Jan Brueghel de Oude en Peter Paul Rubens

All knowledgeable persons are knowledgeable alike. All ignorant persons are ignorant in their own way. So I discovered during the days when, as a former high school English teacher, I once encountered a student who honestly thought Tolstoy had written a book called Anna Kournikova. But then, I also once encountered a student who equally honestly thought Shakespeare had written a play called Midsomer Murders, so perhaps I just wasn’t doing my job properly.

These ill-informed children may well have known Puck All about world literature, but their misapprehensions were at least original, and as such possessed a certain ironic value all of their own: I just got the introduction to an entire article out of them, didn’t I? These innovative inaccuracies were so very, very wrong, they ended up being in a certain sense even better than being unoriginal but right.

Apple of Discord
Is originality of knowledge a virtue, then, or is it overrated?

Back in the days before the Bible was even written, Eve prompted Adam into committing the Original Sin. In the several ensuing millennia since, many people have heartily wished she never bothered.

The apple the inventive offender enticed Adam into eating is often termed the Fruit of Knowledge, sometimes taken as a symbol for science. You would think the dual nature of the fruit—bringing both the positive of human wisdom and the negative of human sin into the world—would indicate that science itself is one of those pleasingly rational and balanced fields that values the twin apples of originality and non-originality equally. In the popular image of scientific history, the pursuit is seen as simultaneously embracing genuine new insights, like Copernicus’ once-revolutionary heliocentric model of the universe, before then enshrining such initial novelties as perpetually enduring items of standard human information.

Yet this is not necessarily how science always functions in practice at all. Studies like Thomas S. Kuhn’s famous 1962 Structure of Scientific Revolutions demonstrate conclusively how science is above all a human endeavor, inseparable from the beliefs, worldviews, and politics of the fallen, post-Edenic humans who practice it.

Many scientists do not like to give up their beloved age-old paradigms, either technical or ideological, and, Kuhn showed, often act to downplay or even suppress awkward anomalies, theories, and results that may upset the prevailing social-scientific applecarts, and their careers alongside them.

Corpse Candles
Our media gives the deliberate impression that science is ever and always open to infinite originalities and innovations of all kinds by endlessly focusing upon the more comically outré experiments and inventions taking place out there. In reality, such stories are often more a form of near-useless “science-as-entertainment,” whose apparently boundless freedom is enjoyed purely because the trivialities being explored are so utterly meaningless and nonthreatening in their nature.

Consider recent Japanese research into attempts to create an “edible robot” as part of a newly invented field of “Human-Edible Robot Interaction” (HERI). As befits its status of “science-as-entertainment,” this was all inspired by Anpanman, a Japanese kids’ cartoon superhero with a head shaped like a jam-filled bun who repeatedly tears strips off his own face to feed to other characters, thus saving them from starvation.

A team of Anpanman-loving oriental robot-abusers coated a vertical vibrating pneumatic tube in a layer of apple-flavored yellow gelatin before drawing a face on so it resembled a living candle. Then, volunteers were asked to eat two such jelly candles, one when the vibrating tube was turned on, making it wriggle like a worm, and once when it was turned off, making it seem more inanimate.

Following successful digestion, diners were asked if they felt more guilty eating the pulsating living jelly-man or the still, corpse-like one. More felt guilty when chewing down on the mover-and-shaker, leading the professors to conclude that swallowing live animals was far worse for your conscience than biting into dead ones. I’d love to see them repeat the experiment with some cannibals.

IgNobel Pursuits
Famously, there is an annual awards ceremony these days for the strangest and most futile-seeming pieces of science, the IgNobel Prize, devoted toward publicizing findings that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

The titles alone of some Prize-winning research papers are worth listing: “Salmonella Excretion in Joy-Riding Pigs,” “The Constipated Serviceman: Prevalence Among Deployed US Troops,” “Impact of Wet Underwear on Thermoregulatory Responses and Thermal Comfort in the Cold,” “Transmission of Gonorrhea Through an Inflatable Doll,” “Farting as a Defense Against Unspeakable Dread,” “A Man Who Pricked His Finger and Smelled Putrid for Five Years,” “Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans,” “An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep Over Various Surfaces,” “The Effect of Country Music on Suicide,” “The Significance of Mr Richard Buckley’s Exploding Trousers,” “Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature,” “Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage,” “Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller,” “Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?” “Why Do Old Men Have Big Ears?” and a handy anatomical guide, “Penises of the Animal Kingdom,” also available in the form of a (taxpayer-funded) pop-up book.

Amongst other pieces of less-than-vital research, IgNobel-winning scientists further studied whether or not it was possible to manufacture viable knives from frozen shit, if it was more efficient to transport a rhinoceros by airplane upside down or right way up, what happened to the brain waves of locusts whilst they were watching Star Wars, the effects of feeding Prozac to depressed clams, the impact upon their sex lives of forcing rodents to wear tiny trousers, what happens to unborn babies if doctors play music directly into their mothers’ vaginas, whether it was medically possible to diagnose narcissists simply from looking at their eyebrows, the difference between scrotal asymmetry in naked and clothed French postmen, and why it was that woodpeckers didn’t just give themselves massive headaches.

