I am quoting Bruce Charlton. He calls expedient research, where the truth is hidden by social expediency, zombie science. I suggest that suggests too much life and passion. It is converged science, it is worse than undead, entropy has won, and there is no longer any meaning

Anyone who has been a scientist for more than a couple of decades will realize that there has been a progressive and pervasive decline in the honesty of scientific communications. Yet real science simply must be an arena where truth is the rule; or else the activity simply stops being science and becomes something else: Zombie science. Although all humans ought to be truthful at all times; science is the one area of social functioning in which truth is the primary value, and truthfulness the core evaluation. Truth-telling and truth-seeking should not, therefore, be regarded as unattainable aspirations for scientists, but as iron laws, continually and universally operative. Yet such is the endemic state of corruption that an insistence on truthfulness in science seems perverse, aggressive, dangerous, or simply utopian. Not so: truthfulness in science is not utopian and was indeed taken for granted (albeit subject to normal human imperfections) just a few decades ago. Furthermore, as Jacob Bronowski argued, humans cannot be honest only in important matters while being expedient in minor matters: truth is all of a piece. There are always so many incentives to lie that truthfulness is either a habit or else it declines. This means that in order to be truthful in the face of opposition, scientists need to find a philosophical basis which will sustain a life of habitual truth and support them through the pressure to be expedient (or agreeable) rather than honest. The best hope of saving science from a progressive descent into Zombiedom seems to be a moral Great Awakening: an ethical revolution focused on re-establishing the primary purpose of science: which is the pursuit of truth.

This was written in 2009. Over the last eight years, things have got worse. The entryists demand that all things are appropriate. As if facts are appropriate, and care for our feelings.

This is not science: it is a lie: our science is no science but an ideology. It is no-science, nonsense. Unless those of us cross-grained enough to continue to be honest continue, the hope for Charlton’s moral awakening will disappear.

And with no-science, we will find we are doing no-engineering, no-medicine, and no-culture. May we change, and rediscover truth.