We now are well into the second year of Covid’s new and ever-evolving bio-politics. Its measures are intrusive, ineffective and/or nonsensical, and dehumanising. They have been traumatic for almost everyone. But there is an additional trauma for anti-lockdown centrists. The public voices whom we trusted, and the institutions to which we belonged or with whom we identified, have almost uniformly embraced this brave new Covid world. So we suddenly find ourselves in the strange company of libertarians, Marxists, and unaffiliated oddballs. And yet, to us, our anti-lockdown position still seems natural and sensible.

In the Covid response, scientists and science have gained an unprecedented social prominence and authority. We must, we are told, “follow the science”. The result has largely been a case of blind scientists leading equally blind governments and citizens into a ditch. I’d suggest that before deciding when and whether to follow science, we need to reflect on what science is and how it works. And 60 years ago, the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn addressed these questions in The Structures of Scientific Revolutions. It’s a useful — even a necessary one — for understanding the science and politics of Covid.

Kuhn argues in his classic work that the history of science is not a straight-line journey towards ever more scientific truth. Rather, the bulk of scientific activity consists of a continuous process of “normal science”, punctuated only rarely by the revolutions that Kuhn calls “paradigm shifts”. In normal science, scientists work within a given paradigm, a model of how their portion of the world works: their labour is to verify and refine this model. But the models of normal science can come under pressure, when they contradict new theories, or when fitting new data to them becomes increasingly unwieldy.

Scientific revolutions then happen when an old model is questioned, rejected and replaced with a new one. This is a gradual process: the old paradigm’s defenders will need to either die or convert before the new paradigm is fully accepted. Well-known examples include celestial mechanics, where Ptolemy’s geocentric universe yielded to Copernicus, Keppler and Newton; physics (Kuhn’s own discipline), where Aristotle’s laws were replaced by Newton’s, superseded in turn by relativity and quantum mechanics; and natural history, where the young earth on which God created each living species separately and purposively became the unfathomably ancient planet where species evolved from each other through the unguided randomness of natural selection.

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Kuhn posits that shifts of this sort are not simply new truths revealed by the accumulation of experimental data. Rather, taken on its own, data is both infinite and incomprehensible. Scientists need models to make sense of data, to decide what to trust, and what to question. Observation, obviously, helps to form these models, but so do pure hypotheses. A paradigm is not accepted only once it is shown that it explains all the data. Rather, the paradigm is accepted early on, and then normal science filters the data through it. Everyday science does not involve a constant questioning of every element in a scientific field. In normal practice, scientists must base their research on unquestioned assumptions. Questioning is rather the exception, that can lead to a paradigm shift, after which normal science resumes under the new paradigm.

For instance, Darwin did not posit the paradigm shift of natural selection because he had seen examples of every extinct and living species in the chain of life. Rather he started from examples that made the paradigm seem plausible, and then endeavoured to fit the whole of the natural world to his assumptions. Because his paradigm won the day, subsequent generations of biologists then set about building on Darwin’s work, adding samples to the record of species, constructing speculative evolutionary histories to fill gaps, and above all factoring in the new data of genetics and molecular biology.

I believe a Kuhnian paradigm shift is now taking place in the scientific fields most relevant to Covid. In this respect, the scientists who have guided the bulk of the Covid response have set up a new paradigm, a new series of unquestionable truths. So, in epidemiology these truths are: lockdowns are an effective and a necessary measure to handle a pandemic, and masks work well against respiratory diseases. In virology and immunology we have: natural immunity is inferior to vaccine-acquired immunity, and injections that alleviate viral symptoms (at least in the short-term), but do not stop infection or transmission, are successful vaccines. Finally, in the field of public health: citizens and governments have the ability and therefore the responsibility to alter the course of a pandemic by the restructuring of daily life.

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This paradigm shift is not complete. Some prominent scientists continue to adhere to older paradigms. For them, none of the above principles is a basis for normal science: rather, they are, at best, within the range of the questionable, at worst demonstrably false. The trouble is that dialogue between this old guard and the scientists of the new paradigm is largely impossible, because dialogue works best within a shared framework.

