Nick Joy asks: Is this the end of science?

In my criticism of the civil service, I have often used the word corrupt, which worries some people as they see corruption as being monetary. Where the word is apt is in the decline of impartiality – not just political impartiality – in the civil service. More and more activists, from Stonewall to the vegans, see impartiality as something that needs to be swayed.

I once had an argument with a pro-salmon farming scientist who was angered by the bias of some scientific documents. When I suggested that all human beings are biased, he replied that he could not be because he was a scientist.

Everyone is biased. It is simply impossible not to be, unless you do not care for anything in the world. So the only way to have impartial organisations is for the people in them to declare their bias, not just to their organisation but also, most importantly, to themselves. If you cannot understand your own bias, you cannot produce unbiased work.

Often in social media these days you see the phrase “science produces results for those who pay it most”.

People assume that the only malign influence is monetary but in a rich, cosseted society there is another, just as malign: the pursuit of righteousness. I mean by this the desire for others to see our goodness: what we now call “virtue signalling”.

Science is extremely vulnerable to this type of activism. If you cannot counter a reasoned argument then you can produce some science to say that it is dangerous, unhealthy or bad for the planet. So, scientists are caught in this morass. Of course there are scientists in industry and in no way am I suggesting that they are corrupt. Their allegiance is clear and they have declared their bias openly (this does not mean that the work they produce is biased).