Le Science est mort, vive le Science!: Science is dead. Long live Science!
According to Wikipedia:
The original phrase was translated from the French Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!, which was first declared upon the coronation of Charles VII following the death of his father Charles VI in 1422.
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The phrase arose from the law of le mort saisit le vif—that the transfer of sovereignty occurs instantaneously upon the moment of death of the previous monarch. “The King is dead” is the announcement of a monarch who has just died. “Long live the King!” refers to the heir who immediately succeeds to a throne upon the death of the preceding monarch.
Science under the previous monarch Barack Obama, is now officially dead. Science under President Trump has instantaneously succeeded the death of the old science.
So what does this mean for ordinary Americans?
In the film Jurassic Park, the character Ian Malcolm, a mathematician who specializes in a branch of mathematics known as “Chaos Theory,” states,
[Y]our scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn’t stop to think whether they should.
According to the Fractal Foundation Chaos Theory is defined as follows:
Chaos is the science of surprises, of the nonlinear and the unpredictable. It teaches us to expect the unexpected. While most traditional science deals with supposedly predictable phenomena like gravity, electricity, or chemical reactions, Chaos Theory deals with nonlinear things that are effectively impossible to predict or control, like turbulence, weather, the stock market, our brain states, and so on.
Policy Science Kills: The Case of Eugenics by Jeffrey A. Tucker notes this about nonlinear science:
The climate-change [weather] debate has many people wondering whether we should really turn over public policy — which deals with fundamental matters of human freedom — to a state-appointed scientific establishment. Must moral imperatives give way to the judgment of technical experts in the natural sciences? Should we trust their authority? Their power?
There is a real history here to consult. The integration of government policy and scientific establishments has reinforced bad science and yielded ghastly policies.
An entire generation of academics, politicians, and philanthropists used bad science to plot the extermination of undesirables [Eugenics].
Crichton in his novel Jurassic Park wrote,
“God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates man, man kills God, man brings back dinosaurs.”
When man plays God, bad things happen. When scientists play God to further a political agenda, really bad things happen.
A column titled How States Got Away with Sterilizing 60,000 Americans by Trevor Burrus reports:
On the morning of October 19, 1927, the Commonwealth of Virginia sterilized Carrie Buck.
Dr. John Bell — whose name would forever be linked with Carrie’s in the Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell — cut her open and removed a section from each of her Fallopian tubes. In his notes, Dr. Bell noted that “this was the first case operated on under the sterilization law.”
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We know Carrie’s story because her case eventually made it to the Supreme Court. But to the Commonwealth of Virginia in the 1920s, Carrie was just another congenitally “feeble-minded” woman who, in the parlance of the times, had a tainted “germ plasm” that would create generations of “socially inadequate defectives” if she were allowed to procreate freely. Carrie is the most famous of the (at least) 60,000 Americans who were forcibly sterilized in order to “cleanse the race” of undesirable genes.
The United States forcibly sterilized people through the 1970s. Many victims are still living. Virginia has apologized for its sterilization program, and, like North Carolina before it, voted to compensate still-living victims.
Science created Eugenics, which is now called genetics.
Science must have a moral basis for what it does, a moral basis that tells it what it should not do.
Science is, “[T]he intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.”
Science is not being God, rather science is about observing God in all of His glory. Le Science est mort, vive le Science!
As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
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