Science may be a tried and tested way of knowing what we know, but it’s under threat. In Australia, leading science agency CSIRO is expected to cut up to 350 research roles. A CSIRO staffer said it was among the worst cuts the agency has ever seen.

In the United States, the Trump administration is waging war on science. It’s threatening the largest ever budget cut to the US National Science Foundation. It has also allowed US National Institutes of Health to slash $2 billion from its grant budget. The freezing of US National Science Foundation budgets this year left many researchers without a salary.

These cuts are affecting global science funding – including in Australia.

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Review: The War on Science – edited by Lawrence Krauss (Swift Press)

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The attacks belie a longer running civil war. On one side are those who champion science: the process of carefully designing and carrying out an experiment to obtain data that can be used to prove or disprove a hypothesis and advance toward objective truths. On the other are those who reject science as a way of knowing – and harbour “dubious, postmodern notions regarding objective, evidence-based enquiry”.

War on science

This is the thesis of The War on Science, a collection of 39 essays edited by physicist and bestselling author Lawrence Krauss. Its authors, all current or former academics, from various countries (including Australia) unite to defend freedom of speech and open enquiry.

It’s up to the reader to evaluate the evidence the book provides in light of this hypothesis. If we disagree, can we use rationality and counter-evidence to make an opposing case? The book challenges us to do so.

Krauss is a polarising figure. He has had a successful career over many decades, founding the Origins Center and authoring numerous bestselling books on science. However, he was investigated by Arizona State University for misconduct in 2017 – and in 2018 agreed to retire after it was found he had breached the school’s policies on sexual harassment, although he continues to deny the allegations. The cosmologist has also been linked to Jeffrey Epstein.

Lawrence Krauss, pictured with the Doomsday Clock in 2016, has been linked to Jeffrey Epstein. Michael Reynolds/AAP

For some readers, separating this information from the evidence presented by each of the essay authors will be challenging. Nevertheless, with our scientific institutions under threat, it is necessary to critically evaluate the arguments they make.

Like all good scientific experiments, The War on Science has a hypothesis at its core. It argues university and funding body policies rooted in postmodern ways of knowing restrict rational enquiry and freedom of expression.

Postmodernism is a philosophical framework based on the principle that truth is subjective and relative, and scientific rationality represents an oppressive power structure that demands revolution. The fundamental tenet of postmodernism, argues this book, is heretical to science’s fundamental assumption: truth is objective and knowable.

Each essay can be viewed as its own individual experiment. We are invited to weigh the evidence, evaluate each author’s experimental method – then decide.

Essays vacillate from culture war talking points to academic critique, pointed commentary to dry academic rigour – and from agreeable to edgy. Discussions of the definition of “woman” nestle alongside serious critiques of university executives, and academic societies and institutions, who have constrained academic freedom of expression.

I believe it is important to resist the temptation to dismiss this book as a relic of the culture war – and consider it as a whole. That way, we can draw our own conclusions according to the substance of its ideas.

Australia trusts science - for now

In a study of 68 countries this year, Australia scored fifth highest for public trust in science. “Scientist” is one of our most trusted professions. The US trailed Australia at 12th, and the UK at 15th.

Australia spent just 1.68% of its GDP on “research and development” in 2024 compared to 3.5% of GDP by the US, and 2.8% by the UK.

In a society that holds such a high trust in science despite paltry levels of government support, what impact might this alleged “war on science” have?

In his introduction, Krauss singles out Australia’s National Medical and Health Research Council’s (NHMRC) Gender Equity Strategy 2022-2025 as an example of “quotas and discrimination based on sex and gender” being “not unique to North America”.

As a peer reviewer for scientific journals like Nature, I expect authors to be precise in their statements. I’d like more precision from Krauss too. The policy he cites only applies to the “Investigator Grant” scheme (accounting for around 65% of NHMRC funding awarded in 2025).

Political correctness and science

Former Harvard University president Claudine Gay is repeatedly held up as a negative example in these essays. Asked in a hearing whether calls “for the genocide of Jews” violated the university’s code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment, she replied “it depends on the context”. Calls for her resignation followed. Philosopher Maarten Boudry negatively links this to the postmodern belief truth can only be imbued by language and context.

A Soviet agronomist’s flawed research resulted in the failure of food crops across the Soviet Union and China.

Trofim Lysenko, the Soviet agronomist whose research resulted in the failure of food crops across the Soviet Union and China, also features prominently. His belief that vernalization (the process whereby seed germination or flowering of plants can be stimulated through exposure to low temperatures) was hereditary was rooted in a profoundly incorrect understanding of genetics. Somehow, his theory found favour with senior Soviet officials. Dissenting research was suppressed, and his theory led to the failure of crops across the Soviet Union and China.

This is a ghoulish example of how a prerequisite for political correctness in science can cost millions of lives.

Anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss’ essay is likely to be the most unpalatable for Australian readers. She is deeply opposed to the repatriation of artefacts based on the spiritual beliefs of Indigenous groups. Her essay expresses concern that restrictions on studying such artefacts will limit the science of anthropology – and our understanding of how human societies have developed and evolved. Her essay challenges the validity of Indigenous sovereignty.

