profoundly erroneous. 

The truth is that in all kinds of inquiry, there is a mixture of truth and error.  A very thorough scholar of modern scientific work, its atheistic ideological motivations  and its economic underpinnings will discover a world heavily infected by groundless boasts, bad methods, triumphalist achievement legends, irrational belief traditions, hype, clickbait and agents pretending to be impartial judges of truth who are actually like bribed jurors because of their financial conflicts of interest, corporate ties and membership in conformist belief communities strongly resembling organized religion, communities in which obsequious servility is rewarded far more than speaking truth to power. 

So in fields such as biology we have much truth being taught, along with very much error being taught. It is a very bad mistake to uncritically accept en masse the teachings of people in some field because you have placed that field on the right side of some demarcation line, and a a very bad mistake to uncritically reject en masse the teachings or insights or observations of people in some field because you have placed that field on the left side of some demarcation line. 

Pigliucci's approach leads to the laziest rebuttals and the laziest scholarship.  Thinkers such as Pigliucci think they can be excused from studying hundreds of years of writings describing very important anomalous observations, on the grounds that they have categorized some field of inquiry as being on the left side of some demarcation line.  Were they to study such writings they would find evidence and arguments debunking their cherished dogmas. But guys like Pigliucci keep thinking: No need to seriously study such stuff-- it's on the left side of the line! It's a very misguided approach.  A much better approach is: study the writings of your ideological supporters closely, and study the writings of your ideological enemies just as closely. I  follow such a principle, as you can see by the fact that my blog sites so often contain discussions of articles and papers contrary to what I believe. 

Life would be a lot easier if you could follow simple rules such as believe everything in Category X, and disbelieve everything in Category Y. But such rules lead you astray.  In the world of today's science, peer reviewers are often failing to do their jobs, approving very low-quality work for publication in science journals. Meanwhile many scientists (eager to up their citation count) routinely produce article titles claiming their research showed something it did not show; and universities every day send out science-related press releases making false claims. Within some Category Y that you may scorn may be reliable observations by trustworthy witnesses that give you the most important clues about reality.  A good rule is: pay little attention to some category, and scrutinize every new observation report, asking whether it meets high standards of good evidence. Financially unmotivated people giving first-person accounts of spooky things while giving their names and the observation dates can provide better evidence than found in most scientific papers, where we typically have passive voice accounts that fail to tell us who exactly was the observer and when the observation occurred, written by financially motivated claimants.   

The diagram below illustrates in the first rectangle the fallacious and simplistic viewpoint of scientism, and in the second rectangle a realistic viewpoint recognizing that there is a mixture of truth and error in every category of human thinking.

There are many millions of very good people in every ideological camp. There are hundreds of millions of very good people who are atheists. There are hundreds of millions of very good people who are fundamentalist Christians or Catholics. There are hundreds of millions of very good people who are Muslims. There are hundreds of millions of very good people who are Buddhists. There are hundreds of millions of very good people who are Hindus. It is not true that you have to think in a particular way to be a good person. 

Blundering very badly, Pigliucci, has endorsed the bootlicking nonsense that is scientism. To speak metaphorically, the boot that Pigliucci keeps licking is a boot that keeps stomping our faces, by using gigantically misleading dehumanization rhetoric that deceptively depicts us as very much less than what we are. 

A boot that keeps stomping your face

Pigliucci is a big fan of the ancient Stoics, but he would have done better to have followed the example given by the dialogues of Plato, where the hero is a character (Socrates) ever prone to question all types of authorities and all boasts of knowledge, someone not at all a bootlicker. 

Postscript: After writing and posting the post above, I found a 2003 article by Pigliucci entitled "The Sin of Scientism," in which he states, "Scientism is the secular equivalent of religious bigotry, and it does no good to either society or to science itself." It sounds like Pigliucci's 2003 position on this topic was a lot better than his 2025 opinion on this topic, discussed above. 

