Newcastle West's Ralph Robinson is pretty peeved - shall we say - about the coronavirus conspiracies being tossed around like dodgy face masks in an ill-blowing wind.
Anti-vaxxers, the Trump administration and Pete Evans have been getting amongst it. And 5G mobile phone networks! Geez, what did they do? They didn't spread the virus, that's for sure.
All this misinformation is why we need rational types like Ralph, who was a University of Newcastle senior lecturer in philosophy for a long time.
Ralph said the social and political upheaval of the coronavirus pandemic "illustrates a tussle which has pervaded Western thinking for centuries".
This tussle relates to the idea of "contrasting certainties".
Yep, humans can be pretty pigheaded.
Ralph puts it this way: "Human knowledge continues to be a work in progress".
Modern folks tend to forget that our cognitive abilities and beliefs evolved from earlier forms of life.
In other words, many of us are still chimps. Or stuck in the patterns of our common ape ancestor, anyhow. Which reminds us of a joke. What do chimps do when they go mad? They go bananas, of course.
Brash Confidence
Ralph points out that human knowledge has progressed to develop myths and fictions, societies and civilisations.
"But 'red in tooth and claw' pre-history has its legacy in continuing strife and competitions, even warfare," he said.
Don't forget rugby league, Ralph.
"Brash confidence sometimes parades its certainties, on occasion even claiming absolute truth and demanding compliance," he said.
But human fallibility is exposed when beliefs "fail to match the world as it is".
Humans have evolved with rare neural networks [the brain and nervous system] and "cognitive and emotional capacities".
Over millennia, curiosity about our world and each other means we have developed methods to measure and test "what we think we know", Ralph said.
As we progress, we abandon guesses and myths that have kept curiosity at bay.
We develop and revise knowledge.
"That is no mystic collection of absolute truths: we call it science as we assemble what we learn, as we develop the tools and methods that curiosity makes possible," he said.
But our knowledge is never complete, unlike the "certainties of mythical explanations, conspiracy theories, racial or other prejudices and fears that drive so much modern agitation and misinformation".
Ralph points out that it was science and medicine that informed urgent political measures - like social isolation and distancing and bans on mass gatherings - to control the spread of the disease.
"Scientists are human and fallible, so mistakes are possible. But science is protected by rigorous methodological procedures designed to reveal mistaken or misleading conclusions."
That aside, always remember: Don't trust atoms - they make up everything.
Non-Viral Jokes
Why did the monkey like the banana? Because it had appeal.
What do chimps wear when they are cooking? Ape-rons.
What do you call a baby monkey? A chimp off the old block.
What happens when you throw a banana at two hungry apes? A banana split
