Flat-Earthers believe in the bizarre conspiracy that experts suppress the truth of a flat earth. The phenomena is perceived to be part of a trend people who are “anti-experts”, rejecting things like vaccines, Apollo Moon landings and man-made climate change. Now revered intellectual Richard Dawkins has weighed-in on the conspiracy theory controversy.
Mr Dawkins told BBC Science Focus Magazine the internet’s influence is key. He said: “We’ve even got flat-Earthers on the rise at the moment.
The evidence for the Earth being round is so utterly incontrovertible – you have to wonder, what’s going on here?
Richard Dawkins
“The evidence for the Earth being round is so utterly incontrovertible – you have to wonder, what’s going on here?
“I suppose one explanation for flat-Earthism is a kind of fellowship.
“People who perhaps have been a bit of a misfit in their life find a group of people who are also misfits, and they like to club together, and the internet provides the club room where you can meet people who have dotty ideas like you.”
The anti-vaxxer movement, believing vaccines are ineffective and unsafe, is considered by the scientist to be a similar symptom of anti-intellectualism.
Mr Dawkins said: “With the anti-vaxxers, there is widespread hostility to big pharmaceutical companies, and with some good reason actually.
“It would be easy enough, if you are heavily committed to criticising Big Pharma, to think that being an anti-vaxxer is a part of that.
“What we want is for people to think critically and clearly about each individual case and not lump things together if they’re not really lumpable.”
A recent YouGov poll discovered one in six British people agreed with the statement: “The Moon landings were staged.”
Four percent thought the NASA hoax theory was “definitely true”, 12 percent it was “probably true”, with another nine percent registering as don’t knows.
Scepticism about the Apollo Moon landings was more common among the young.
21 percent of 24 to 35-year-olds believed the Moon landings were staged, compared with 13 percent of over-55s.
Mr Dawkins added: “It’s mysterious, because the evidence for the Moon landings is utterly overwhelming.”
NASA spokesman Allard Beutel this year told the Washington Post: “There is “a significant amount of evidence to support NASA landed 12 astronauts on the Moon from 1969-1972.
“NASA has “842 pounds of astronaut-collected Moon rocks studied by scientists worldwide for decades; you can still bounce Earth-based lasers off the retroreflector mirrors placed on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts; and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged the landing sites in 2011.”
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