WHO’D be a scientist these days?

Years of hard work and research prospects trickle through your fingers like sand as the UK Government plays fast and loose with education, the loss of Erasmus+ and uncertainty over the Horizon Programme. Alternatively you are howling into the void as time and time again you warn Boris Johnson of the dangers of Covid-19, aggressive new variants, border controls and the basic duty of a Prime Minister – or for that matter a First Minister - to protect citizens from harm.

Climate scientists have been up against it for years, battling against the greedy climate deniers, even as flood damage costs lives and costs trillions in mitigation and California and Australia burn in astonishing fires of biblical proportions.

Talking of the Bible, it will be of some interest to biologists, geologists and paleontologists, that the leader of a major political party in Northern Ireland is a “young earth creationist” who holds the view that the Earth began 6000 thousand years ago. This should not in itself, as some have suggested, disqualify Edwin Poots from making a serious contribution to politics but it does suggest that he never got round to watching that excellent Spencer Tracy/Fredric March movie, Inherit The Wind, which made the essential point that the embracing of faith does not necessarily demand the denial of scientific fact.

Talking of the rejection of science and fact-based, empirical research, have you heard the one about women not being allowed to say we have “vaginas”? The medical profession seems to be very quiet on the whole sex-versus-gender debate.

I’d love to know what a midwife or gynaecologist thinks about it being “forbidden” to say that women give birth, have periods and go through the agonies of the menopause. The entirely proper demand for respect and equality should not require the denial of reality.

Of course I know that females go through a myriad of versions of menstruation and non-menstruation, plus choose not to give birth or skip happily through the menopause with crystals while others suffer the pain of a hysterectomy and an accelerated and far harsher version of the change of life. In the same way, not all girls like pink and not all boys like blue. These are gender stereotypes and have nothing to do with sex-based biology. I am a proud mum to one boy and three girls and particularly delighted that my eldest daughter is a scientist.

But my point here is about science and what a sinister bashing it is taking in the 21st century which ultimately leads to a lot of suffering – from the demise of hard-worked scientific projects to the loss of loved ones and terrible long Covid symptoms because of Johnson’s refusal to listen to the experts. The continued nature devastation and the impacts on all life on Earth due to catastrophic human-induced climate change and, finally, the rejection of biology, lazily exchanged with genderised, cultural and societal constructs of what it means to be male or female.

Since the dawning of the age of reason science has led the world into progress. We would be in a very bad place without it. We wouldn’t have a vaccination for instance and we wouldn’t have definite proof that we have to stop fossil fuels and carbon emissions in order for our children to survive on this planet. Without science we wouldn’t know about the dangers of cervical and prostate cancer and how to help women and men who get this illness. We wouldn’t know about gas and air and epidurals and antibiotics after a forceps birth and issues with bodily trauma and infections post-pregnancy. And as Scots we should be rightly proud that so many of these advances have been led by our very own land of invention.

Ah but, I hear you say, what about the flip side of science? Nuclear weapons, “smart” bombs, nerve gas, the surveillance state and other instruments of control of mind and media. All true but human progress still depends on rationality and the building block of provable facts.

With this in mind, it will have been a huge relief to many to read this past week that the new head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has spoken out on women being heard in the push for self-identification. Baroness Falkner of Margravine said “someone can believe that people who self-identify as a different sex are not the different sex that they self-identify. A lot of people would find this an entirely reasonable belief”. Falkner’s comments have been welcomed by feminists who have been fighting to protect sex-based rights against an avalanche of abuse and violent threats for being “gender critical”.

It is scientific fact which shows that sex is binary, even though the existence of only two sexes does not mean sex is never ambiguous. Similarly, there is a factual basis which demonstrates that women are discriminated against due to this binary difference. For example, women who end up in prison are often the victims of male violence.

It is scientific fact that we are heading towards catastrophic global warming if we don’t try to drastically reduce our carbon emissions. The Big Bang, the dinosaurs, fossils and so on that show just how long life on Earth has existed and just how foolish it is to think otherwise.

And it is the scientific research on the infectivity of this so-called Indian variant of Covid-19 which shows that it is running riot around the UK all thanks to Johnson disregarding his advisors – yet again. And if the bodies do end up “piled high” it will be Boris bravado to blame, not the scientific advice or some mythical platoon of vaccine refuseniks.

But, as I said at the beginning, who’d be a scientist these days?