I think that the factual findings of scientists (as opposed to the belief dogmas of scientists) are some of the most important guides to truth, and that is one reason why I so frequently refer to many of these findings (corresponding to direct observations) on this blog and another blog of mine. 

Don't Be Impressed by a Consensus That Is Enforced or Sociogenic

 At the New Atlantis web site we have a very long essay by M. Anthony Mills on the topic of scientific consensus. The title is "Manufacturing Consensus" and the subtitle is "Science needs conformity — but not the kind it has right now."  We see a picture at the top of a herd of sheep all heading in the same direction. But don't be fooled by the photo, the title and the subtitle, which are all kind of like quarterback pump fakes (when a quarterback pretends to throw in one direction, but then throws in another direction). In the essay Mills rather speaks as if he wants you to be one of the unquestioning sheep, one of the herd of meek minions who blindly believe as they are told to believe by science professors. 

The purpose of Mills seems to be to encourage a credulous "believe-it-all" attitude towards science professors and their belief traditions. Mills seems to want us to trust in our science professors as much as a Soviet commissar would trust in his politburo.  And just as Soviet commissars very much believed that Marxist party orthodoxy should be enforced, Mills tells us multiple times that scientist belief traditions should be enforced.

Using "false dilemma" reasoning, in which the reader is given a choice between two radically opposed alternatives that are not the only choices,  Mills paints a choice between two extremes. The first extreme he describes like this:

"According to one influential view, consensus should play no role in science. This is because, so the argument goes, science is fundamentally about questioning orthodoxy and elite beliefs, basing knowledge instead on evidence that is equally available to all. At the moment when science becomes consensus, it ceases to be science."

This is a "straw man" portrayal. Critics of unjustified claims of a scientific consensus do not typically claim "consensus should play no role in science." Everyone agrees that there is a consensus about things such as the existence of cells and the high temperature of the sun, and no has a problem with there being a consensus about such well-established facts. But critics of unjustified claims of a scientific consensus may reasonably claim that (1) some of the claims made about a scientific consensus are untrue because such a consensus (defined as a unanimity of opinion) does not really exist, or (2) some of the claims made about a scientific consensus are inappropriate because the underlying belief is untrue. 

After constructing and then knocking down this "straw man" of ultra-rebellious thinking in which all established facts are put in doubt, Mills proceeds to advocate what he seems to think is the proper way things should occur in the world of science. He uses a kind of reasoning very similar to some reasoning made by Catholic authorities during the Protestant Reformation, who argued that only those trained sufficiently by the Catholic Church could criticize what the Catholic Church was doing. Mills seems to advocate a world in which only those trained within science academia belief traditions can criticize the claims of such traditions. He does this by stating this:

"In order to participate in or contribute to established science — much less to criticize or overthrow it — one has to have been trained in the relevant scientific fields. That is to say, one has to have been brought up in a particular scientific tradition, whether geocentric or heliocentric astronomy, or classical or relativistic physics."

This statement is very wrong.  It is not necessary for a person to have been trained and "brought up in a particular scientific tradition" in order to criticize the statements of scientists in that tradition. Any person studying by himself for a sufficient length of time can gain enough knowledge to make good and worthwhile criticisms of the statements of scientists in many scientific fields.  Also, a person can contribute to science without being "brought up in a particular scientific tradition."  There are many ways in which citizen scientists can and have contributed to established science.

A very important point that Mills fails to realize is that you don't need to thoroughly understand a theory in order to make solid, important rebuttals of the theory.  Suppose someone hands me some bizarre 80-page document advancing some elaborate ancient astronaut theory that includes (among its many complicated claims) the claim that extraterrestrials are living in tall castles on the moon. I don't have to understand all or most of this theory to refute it. I need merely point out that astronomers have thoroughly mapped the moon, and have found no such high castles on it.  Similarly, I don't need to know much about the complicated theoretical speculations of what is called cosmic inflation theory to point out that this theory of something strange happening near the first instant of the universe it not an empirically well-founded theory. I need merely learn that cosmologists say that throughout the first 200,000 years of the universe's history matter and energy were so dense that no observations from such a period will ever be possible. Armed with that one fact, I know that this cosmic inflation theory can never possibly be verified.  

