In 2007, I published Darwin Day in America, a critical history of social Darwinism in the United States and, more broadly, an exploration of the abuse of science in American public policy in the last century-and-a-half. In 2015, I wrote a new chapter for the paperback edition, highlighting a worrisome trend. I warned:

Our culture is witnessing the rise of what could be called totalitarian science — science so totalistic in its outlook that its defenders claim the right to remake every sphere of human life, from public policy and education to ethics and religion.

PP. 385-386

Some predictions you don't want to turn out to be true. Unfortunately, in my view we've gone pretty far down the path toward totalitarian science during the past two years.

I understand some readers may find this statement offensive. We have many different views about COVID-19 and the public policies designed to combat it. Our views are affected both by our understanding of the facts and by our own experiences. If someone you loved died from COVID-19, that tragedy will affect your view of the pandemic. If you or someone you love has been injured by a COVID-19 vaccine, that experience will influence you as well. If your small business or job did not survive the pandemic, ditto. Because of the pandemic's deeply personal costs, it can be painful to engage in a candid discussion of the changes COVID-19 policies have wrought on our society.

Yet such a discussion is long overdue. Evolution News and Science Today focuses primarily on the scientific, philosophical, and metaphysical debates over Darwinian evolution and intelligent design. But from the start, the impact of "scientism" on public policy, freedom of speech, and human dignity have been central to our mission as well. For the past two years, we've largely refrained from wading into the debates over COVID-19. In part this was because it was hard to weigh in on debates when the facts were so unclear. But it also was because the issue was so polarizing.

Now, after two years, facts are becoming clearer — and so are the momentous consequences of the pandemic for our culture. Those consequences are so serious that they can't be ignored. That's why from here on you can expect more coverage at Evolution News of the societal challenges raised by scientism during the COVID era. In this article, let me highlight just three.

New research provides further evidence that rocks representing up to a billion years of geological time were carved away by ancient glaciers during the planet's "Snowball Earth" period, according to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research presents the latest findings in a debate over what caused the Earth's "Great Unconformity" -- a time gap in the geological record associated with the erosion of rock up to 3 miles thick in areas across the globe.

"The fact that so many places are missing the sedimentary rocks from this time period has been one of the most puzzling features of the rock record," said C. Brenhin Keller, an assistant professor of earth sciences and senior researcher on the study. "With these results, the pattern is starting to make a lot more sense."

Over the past weekend at our Dallas Conference on Science and Faith, YouTube video producer Joel Park let us know about this: a video with his son Tor in which the young gentleman walks his dad through a detailed account of the arguments in Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell. Get ready to be impressed.

The kid is 14 years old and it seems clear that he's got a future ahead of him as a communicator. The father-son rapport is very cute, too. They cover, among other things, what distinguishes intelligent design from creationism, what information is and what forms it takes, what that has to do with DNA, what's the difference between a deduction and an inference, the RNA World theory, panspermia, the multiverse, and more. The lucidity of the younger individual's grasp of ID, his ability to concisely explain it, is quite something. Tor could probably help out in tutoring some adult ID critics I can think of.

Watch this:

A British scientist has discovered a new species that belongs to a group of insects so rare that its closest relative was last seen in 1969.

Dr. Alvin Helden of Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) found the new species of leafhopper, which he has named Phlogis kibalensis, during field work with students in the rainforest of the Kibale National Park in western Uganda, and the discovery has been announced in the journal Zootaxa.

The new species, which has a distinctive metallic sheen, pitted body, and, in common with most leafhoppers, uniquely-shaped male reproductive organs — in this case partially leaf-shaped — belongs to a group, or genus, called Phlogis.

Prior to this new discovery, the last recorded sighting of a leafhopper from this rare genus was in Central African Republic in 1969.

New research shows it's the composition of the rock a meteorite hits, and not the impactor's size, that causes an extinction-level event.
It's a well-known story in our planet's past: A giant space rock slams into Earth, causing a catastrophe that ends in mass extinction. You might think that when it comes to determining which hits will cause such widespread devastation, the size of the incoming impactor is what matters. But new research suggests that something else might matter more: The composition of the ground where that meteorite hits.

The work, published Dec. 1, 2021, in Journal of the Geological Society, focuses on explaining why some meteorite impacts cause mass extinctions, while others don't. For example, the famous impact that killed the dinosaurs and left the Chicxulub crater was much smaller than many other impact events that didn't cause massive loss of species. Why might this be?

The robot surgeon will see you now.

For years, the world of medicine has been steadily advancing the art of robot-assisted procedures, enabling doctors to enhance their technique inside the operating theatre.

Now US researchers say a robot has successfully performed keyhole surgery on pigs all on its own - without the guiding hand of a human. Furthermore, they add, the robot surgeon produced "significantly better" results than humans.

