I don’t think the effects of authoritarianism in science are complete – far from it. However, since there is not a scintilla of evidence against Evolution, it’s going to be hard to progress further down that track other than by filling in the details – the big jumps occur when you have contradiction, paradox, mystery. I guess there is still a bit of work to do in genetics, but at this point it does not seem like the overall paradigm is going to be overthrown. So that’s pretty static. In the case of climate change, I haven’t seen much change in people’s positions over the years. I still see things like ‘93% of scientists believe in climate change’, which reminds me of the time when hundreds of scientists signed a statement that Einstein was wrong (about Relativity). That kind of argument is purely authoritarian. (As Uncle Albert said, ‘Why did they get hundreds, when all they needed was one?’) There have also been a lot of apocalyptic predictions and charges of dishonesty, conspiracy, and special interest, which are signs of authoritarian politicization and faith, not science. Curiously, I have believed that global warming would occur since I was a child sixty-odd years ago, because I heard about smudge pots in orange groves, used to ward off freezing; the extrapolation seems obvious.
I can think of some other cases. I attended a prestigious university in the late 1950s, where one could not teach psychology unless one was a Freudian. Enough said?