We then have a statement which is characterized by an  overawed naivete. Mills seems to suggest that scientists receiving training should trustingly accept triumphal stories handed down by their elders, rather like Catholics reverently accepting stories of the wondrous deeds of the medieval saints. He states this:

"To be initiated into a tradition, one has to first submit to the authority of its bearers — as an apprentice does to the master craftsman — and to the institutions that sustain the tradition. In the natural sciences, the bearers of tradition are usually exemplary figures from the past, such as Newton, Einstein, Darwin, or Lavoisier, whose stories are passed down by teachers and textbooks."

This is not the way any one should study nature.  We should learn about nature by studying observations, always questioning belief dogmas and whether observational claims are robust, always asking whether some claim about nature is a belief mandated by facts and observations, or merely some speech custom or belief tradition of overconfident authorities.  Sacred lore and kneeling to tradition may have its place in religion, but has no proper place in the world of science. Whenever scientists are taught through a kind of process in which "stories are passed down" like sacred lore, and revered "not-to-be-questioned" scientists are put on pedestals, it is a sign that scientific academia has gone off track. 

We may wonder whether the visual below might be a good representation of the ideas of Mills on how scientists should be trained:

Very confusingly defined in multiple ways, "consensus" is a word that some leading dictionaries define as an agreed opinion among a group of people. The first definition of "consensus" by the Merriam-Webster dictionary is "general agreement: unanimity."  Mills fails to see that some of the most important claimed examples of scientific consensus are cases where we do not have good evidence that there actually is a consensus (defined as a unanimous opinion). The only way to reliably tell whether a consensus exists among scientists is to do a secret ballot vote. Such votes are not done of scientists. So, for example, we do not know whether even 90% of scientists believe in Darwinism or in claims that minds come mainly from the brain.  

But there are quite a few of what we may call cases of a socially enforced reputed consensus. That is where there is a general idea that there is an expectation that a scientist is supposed to support some idea (or at least not contradict it), or else he is going to be in career trouble.  Mills seems to give his approval of the idea of a socially enforced consensus.  First he states, "This is why consensus is so vital to science — and why the institutions of science not only can and do but should use their authority to enforce it." This is only one of 21 times Mills uses the word "authority" in his essay. 

The idea of an enforced consensus is self-contradictory. According to the Merriam-Webster definition, "consensus" means agreement or unanimity. When people agree on something, there is no need to enforce opinions. The instant someone talks about enforcing a consensus, it is an indication that no real consensus exists. 

Mills then gives us a rather long description of a scientific consensus as an excuse for placing questions "out of bounds" and for "gatekeeping" in which there is a kind of protected country club in which hated opposing observations and arguments are kept out, like black applicants to 1950's country clubs. Mills approvingly cites the tendency of modern scientists to ignore a host of arguments and observations that conflict with their belief dogmas. Such behavior, so unworthy of a first-class scientist or first-class scholar,  is an appalling tendency to fail to study observational reports that conflict with your beliefs and are evidence against some thing you claim is true. Referring to the literature of critics and contrarians as "venues," he writes this:

"What is striking, however, is that the arguments presented in these venues are almost never refuted by mainstream scientists. They may be publicly denounced, but without elaborate argumentation in professional journals. Most of the time, they are simply ignored....Science could never advance if it had to re-establish every past theory, counter every objection, or refute every crank."

The term "crank" is a term that merely means someone who irritates you. The reasoning that scientists should be excused from countering objections to their theories because they don't have time to do that is one of the silliest arguments made by scientists too lazy to respond to objections to their theories, and is here repeated by Mills. Scientists nowadays waste enormous amounts of time and federal dollars cranking out poorly reproducible results and poorly designed experiments described in papers that typically get almost no readership, with a large fraction of the papers being highly speculative or mostly unintelligible or devoted to topics so specialized and obscure that they are of no real value. The idea that scientists are too busy to respond to arguments and evidence against their theories is absurd. Were scientists to stop wasting so much time, they would have plenty of time to respond to arguments and evidence against their theories.