The breakthrough is another step towards the day when fully automated surgery can be performed on patients.

The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (Star) carried out laparoscopic surgery to connect two ends of an intestine in four pigs. According to a paper published in Science Robotics, the robot excelled at the procedure, which requires a high level of precision and repetitive movements.

Axel Krieger, of Johns Hopkins University, said it marked the first time a robot had performed laparoscopic surgery without human help.

"Our findings show that we can automate one of the most intricate and delicate tasks in surgery: the reconnection of two ends of an intestine. The Star performed the procedure in four animals and it produced significantly better results than humans performing the same procedure."

An intermediate-mass black hole located in the nearby Andromeda Galaxy fills a 'large gap' in the understanding of the cosmic objects.

Astronomers have discovered a black hole "unlike any other" housed in a star cluster in the nearby Andromeda Galaxy. The "intermediate mass" object is thought to be one of a rare third type of the cosmic phenomena that could be the 'missing link' to understanding the evolution of black holes.

The findings, published recently in the Astrophysical Journal, show that the object has a mass 100,000 times greater than the Sun. This makes it smaller than supermassive black holes located at the center of galaxies, but larger than the stellar black holes formed when stars explode.

Using observational data from the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, the researchers identified the intermediate black hole (IMBH) in a massive star cluster (called B023-G078) that is more than 6 million times the mass of the Sun. The authors argue that the cluster is a "stripped nucleus," the remnant of a smaller galaxy that fell into a larger one and had its outer stars snatched away by gravitational forces.

Describing these clusters as the "dumping ground for a bunch of different stuff," study co-author Anil Seth said:

"Stripped nuclei can have repeated formation episodes, where gas falls into the center of the galaxy and forms stars. And other star clusters can get dragged into the center by the gravitational forces of the galaxy."

Astronomers have presented a new explanation for the mysterious downward-moving dark voids seen in some solar flares.

Cambridge, MA -- In January 1999, scientists observed mysterious motions within a solar flare.

Unlike typical flares that showed bright energy erupting outwards from the Sun, this solar flare also displayed a downward flow of motion, as if material was falling back towards the Sun. Described as "downward-moving dark voids," astronomers wondered what exactly they were seeing.

Now, in a study published today in Nature Astronomy, astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) offer a new explanation for the poorly understood downflows, now referred to as supra-arcade downflows (SADs) by the scientific community.

"We wanted to know how these structures occur," says lead author and CfA astronomer Chengcai Shen, who describes the structures as "dark finger-like features." "What's driving them and are they truly tied to magnetic reconnection?"

Candy, cookies, juices. Just about everyone likes sweet treats, but what one person thinks tastes too sugary, another might think is just right. This variability makes it challenging to develop new foods and beverages, so companies have sought a more objective method. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have developed an ultrasensitive bioelectronic tongue that measures sweetness by mimicking human taste buds.

Although human sensory panels are the most common way to analyze a substance's taste, there can be a lot of differences in how people perceive flavors. To get more objective data, researchers have made bioelectronic tongues in the lab, but they either are complicated to manufacture or can't fully replicate the way the human tongue works. Human tongues have sweet taste receptors with two large, complex structures that bind to compounds such as sugars. The outermost portion of one of these structures is called the Venus flytrap domain because its hinged, two-lobed molecular structure resembles the leaves of the insectivorous plant that close around its prey. This domain interacts with most of the sweet substances a person consumes. In a previous study, Tai Hyun Park, Seunghun Hong and colleagues made an umami sensor with human-like performance by using just the protein at the end of the umami taste receptor. So, these researchers wanted to apply the same concept to make a sweet-sensing bioelectronic tongue, using the Venus flytrap domain as electronic taste buds.

Through analyzes of ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, a research team led by Lund University in Sweden has found evidence of an extreme solar storm that occurred about 9,200 years ago. What puzzles the researchers is that the storm took place during one of the sun's more quiet phases - during which it is generally believed our planet is less exposed to such events.

The sun is a prerequisite for all life on Earth. But our life-giving companion can also cause problems. When there is strong activity on the surface of the sun, more energy is released, something that can give rise to geomagnetic storms. This in turn can cause power outages and communication disturbances.

Predicting solar storms is difficult. It is currently believed that they are more likely during an active phase of the sun, or solar maximum, during the so-called sunspot cycle. However, the new study published in Nature Communications shows that this may not always be the case for very large storms.

"We have studied drill cores from Greenland and Antarctica, and discovered traces of a massive solar storm that hit Earth during one of the sun's passive phases about 9,200 years ago", says Raimund Muscheler, geology researcher at Lund University.