In Kuhn’s thesis, the two sides cannot simply reach agreement by impartial analysis of the same evidence. Evidence is far too complex to make sense on its own; scientific debate can generally only bear fruit within a shared paradigm of how to select and use evidence. Most evolutionary biologists have no interest in any interpretation of evidence that is purported to show direct divine intervention. Similarly, most leading covidologists have no interest, for instance, in studies that indicate that neither masks nor mask mandates affect the spread of Covid.

Since Kuhn published his book, talk of “paradigm shifts” has moved beyond the philosophy of science, and entered the everyday lexicon. This is doubtless because we perceive such shifts not only in the specialised domains of science, but in the framework of moral and social norms that affects us all. At least since the ancient Greek sophists, philosophers have observed that such norms vary from one society to another. But a characteristic of modernity has been a sequence of relatively rapid shifts in norms within a given society.

To pick an example where the old paradigm is truly dead and buried: for much of European history, it was largely held as self-evident that a certain excellence of character and ability came with being born of noble blood. This notion now seems ridiculous to us, and its late-born heir, scientific racism, is going the same way. For other norms, most notoriously those of sexual morality, the paradigm shift is far from complete. Each side appeals to a model of human nature, which it holds as self-evident, and which the other side rejects. Debate becomes a dialogue of the deaf, exactly because each side rejects the other’s paradigm.

Clearly the Covid paradigm shift is taking place not just in science, but in this wider world of moral and social norms. The field of public health necessarily takes us into that world: as its name implies, public health is inevitably a political matter. We are changing our society and our morality when we consider viral spread to be a moral failing, and prioritise its prevention over such basic needs as freedom of movement or physical contact.

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It is first and foremost these moral and social changes that have horrified us anti-lockdown centrists. Most of us, probably, are not scientists, although many of us have done a great deal of scientific reading since March 2020. But our core position must be that the proposed new normal of indefinite intrusions on our freedom and our flourishing is unacceptable regardless of these policies’ effectiveness against Covid. In our paradigm, the old normative paradigm that we are bewildered to find is not shared by so many of our peers, social distancing in the long run threatens the death of society, to be replaced by a grotesque ballet of the masked and vaxxed, interacting only at the whim of governments and experts.

There is, however, one aspect of Kuhn’s thought that remains controversial among historians and philosophers of science. Kuhn’s model can be reconciled with the Enlightenment narrative of scientific progress, if we posit that a paradigm replaces its predecessor because it is more true: Einstein’s physics comes closer to describing reality than Newton’s; natural selection of random mutations is a truer explanation of the evolution of species than any teleological drive. But for Kuhn one paradigm replaced another not because it was more true, but only because it was, for a given scientific community, more fruitful and satisfactory, a “better instrument for discovering and solving puzzles”. Criteria for a successful new paradigm included improvements in “accuracy of prediction, simplicity, scope, and compatibility with other specialties”. But these did not amount to “a better representation of what nature is really like”[1.  Quotes are from Kuhn’s postscript to the 1969 edition of his book, in which he defended himself against the charge of scientific relativism]. The only linear scientific progress Kuhn then acknowledged was that within the normal science that elaborated a given paradigm.

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Kuhn’s scepticism towards progress was certainly influenced by the impasse reached by his own discipline, physics. Relativity and quantum mechanics are both extremely powerful paradigms, but they cannot be reconciled: as far as we can tell, they can’t both be true. But hopefully such an impasse is not the last word in physics, let alone the ultimate destiny of all scientific and moral paradigms.

We anti-lockdown centrists are fully prepared to argue on both facts and principles, and we continue to hope that our paradigm will win out. We believe that the new scientific paradigm fails even on Kuhn’s own terms, because it provides no better model for understanding the phenomena. But, beyond that, we maintain that the old paradigms – both scientific and social – really are more true to the natural world and to human nature. So we hope that our communities can be convinced both that most anti-Covid measures have proved ineffective, and that their social price is far too high. Such arguments will not be easy, because dialogue between paradigms never is. The first step is for both sides to see that the debate is indeed between rival paradigms, and that, consequently, the future of both medical science and society are at stake.