Award-winning useless inventions, meanwhile, included a special table for aiding difficult births by spinning a strapped-down expectant mother around at super-high speed until eventually the baby just flew out from between her legs like a mini-Superman covered in blood and amniotic fluids. Probably best not used in a maternity-ward delivery room with lots of large windows.

Brains, but No Trust
This all gives the cumulative impression that today’s scientists are allowed to investigate whatever they jolly well please, entirely consequence-free. However, this is an illusion created by the fact that such curious pieces of IgNobel knowledge upset no vested interests whatsoever. If you are conclusively able to demonstrate that rats find it difficult to differentiate between recordings of the Dutch and Japanese languages being played backwards into their cages, as one team did, then nobody really cares, as such incredible minutiae threaten absolutely nobody’s careers, research grants, political outlooks, or cherished beliefs. With certain other areas of study, however, attitudes toward original thoughts are rather different…

When it comes to investigations of the human brain, for instance, certain findings are clearly considered admissible, and others are not. Last year, Greek researchers examined MRI scans of the brains of 928 Dutch citizens, before asking patients their political allegiances. Supposedly, this showed conservatives tended to have a larger amygdala than liberals, this being a part of the brain that helps regulate emotions like fear. Thus, the scientists were able to conclude such people would naturally “have higher needs for security,” so making them lean rightward.

Such novel findings are deemed scientifically acceptable, as they lend themselves toward the following, politically satisfactory interpretation: Dutch conservatives are mentally disabled and only vote for anti-immigration politicians with equally oddly shaped skulls like Geert Wilders because their spazzy, amygdala-warped brains make them irrationally dread being stabbed to death by nearby Moroccans.

But what if other scientists had taken MRI scans of Moroccan immigrants and native white Dutchmen and concluded the brains of the latter were simply of a much higher quality, all things considered? Li Zehou was a Chinese philosopher who died in exile in the U.S. in 2021, having his brain cryogenically frozen like Walt Disney supposedly did. Unlike Uncle Walt, Zehou did this not because he wanted to be reanimated one day, but because he theorized the different ways of thinking enjoyed between different cultures would end up leaving a different cerebral “sediment” captured within the gray matter of different nationalities, a physical substance potentially measurable after death.

If so, this would lend credence to the currently socially verboten idea that there really might be quantifiable physical and intellectual differences between the world’s different races. Thus, Zehou has yet to receive any IgNobel Prize himself, despite the overtly weird nature of his ideas and actions. After all, if he turned out to be correct, that would help make the entire pseudoscientific “Race is a cultural fiction” narrative Western society is currently being forced to swallow somewhat untenable. Seeing what happens when you make locusts watch Star Wars, by contrast, will not upset Black Lives Matter or the ADL one little bit.

Academic Arguments
We have just marked a year since the first publication of another piece of amusingly unusual research that probably won’t be getting an IgNobel Prize anytime soon, an essay called “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution” by Nathan Cofnas.

Cofnas is a white, U.S.-born junior Cambridge academic who has written some controversial pieces pointing out the awkward social implications of the proven fact that average IQs differ among different races. This has led Cofnas to develop some brutally honest, if rather non-PC, hypotheses about what Western society would look like if these realities were actually acknowledged, rather than systematically ignored in a wholly nonscientific fashion, as is actually the case.

As he put it in the above paper, without positive discrimination at top universities like Harvard, “the number of black professors would approach zero percent,” unless Thomas Sowell somehow managed to develop the ability to bilocate. In a truly color-blind and scientifically meritocratic society, Cofnas said, “blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile fields outside of sports and entertainment.” And reruns of America’s Most Wanted, of course.

A lot of liberal people—including liberal scientists—may find this idea uncomfortable, Cofnas said, but it was backed up by actual data, and “since truth is intrinsically valuable,” it was the moral duty of scientists to demonstrate such realities even when uncomfortable to received public wisdom.

This was indeed an Original Sin—but Cofnas’ punishment was distinctly standard-issue. For presenting mankind with the Forbidden Fruit of Knowledge, like apple-thieving Eve before him, the honest academic was faced with compulsory exile from the Edenic lawns of Cambridge, after being subject to an attempted cancellation. Even though the IQ data Cofnas was referring to was real and accurate, the Director of his College’s Centre of African Studies declared that having someone like Cofnas working there was “like having a Flat Earther in the Physics faculty.” If said Flat Earther happened to be Candace Owens, that would be just another DEI hire.

Talking of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, one of the chief complaints about Cofnas’ statements of pure physical fact was that they contradicted Cambridge’s DEI policies: A more realistic assessment of the matter might be that Cambridge’s DEI policies contradicted pure physical fact.

“With every coffin comes the advancement of science,” the German physicist Max Planck once said, as regards the socio-scientific old guard standing in the way of new ideas. When it comes to shifting outmoded old notions like race being a pure genetic fiction, something tells me we’re going to need a whole cemetery.