WORLD's 2014 anti-science list

The Daily Beast last Saturday gave WORLD a distinguished third place on a list of “top 10 anti-science salvos of 2014” for our November coverage of The BioLogos Foundation. We earned our spot—as did the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis, and Bryan College—for daring to question the scientific orthodoxy of Darwinism. Others making the top 10 included skeptics of climate-change alarmism.

WORLD believes good science is vital, so we want to contribute to the effort to keep research on the straight and narrow. Here’s our own list of seven unscientific claims from the past year.

1. Selling abortion through euphemisms

The classic excuse for abortion is that the unborn baby is not a person but a blob of tissue. That unscientific justification couched in scientific terms (you and I are just “tissue” too, aren’t we?) is so preposterous almost no one appeals to it these days.

Still, for abortion providers, selling abortion depends on shrouding the procedure in euphemisms and misleading terms. In July, Live Action News drew attention to a New York City abortion facility called Early Options that is advertising what it calls the “SofTouch” procedure. In this procedure, performed anywhere from five to 10 weeks into the pregnancy, “The doctor simply inserts a soft flexible tube through the natural opening of your cervix, and applies gentle pressure,” according to Early Options. “This quietly ‘releases’ your late period and induces a miscarriage.” The facility even calls this a “natural release.”

But if this were really a miscarriage, a woman wouldn’t need to schedule an appointment at Early Options for it to happen. Even medical literature calls this what it actually is: An “induced termination.” For exterminating tiny humans with a “soft flexible tube” and calling it “gentle,” “natural,” and a “miscarriage,” Early Options gets first place on our anti-science list.

2. Denying homosexuals can change

After gay blogger Brandon Ambrosino wrote last January that he considered his identity a “choice,” Mark Joseph Stern over at Slate told him he was wrong. “Male sexuality,” Stern wrote, “is clearly fixed from birth. Men are born gay, bi, or straight—and that orientation can never be altered.” After attempting to support that dogmatic conclusion with several old studies of homosexuality in families, Stern admitted that biologists believe there are multiple, complex factors in play that trigger homosexuality, without one single cause.

Yet there is no conclusive evidence that anyone is “born gay,” or that sexual orientation is unchangeable. Even if genes did play a role in disposing some people toward same-sex attraction, genes do not dictate behavior or preferences, as biochemist Neil Whitehead has explained. Even the Royal College of Psychiatrists in London stated in March, “It is not the case that sexual orientation is immutable or might not vary to some extent in a person’s life.” Surveys show that adolescents who identify as homosexual often end up identifying exclusively as heterosexual later in life.

Yet Stern thundered, “If Ambrosino is gay, he has been gay all his life, and he will continue to be gay for the rest of it. He can’t do anything to change it, and any claims to the contrary indicate that he is simply in denial.” For denying the reality that some homosexuals do change, Stern gets second place on this list.

3. Denying the dangers of the gay lifestyle

When Bloomberg last January reported that gonorrhea and syphilis are rising significantly in the United States, mainly among homosexual men, it opened by saying the problem was something “the government said is linked to inadequate testing among people stymied by homophobia and limited access to health care.” Quoting a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official and an epidemiologist, Bloomberg suggested that “homophobia” was the major cause behind the rise in these two sexually transmitted diseases. Not until the final paragraph did the news organization mention a rise in “unprotected sex among gay men.” Bloomberg gets a spot on this list for helping perpetuate the myth that the high risks of mental illness, sexually transmitted diseases, and substance abuse among homosexual men and women are mostly due to oppressive societal attitudes rather than the gay lifestyle itself.

4. Searching for extraterrestrials

Researchers over at the SETI Institute continue to scan outer space for radio signals or other signs of aliens, although no evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence—or life, for that matter—has turned up outside of abduction conspiracy circles. David Black, who became president of the institute in April, said SETI researchers are interested in looking not just at the heavens but also at social interactions on Earth to “figure out what they might tell us about alien life. How long will we survive? How would we interpret a message? Should we send a message, or is that inviting danger?”

5. The “overpopulation” crisis

Speaking of Earth, both Newsweek and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published articles recently bewailing the number of humans on the planet—a worry that has plagued us since Thomas Robert Malthus invented it in 1798. Newsweek suggested more abortion and contraception was the solution, and the PNAS writers even complained a World War III wouldn’t be deadly enough to solve the impending “overpopulation” crisis. Yet, experience has shown over and over that scientific ingenuity has provided solutions to problems of food supply. It is wars and regional conflicts, political oppression, and poverty that result in malnourishment, not a shortage of available food. People are a source of wealth, not a drain on it. In Europe, economies are stagnating because of the low birthrate.

6. Gender as a social construct

The all-women’s Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., blazed a new trail in September by establishing a new policy for transgender students. It became the first U.S. women’s school to permit the enrollment of “self-identified women”—meaning students who claim to be transgender without any doctor’s letter or other legal documentation to back it up. Under this policy, a male can enroll as long as he feels himself to be a woman at the time, no questions asked. At Holyoke, gender is no longer based on DNA but on a social construct.

7. The imaginative multiverse theory

“There doesn’t seem to be anything unique about the event we call the big bang,” theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said recently. “It is a reproducible event that could and would happen again, and again, and again.” Wilczek was defending multiverse theory—the idea, espoused by some scientists, that there are multiple universes, not one. Problem is, there’s no convincing scientific evidence for a multiverse, or any way of disproving one. Multiverse theory closes out our anti-science list for having a bigger basis in imagination than evidence.