There then follows a bad argument by Mills that we must accept the teachings of scientists all over the place because we are "dependent" on such teachings. It involves another silly argument about time,  an argument that kind of seems to say that we can't challenge any dogmas of scientists because we don't have time to study up on the relevant topics. That isn't true at all. For example, anyone can read up on a Saturday on the very slight reasoning Darwin used to advance his very simple theory of so-called "natural selection," and anyone can read up on a Sunday on some powerful reasons for rejecting such claims. 

Scientific theories can be cast into doubt or effectively refuted by someone who has not spent terribly much time studying such theories. I will give one of hundreds of possible examples. Consider the case of out-of-body experiences, which are very widely reported by humans.  Prevailing neuroscientist theory holds that the mind is purely the product of the brain, and prevailing evolutionary theory holds that the collective reality of human minds is purely the product of some brain-related random mutations in the past. But suppose a scholar collects many reliable accounts of people who report traveling out of their bodies and observing them from above; and suppose he finds that in many of these cases the person had no appreciable brain activity; and suppose he gathers evidence that quite a few of these people discovered things that should have been impossible for them to know if such experiences were mere hallucinations.  Now we have evidence that would seem to cast very great doubt on two major scientific theories: both the theory that mind is purely the product of the brain, and the theory  holding that the mentality of the human species is  purely the product of some brain-related random mutations in the past.  To produce such evidence, it was not even necessary to study closely the theories cast into doubt by the evidence.  I could give countless other examples of how independent research by non-scientists can cast doubt on the claims of hallowed scientific theories, without requiring great study of the intricacies of such theories by the non-scientists. Such examples help show that we are not at all "dependents" who must meekly accept scientific theories we have not become experts on, like little children forced to believe whatever their parents tell them.  

Later Mills mentions "the modern evolutionary synthesis" (in other words, Neo-Darwinism), making the very dubious claim that it is a "consensus."  He is apparently unaware that there is a large respectable scholarly body of literature opposing Neo-Darwinism, and that nearly a thousand scientists have signed their names indicating their agreement to the following statement:

"We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

Any secret ballot of scientists would show that a significant fraction do not believe or doubt Darwinism. I doubt Mills realizes that a claim of a consensus is a powerful rhetorical weapon, and that long before there is anything like a consensus, believers in some scientific idea may start claiming all over the place that there is a consensus in support of an idea.  This is a powerful form of psychological  intimidation, a sneaky way by which bad ideas can start to go viral and rise to the top.  Advocates of some theory will claim that all or almost all of the smart people are moving or have moved to embrace the theory,  although that may not at all be true. The "everybody moving in one direction" impression may largely be an illusion fostered by those who know the persuasion power of portraying some consensus that does not yet exist.  "Bandwagon and herd-effect your way to the top" has been the secret by which many a bad theory becomes dominant. 

Mills cites "the modern evolutionary synthesis" as an example of something "that scientific institutions can and should enforce." Here he sounds like some Soviet commissar telling us that Marxist dogma must be enforced.  The commissars believed it was right for Marxist dogma to be enforced, because they regarded it as a form of science, what they called "economic science" or "scientific communism." 

Towards the end, Mills mentions how scientists were wrong in stating in 2020 claims that there was a consensus that COVID-19 had purely natural origins. But he seems to have learned no sound lesson from such a failure, and seems to mention this failure just as a lure to attract readers interested in hearing someone with ideas different from his own, like someone using cheese in a mouse trap.

The end of the claim that there was a scientific consensus on COVID-19 origins came about largely because of the work of non-scientists such as journalists and people in non-scientific fields (such as Jamie Metzl) who kept writing articles giving us facts opposing such a consensus.  Here we have an important reality contrary to what Mills has suggested, that science matters should be left to the scientists because they are too complicated for people to understand, a claim Mills made about the time he said this: "In order to participate in or contribute to established science — much less to criticize or overthrow it — one has to have been trained in the relevant scientific fields." Mills has failed to draw the right lesson from what happened here: that non-scientists may have something very valuable to contribute to scientific debates.  The "leave science to the scientists" thinking that Mills seems to advocate makes no more sense than "leave war to the generals."