Darwin still divides the Left and Right, but the polarity has reversed. No one really cares about creationists any more. Instead, the row is over whether Darwin – and his theory, or its implications – is racist, or sexist. And the people passionately defending him are often right-wingers, while his critics are on the Left.

The latest incarnation is a by-the-numbers fighting-the-culture-war piece in the Telegraph about a guide to “Applying a decolonial framework to teaching and research in ecology and evolution” published by some plant scientists in the University of Sheffield. In the guide, science lecturers are told to contextualise Darwin by making it clear how his worldview was shaped by colonialism and racism.

I’ve read the guide, and it’s kind of tiresome. A small but irritating aspect is that it slanders the great pioneer of genetic biology JBS Haldane as a “racist and eugenicist”, on the basis of a piece of science fiction he once wrote.

It does indeed criticise Darwin too, one angle of which is that the HMS Beagle, upon which he sailed, was on a mission to map the coastline of South America in order to aid colonial control; that seems a strange thing to blame him for. But it also says that he thought white people were superior to black people, and men to women. It doesn’t mention his passionate hatred of slavery – “Great God how I should like to see that greatest curse on Earth Slavery abolished,” he wrote, saying it would be worth a million lives lost in war to end it – which feels relevant, but no doubt he was racist by modern standards. Cue a thousand-year war over whether we should judge him by standards of his own day or ours, and what those standards are, and so on.

I also rather wish that the Sheffield academics had mentioned whether or not they think Darwin’s theory of natural selection is true or not. There’s an awful lot of talk about power imbalances, Eurocentric viewpoints, and the legacy of colonialism, and how science “cannot be objective and apolitical” – but regardless of whether or not Darwin was racist, was he right? Maybe that’s taken for granted.

Universities, though, are universities; there are hundreds of them, and hundreds of academics in each one, and academics are mainly very left-wing. If you pick the most left-wing thing some academic has said that week, then you’ll never run out of things to print in your newspaper, if you need to keep stoking the culture war to rile up your readership. 

It’s not just the man himself, though. The interesting question is not whether he was personally racist, or to what extent his views were shaped by colonialism – the interesting question is whether his ideas were correct, or, more generally, which of the many, many ideas that have sprung forth from his initial, startling insight are correct, and which are not.

The sad, forgotten creationists aside, most of us gladly accept that dragonflies’ wings and wombats’ toenails or whatever have evolved; that those ancestors which had versions of those organs more suited to their environment tended to have more offspring.

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But when Darwin’s idea gets applied to behaviour, it becomes more controversial. The field of science that tries to do this is called sociobiology; it was controversial enough when it arose in the Seventies, pioneered by EO Wilson. It caused a furore – protesters poured water over Wilson’s head during a conference talk, chanting “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.” Wilson’s work was mainly about ants.

When Darwinian ideas are applied to the human brain, and human behaviour, it is called evolutionary psychology, and that is more controversial still. 

Which, on the face of it, is strange. Evolutionary psychology is, at its heart, the idea that the brain (and therefore the mind, and human behaviour and psychology in general) is the product of evolution, just like every other animal organ. As Richard Dawkins wrote in the 2005 foreword to The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, that is so obviously true as to be almost not worth saying: “The central claim [of evolutionary psychology] is not an extraordinary one,” he wrote. “It amounts to the exceedingly modest claim that minds are on the same footing as bodies where Darwinian natural selection is concerned. Given that feet, livers, ears, wings, shells, eyes, crests, ligaments, antennae, hearts and feathers are shaped by natural selection … why on earth should the same not be true of brains[?]”

If you accept that evolution really happened and that humans are a product of it, then that should surely be uncontroversial. It’s surely the case that if we had evolved from bats, or whales, rather than apes, we would be very different, psychologically speaking. But evolutionary psychology is an astonishingly controversial field. It’s “pseudoscience”, or “unfalsifiable”, according to some.

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The idea that the mind is evolved goes back to Darwin himself, but it was Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, a wife-and-husband team of academics, who really developed the field in The Adapted Mind, a book of essays they edited in 1992. 

Insofar as I can tell, evolutionary psychology is no more pseudoscientific or unfalsifiable than evolutionary biology in general. It’s harder to do, because brains and behaviour don’t usually leave fossils, but in principle it’s the same. You come up with some hypothesis, you make predictions using that hypothesis, and you test those predictions against reality.

