Michael Egnor: Don’t Confuse Scientific Consensus with Science

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2025

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

On this episode of ID the Future out of the vault, host Emily Kurlinski talks with Michael Egnor, professor of neurosurgery at Stony Brook University, about the dire warnings, stretching back at least to Thomas Malthus near the turn of the nineteenth century, that overpopulation would lead to starvation and civilizational ruin. Egnor discusses this and other scientific claims once widely embraced by scientific experts and later shown to be off base. The lesson, Egnor says, is that when someone tells you to believe something simply because it’s “the scientific consensus,” reserve judgment. Consensus, says Egnor, is “a political concept, not a scientific one.” And when much of the scientific community is held captive by a dogmatic adherence to materialism, Read More › Source

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
0:14.4	Welcome. I'm your host, Emily Kirlinski, and today we have an opportunity to speak with Dr. Michael
0:19.4	Egnor about scientists and the idea of scientific consensus.
0:23.6	Egnor is a professor of neurosurgery at Stony Brook University and he is well known for his work in pediatric cases.
0:29.6	He is also a senior fellow at the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.
0:34.6	Dr. Egnor, we're so glad to have you with us.
0:36.6	It's a pleasure to be here.
0:38.9	In September of 2019, you wrote an article on Evolution News called Apocalypse Now, more things
0:45.1	scientists would like you to forget. I'm wondering if you could share with us some examples of these
0:49.9	sort of world-ending disasters that scientists have predicted, even in just, for example, the past
0:54.5	50 years?
0:55.4	Sure.
0:56.2	Well, science has a tendency over the past couple of centuries, actually, to predict
1:02.6	apocalypses.
1:03.7	Probably the first apocalypse was the Malthusian apocalypse that was predicted by Thomas Malthus back in the late 18th century that the human population would outrun the food supply and that we'd all starve to death.
1:18.5	That, in fact, influenced Darwin. Darwin, about 50 years later, credited Malthus with giving him some of his ideas about natural selection.
1:33.3	But Malthusian apocalyptic hysteria has been clearly shown to be wrong. I mean, humanity is today probably better fed than it has ever been.
1:39.3	The food supply because of human ingenuity has increased at a much higher rate than human population has.
1:47.0	So scientists were wrong about that, although they still have Malthusian hoaxes going on. People still are
1:54.0	warning us about overpopulation, although it hasn't really turned out to be a problem.
1:58.5	Directly from Darwin's theory, eugenics was a scientific apocalypse.
2:03.7	The concern among eugenicists in the late 19th and early 20th century was that people of what
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