Last week, science writer Christopher Plain published a story in the online magazine The Debrief (which describes its subject matter as “Science, Tech and Defense for the Rebelliously Curious”) about fossilized human footprints found in a desiccated lakebed in White Sands, New Mexico. According to the article, radiocarbon dating places the age of the footprints at 23,000 years old. This would be during the “Last Glacial Maximum” — a time when glaciers were at their southernmost extent over what is now North America, northern Europe and Asia — and 10,000 years earlier than contemporary theorists claim human beings were in the Americas.

The discovery not only radically changes our perspective on the migration of ancient peoples; it provides yet another warning about undue reliance upon what has come to be called “settled science.”

Consider this quote from the piece:

“For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, archaeologists believed humans had not arrived in the Americas until as recently as 3,000-4,000 years ago. In the late 1920s, archaeological discoveries at sites like Folsom and Clovis in New Mexico pushed that date back thousands of years, with the most commonly accepted date for human arrival being extended to 13,000 years ago. … The situation changed in 2019 when researchers from the UK’s Bournemouth University and the U.S. National Park Service unearthed a series of undoubtedly human footprints in White Sands dated to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago.”

The article quotes geologist Jeff Pigati, from the U.S Geological Survey, as well as anthropology and geology professor Vance Holliday and doctoral student Jason Windingstad, both from the University of Arizona, whose (separate) studies confirmed the dates of the human footprints. Windingstad admits, “It’s a strange feeling when you go out there and look at the footprints and see them in person. You realize that it basically contradicts everything that you’ve been taught about the peopling of North America.”

That contradiction has caused consternation among experts in the field. Plain writes that, notwithstanding 55 separate carbon dating tests of the footprints and surrounding materials, the scholars’ new conclusions “remain highly controversial since they seem to go against a relatively well-established timeline.”

That’s the way real science works: Even the most “established” theories can be questioned. And while defenders of the status quo will demand (a lot of) evidence, what we “know” will change when new information proves the old ways of thinking false.

But science becomes a very different process — rigid, intolerant of dissent and dangerous — when it gets yoked to politics. Questions are no longer permitted, because now it’s not just some obscure academic’s pet theory that’s at stake; it’s a platform of policy objectives that an entire political party is seeking to force down the public’s throat (or into other parts of their bodies, as the case may be).

I (and others) have written about this before. In 2017, I wrote “What Margarine Can Teach Us About Climate Change,” an article about Dr. Paul Offit’s book “Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong.” The government chose to discourage consumption of dairy products in favor of seed oils, on the basis of flawed and incomplete information, with deleterious health consequences.

Two years later, I wrote another article that explained how governments around the world mandated sterilizations, coerced abortions and promoted infanticide in response to fearmongering and false predictions about a “population explosion.”

In 2022, Powerline Blog’s John Hinderaker wrote a series of articles about how Sri Lanka’s president decided to ban synthetic fertilizer (in pursuit of “climate change” objectives, of course), resulting in the collapse of the country’s agriculture and its economy. After months without food, heating oil and other necessities, Sri Lankans stormed the presidential palace in Colombo and forced their president to flee the country on a military jet.

One dead giveaway that academic inquiry has been being hijacked by politics is the term “settled science.” So, we’re told it’s “settled science” that childhood vaccines are safe — until we learn that none have been the subject of long-term testing against placebos, and some researchers are now investigating possible connections between vaccinations and sudden infant death syndrome. Those defending the current vaccination schedule insist that these new inquiries are nonsense. We’ll see.

It was “settled science” that COVID-19 jumped species at a Wuhan market, and we were to pay no attention to the international virology lab behind the curtain, or the gain-of-function research that we weren’t funding there (except when we were).

It was “settled science” that the mRNA shots for COVID-19 were “safe and effective” — even though they didn’t prevent contraction or transmission of the disease (and dictionaries magically changed their definitions of “vaccine” to remove the word “immunity”). And there have been thousands of cases — many fatal — of myocarditis and pericarditis in young people. Other potential adverse effects are now being studied as well. The “party line” is still that the shots are safe. We’ll see.

The “science” around “climate change” isn’t “settled” either. That the climate changes is certain (just ask the people making their way past the glaciers 20,000 years ago); the extent to which human activity changes it is not. When I was in high school, we were warned about “the coming ice age.” By the time I was in law school, it was “global warming.” Predictions about the “ozone hole” and Antarctic ice have been wrong.

“Science” is a process, not a result. If the consequences of your hypothesis don’t pan out as you predicted, your hypothesis is wrong. The footprints in White Sands, New Mexico, tell us that what we previously thought about migration from Asia into the Americas was wrong. The footprint of “settled science” shows us that politicians who tie their pet policies to scientific theories are almost always wrong.

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