For instance: one hypothesis within evolutionary psychology is the “psychological immune system”, the idea that we have an evolved tendency to behave in ways that reduce our exposure to dangerous pathogens. That’s pretty obviously the case in certain situations — for instance, faeces and rotting meat smell bad to us and we want to get away from them. But one more specific hypothesis was that people who have recently been ill, and therefore less able to fight off new diseases, would be hypersensitive to that tendency, and would want to (for instance) avoid people whose faces showed signs of disease.

One study found evidence that that was the case; a later, larger replication found that it wasn’t. Hypothesis (so far) falsified. This is bog-standard science.

It is true that there are a lot of comedy-sounding studies, into nipple erection and sexiness or a correlation between intelligence and semen quality, and some of them have failed to replicate. 

But if having some strange-sounding studies published, or studies that have failed to replicate, is enough to render an entire field pseudoscientific, then very few fields will survive. The field of medicine contains studies like this, in the medical journal Global Advances in Health and Medicine, which claims that to heal the body we need to study “the human energy field” and especially “organ-associated frequencies instrumental in the endocrine/chakra systems”. (It was eventually retracted, after two years.)

And this, in the same journal, encouraging “shamanic journeying” in paediatric palliative care, “in which the patient or the shaman moves into an altered state of awareness and encounters … ‘power animals.’” Or this paper, in the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology, which looked at five (5) human brains, used no control group, did frankly weird things with the numbers, and used that to claim that aluminium in vaccines causes autism.

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Those papers — which took me five minutes to find — are bad, and silly, and potentially harmful. But we don’t throw out the entire scientific field of medicine because there are weird, bad papers published on its fringes. Evolutionary psychology has its cranks, and its amusing or weird-sounding papers, but so does every field. Demanding that it alone be pure is an isolated demand for rigour. It’s not fair to apply uniquely stringent rules to evolutionary psychology, and I think the only reason people do is because evolutionary psychology is associated with a particular kind of reactionary politics.

It is, of course, true that evolutionary psychology can have obvious political implications that other fields, chemistry or astrophysics, say, might not. And some of them are unpalatable. The James Damore “Google memo” based its suggestion that women are, on average, less interested in tech than men explicitly on an “evolutionary psychology perspective”, for instance.

But there is lots of perfectly good, and politically uncontroversial as well as scientifically uncontroversial, science that goes on, looking at psychology through an evolutionary lens. Daniel Kahneman’s great work of popular psychology, Thinking, Fast and Slow, explicitly describes human psychology as an evolved thing: “The questions are perhaps less urgent for a human in a city environment than for a gazelle on the savannah, but we have inherited the neural mechanisms that evolved to provide ongoing assessments of threat level, and they have not been turned off.” He links our ability to read faces to a crucial evolutionary need to assess the intentions of people around us. This is evolutionary psychology, unadorned.

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More importantly, though: whether something is politically convenient or not doesn’t affect whether it’s true. The Damore essay is a case in point. It certainly doesn’t seem to be unambiguously false: Cordelia Fine, author of Delusions of Gender and a populariser of feminism-inspired science, told the Guardian that Damore’s summation of the difference between men and women was far from perfect but “more accurate and nuanced than what you sometimes find in the popular literature” and “not seen as especially controversial”.

One problem is that if you say things like “Some of the differences between men and women are caused by evolution,” it sounds as though you’re saying “And therefore there is no point in working to reduce the gender pay gap”, or “and therefore women are supposed to have babies and not work”. It’s very hard to avoid people hearing those things. 

And it’s absolutely true that some people do use evolutionary psychology as a crutch for their beliefs; human beings are, indeed, not lobsters. (Mind you, they’re not clownfish either.)

Charles Darwin, the historical figure, is interesting to study, and it’s worth remembering that he was a man of his time. But Darwinism, the great insight of evolution by natural selection, is separate. It is true (or false) regardless of Darwin’s own views, and so are the many insights which have followed it. We can go back and forth over whether he was a racist, but the more interesting question is: was he right?