It is hard to overlook her choice of language to refer to Indigenous Australians, which could be interpreted as deliberately pugilistic. But given Australia’s unique cultural context and wealth of knowledge in this area, there is ample opportunity to counter Weiss’ concerns with evidence-based statements.

Some characterisations of various identity groups can come across as derisive and mean-spirited. For example, a characteristically acerbic Richard Dawkins dismisses “the claim we can override science and choose our own sex from a spectrum” as “ridiculous” and “human conceit”.

Nevertheless, the book mounts its case. Falling into step with the long march of postmodern theory and incorporating its ideas into policy risks undermining science – regardless of the intent.

Setting aside Dawkins’ tone, his essay contains an impassioned defence of a precise definition of sex in the context of evolutionary biology. It describes the consequences of yielding such definitions to what he terms “the theology of woke”.

Richard Dawkins’ essay contains an impassioned defence of a precise definition of sex in the context of evolutionary biology. Jana Lenzova/Penguin Random House

This argument is echoed by philosopher Alex Byrne, bioethicist Moti Gorin and Australian womens’ health researcher Karleen Gribble (who writes on the importance of using sexed language in communication around maternal health) in their respective essays.

The book’s essays provoke and challenge in a way that evokes a Socratic seminar text. They introduce ideas and values that are complex, challenging to summarise, pertinent to the life of the reader and approachable from a variety of perspectives.

There are moments rich in irony. One could argue that several of the essays use the postmodernist-influenced method of autoethnography, where the experience of the author is venerated as ultimate, relative truth.

The maudlin account of longtime freedom of speech defender Nicholas Christakis and the pugnacious defiance of Italian physicist Alessandro Strumia are tonal opposites. But both use their personal experiences to illustrate a broader cultural context.

Christakis drew the ire of students at Yale University’s Silliman College over his wife’s 2015 email criticising sensitivity to cultural appropriation.

In 2018, Strumia was suspended from his “invited scientist” position at Cern, the European nuclear research centre in Geneva, when he presented his data “test[ing] anecdotal claims about why women remain underrepresented in physics”, at a CERN-hosted workshop on gender.

His presentation, in which he said physics was “invented and built by men, it’s not by invitation”, was deemed to have violated the meeting’s code of conduct. Strumia argues his criticisms were backed by available evidence – drawn from publication records, demographic information and citation rates – and his academic freedom of expression was violated.

We can interpret these accounts as empirical evidence, rather than truth statements: data obtained by experiment that was conducted from the perspective of each author. It’s left to the reader to weigh this evidence.

Attacking postmodernism

The final chapters of the book contain the most laser-guided attack on postmodernism. It’s hard not to chuckle darkly at University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot’s characterisations in his moralistic modern-day fables describing the adventures of “President Not-A-Complete-Dingleberry” and an assortment of richly-compensated “Deanlets” that preside over our institutions.

Abbot proposes “three critical principles for the protection of science from politics”: freedom of speech and expression, the political neutrality of institutions and hiring on the basis of merit.

The discordance between the university as a (profitable) business and the university as a place of learning and cultivation of knowledge is recognisable the world over.

Chemist Anna Krylov. USC Dornsife

Chemist Anna Krylov and statistician Jay Tanzman’s essay highlights the work of behavioural scientist Corey Clark (with co-authors), who studies how humans sabotage rationality with emotion and selective reasoning. It shows many academics choose to self censor out of a sense of benevolence toward peers and to maintain the wellbeing of social groups.

These closing essays mount a final charge toward the power structure of our institutions, rather than lashing out at socially progressive activist movements. This is a call to action; to return to the Socratic ideal of the university as a place where ideas and power structures can be challenged through open expression.

Is this final offensive a clever and deliberate tactic to appeal to the postmodern yearning for the triumph of the disenfranchised? Or is it simply the presentation of more evidence to bring us infinitesimally closer to the truth?

Arguing through evidence

The precedent set by the budget cuts made to US science – motivated by sweeping diversity, equity and inclusion policies enacted over recent years – only lends weight to the arguments in this book.

They seem to be, in part, inspired by the very concerns raised by the authors in this book. An official White House fact-sheet describes a $5.2 billion cut to the NSF to end programs promoting “radical DEI and climate change alarmism”. – though it was conceived before the most recent US budget announcement, as Krauss explains in his introduction.

If we wish to continue to enjoy the substantial trust the Australian public have in science, and counter a tendency toward the political polarisation that has underwritten the drastic cuts to the US science budget, we should meet the authors of The War on Science on their own terms.

The War on Science defends open enquiry, but does so in a way that might not be palatable to all. It charges us to draw up our own experiments. It also challenges us to obtain contradicting evidence where we disagree with its claims.

Readers who disagree with the book’s arguments can evaluate their arguments through the lens of science – as the authors explicitly welcome. Applied correctly and in good faith, science enables self-correction. It offers the best method to handle ideas we find challenging. With critique and dialogue, the truth will out.