Category Archives: Science

Interesting quote from Charles Darwin

In his "Journal of a Voyage Round the World", he praised Christian culture and the work of missionaries.

In his book “The Mission of God” (Wilberforce Publications, London 2016), the author Joseph Boot quotes Darwin. On page 381 of that book, he introduces the quote thus:

On his world voyage on the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin, despite his growing agnosticism and deistic religious confusion, found himself unable to overlook the profound impact of Christian missionaries in Tahiti and the Pacific Islands. In the first work he ever wrote, before the implications of his theory gripped and ruled him, Darwin’s Christianized background caused him to rain praise on the evangelical missionary.

There follows this quote, which, according to the endnote, is from

Charles Darwin: Journal of a voyage round the world (London: T. Nelson and Sons, Paternoster Row, 1890), 496-947.

This is it:

It appears to me that the morality and religion of the inhabitants are highly creditable. There are many who attack … both the missionaries, their system, and the effects produced by it. Such reasoners never compare the present state with that of the Island only twenty years ago, nor even with that of Europe at this day; but they compare it with the high standard of gospel perfection … [T]hey forget, or will not remember, that human sacrifices, and the power of an idolatrous priesthood – a system of profligacy unparalleled in any other part of the world – infanticide, a consequence of that system – bloody wars, where the conquerors spared neither women nor children – that all these have been abolished, and that dishonesty, intemperance, and licentiousness have been greatly reduced, by the introduction of Christianity. In a voyager to forget these things is base ingratitude; for should he chance to be at the point of shipwreck on some unknown coast, he will most devoutly pray that the lesson of the missionary may have extended thus far … [T]hose who are most severe should consider how much of the morality of the women in Europe is owing to the system early impressed by mothers on their daughters, and how much in each individual case to the precepts of religion. But it is useless to argue against such reasoners; – I believe that, disappointed in not finding the field of licentiousness quite so open as formally, they will not give credit to a morality which they do not wish to practice, or to a religion which they undervalue, if not despise. 

How Science is Done These Days

With the example of climate science

Article by Tony Thomas.

Excerpt:

There’s nothing new about mainstream climate scientists conspiring to bury papers that throw doubt on catastrophic global warming. The Climategate leaks showed co-compiler of the HadCRUT global temperature series Dr Phil Jones emailing Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann, July 8, 2004:

I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth, a colleague] and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

Thanks to a science whistle-blower, there’s now documentation of a current exercise as bad as that captured in the Jones-Mann correspondence. This new and horrid saga – again involving Dr Mann – sets out to deplatform and destroy a peer-endorsed published paper by four Italian scientists. Their paper in European Physical Journal Plus is titled A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming and documents that extreme weather and related disasters are not generally increasing, contrary to the catastrophists feeding misinformation to the Guardian/ABC axis and other compliant media.

The witch-hunt has Australian elements. Last September, The Australian’s environment writer, Graham Lloyd, highlighted the paper (paywalled) and its conclusion that the “extreme events emergency” was overblown. Sky News Australia, which twice reported the study, picked up more than 400,000 views and thousands of comments.

The green-left Guardian countered with a hit-piece by in-house cataastrophist Graham Readfearn featuring professors Lisa Alexander and Steve Sherwood, both of NSW University. They alleged cherry-picking and misquoting. Their main specific complaint was that the Italians’ paper had drawn on the 2013 5th IPCC Report rather than the recent 6th Report. (The Italians say they submitted the paper before the 6th Report emerged).

The Guardian’s fuss caught the attention of Agence France-Presse’s (AFP) Marlowe Hood, who modestly styles himself “Senior Editor, Future of the Planet” and “Herald of the Anthropocene”. He penned his own diatribe for The Australian (paywalled but also here) against the Italians’ paper. Jumping the gun on any editorial inquiry, AFP branded the study “faulty” and “fundamentally flawed”, involving “discredited assertions” and “grossly manipulated data”. This abuse was normal since AFP and The Guardian are leaders of the Covering Climate Now (CCN) coalition of some 500 media outlets with reach to a 2 billion audience. These outlets signed the CCN pledge to hype catastrophism and rebut and censor any scepticism about our planet’s forecast fiery fate.

The whistle-blowers’ documents reveal how this media pile-on – as distinct from reasoned scientific complaint — led the journal’s owner, Springer, to demand “action”. Springer’s aim was to force the editor to publish at least an erratum and, preferably, retract it altogether, restoring climate right-think.

I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published

Patrick T Brown lays out why science, in particular climate science, is so corrupt.

At the same time, the UN announces that “climate breakdown”, whatever that means, has begun. Just a few weeks after it announced that “the era of global warming is over, the era of global boiling has begun”. How anyone can take that seriously is beyond me.

Modern Medicine’s Great Controversy by Dr. Peter McCullough, Mises Institute Speech

31 minute speech here. (Also here and here.)

Modern Medicine’s Great Controversy by Dr. McCullough, Mises Institute Speech, Medical Freedom Summit, Windham, NH, August 19, 2023. This speech was followed by a wonderful presentation from ethicist and former professor of medicine Dr. Aaron Kheriaty. The audience was a prestigious group of intellectuals and business magnates hosted by Joe Matarese in Windham, New Hampshire.

The Royal Society’s lockdown pseudoscience

This once venerable scientific institution has ignored all of the real-world evidence against the Covid restrictions.

Article by David Livermore.

Excerpt:

Real-world evidence against NPIs [Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions] is also nowhere to be found in the Royal Society’s report. Although only a minority of countries adopted few or no restrictions in response to the pandemic, Belarus, Sweden and Nicaragua can all be counted as examples. They are the closest to a control group that we have if we are truly to understand the effects of NPIs. However, searching the report for these countries returns zero hits. This is odd, considering that South Korea appears 52 times and China 19 times.