This week’s Novum Organum

Modern “science” is like ideology. Just as ideology jerks us around by taking one part of reality and treating it as though it were the only thing that matters, and telling us that we are supposed to devote ourselves to advancing and empowering this one part of reality at the cost of all others, science jerks us around with its never-endng cascade of fragmented discoveries, each one of which is based on some tiny piece of evidence, and each one of which, we are told, validates a revolutionary new view of the world. But the only thing these rapidly accumulating and mutually canceling revolutionary views of the world accomplish is to make people think that there is no truth, which in turn makes them more receptive to the next hyped-up scientific “revolution,” the next world-transforming ideology, that comes along.

Here’s a minor example of modern science with its constant revolutions. A few years ago, scientists were promoting the idea that the Y chromosome is shrinking and that the male sex would soon go out of existence. The subtext was that we were supposed to think this was cool; real men don’t mind becoming extinct. But now scientists are telling us that the male sex is the powerhouse of evolution:

Women may think of men as primitive, but new research indicates that the Y chromosome—the thing that makes a man male—is evolving far faster than the rest of the human genetic code.

A new study comparing the Y chromosomes from humans and chimpanzees, our nearest living relatives, show that they are about 30 percent different. That is far greater than the 2 percent difference between the rest of the human genetic code and that of the chimp’s, according to a study appearing online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 13, 2010 07:24 PM | Send