Mills tries to portray the year 2020 inaccurate claims of a COVID-19 origins consensus as some freak aberration. But there was nothing very out-of-the-ordinary about such a thing. It was just another example of the very long-standing tendency of many science professors to  jump to conclusions, to claim to know things that they do not actually know, to avoid studying evidence that conflicts with the conclusions they have reached, to claim they understand the origin of something before achieving almost any of the prerequisites needed before credibly making such a claim, to meekly bow to the authority of their peers or predecessors, and to unfairly characterize reasonable critics as unreasonable extremists. To see a table listing many parallels between COVID-19 origins groupthink and human origins groupthink, see this post.  

In the last paragraph, Mills returns to his ideas seeming to recommend that we should be ruled by the belief traditions of professors, telling us that "science’s integrity must be protected by enforcing consensus."  When people say such things, they are using the secondary definition of "integrity," which is "the state of being whole and undivided." Similarly, medieval authorities argued that "the integrity of the Church must be protected" when trying to justify abominations such as the Inquisition and the Albigensian Crusade. The idea that a consensus should be enforced is a medieval-sounding and Soviet-sounding idea that has no place in properly functioning science. Science by itself is a morally neutral activity with no intrinsic moral component, and in the past hundred years many scientists in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, imperial Japan and also the United States had a long history of entanglement (direct or indirect) with brutality and oppression, often funded by governments. So you may find Mills saying that Darwinism needs to be enforced almost as scary as Mike Flynn saying that America should have only one religion. 

Mills would do well to study the chart below, and to ask himself whether he is encouraging some of the dysfunctional items on the right end, while discouraging some of the good things on the left end. 

You should tend not to be impressed by a claim of a consensus, whenever such a consensus is enforced or sociogenic. Imagine if I query fifty architects about their opinion about a new building in some city, in fifty separate emails each addressed solely to one of fifty different people, and the architects all give me the same answer about whether the building was well-designed. Such a consensus is impressive because it is not a social conformity effect, and there is no enforcement involved. But it is not impressive when 100% of the graduates of some teaching program claim to believe in some dogma that everyone who went through that program was strongly pressured into believing.  For example, 100% of the graduates of biblical fundamentalist theology schools may believe in biblical fundamentalism, but that does nothing to show that biblical fundamentalism is true. And 100% of the graduates of some neuroscience master's degree program may believe the brain is the sole cause of the mind, but that does nothing to show that such a belief is true; for within such a program anyone who rejected such a dogma would have been treated like an outcast or a leper. 

Let's consider things generically, in which the term "Theory X" can stand for any number of theories. Suppose there arises a Theory X which starts to gain enough acceptance that there appears professional training programs to indoctrinate people in Theory X, making them Theory X experts. It may be that a large fraction or most of the population rejects Theory X as unbelievable. But it may be that a small number of people are particularly inclined to believe in Theory X.  It will be usually be only such people who sign up to begin some long Theory X training program to produce Theory X experts. In that program these trainees are constantly pressured to maintain their belief in Theory X, and in the program it is made clear that anyone who rejects Theory X will be scorned and ostracized.  Later when the training is finished, a new group of Theory X experts appears. Upon getting jobs as Theory X experts, the social pressure continues, with all of their fellow Theory X experts pressuring them to keep espousing the tenets of Theory X.  The "old guard" keeps the new guys in conformity with Theory X. 

Suppose then a poll is taken indicating that 100% or 95% of Theory X experts believe in Theory X. Should we be the least bit impressed by this consensus or near-consensus? Certainly not, because it is merely a sociogenic effect.  When a training program acts like a cookie cutter to produce uniformity in the trainees,  that does nothing to establish the likelihood that the training program's tenets are correct.