Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info It has been a long running and heated debate among scientists. Has human evolution peaked and stopped? Or does our species continue to adapt and change? Some say the story came to a halt between 10 and 50 thousand years ago, give or take a few millennia. That we replaced biological change with the ability to adapt culturally to whatever we encountered in our environment. Others believe it continues to speed ahead. And that migration and population explosion are key factors in helping us continually change and conquer species threats like disease. There are not too many votes for the third option. That it has neither stopped, nor continued but has slammed into reverse instead. It is my preferred (admittedly one-man and unscientific) explanation for the state we find ourselves in. Of course I wouldn’t propose such a mind-blowing theory without evidence. So take Exhibit A: The Kennedy Dynasty. It is hard to look at the arc of decline from JFK and Bobby Kennedy, to the present day and not sense something is drastically amiss. Somehow their genes have mutated into the form of Donald Trump’s Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy junior. RFK has himself wasted little time in trying to set human progress and scientific achievement even further back down the evolutionary chain. He has ordered the undoing of decades of medical research to try and support his pet hunch that there is a link between vaccines and autism. He is removing fluoride from water supplies supported by a new breakthrough in science called ‘conspiracy theory’. But RFK is a just a mere mad scientist foot soldier in MAGA’s wider war to take America back to the dark ages. On his 2016 campaign trail Donald Trump infamously declared “We love the poorly educated” to raucous cheers from a rally of people who didn’t realise the joke was on them. Now in his second term and with the intellectual backing of his sinister Project 2025 brains trust, he is determined to Make America Dumb Again. The Trump regime has launched a civil war on science and education in the US. Among his first acts were to remove the words climate change from government websites and shut down some of the most important research programmes in the country. He is dismantling the Department of Education and unravelling organisations like the National Science Foundation and the Department of Health and Human Services. His diktats to universities around diversity have been felt as far away as Trinty College in Dublin. But his latest attack on America’s most celebrated seat of learning – Harvard – is perhaps the most dangerous yet. He will defund the college unless it agrees to hire staff who will push his world view on students. It is a brazen bid to silence knowledge. To put manners on the boffins like the nazis and the church once did to those crazies Einstein and Galileo. Added to his neutering of the judicial system and the media, it completes the totalitarian playbook of control. He will have completed his Emperor’s bingo card and enjoy the unchallenged ability to decide what is real and what is not. When JFK wanted to inspire us as he addressed the Dail in 1963 he famously reached for the words of Nobel Prize winning Dubliner, George Bernard Shaw. "Some men see things as they are and say 'why?’ I dream things that never were, and say 'why not'?" Science has been the measure of many of those dreams as it has revealed to us the nature of things like DNA, electricity, disease, gravity, planets, antibiotics, cyberspace… But in just 12 presidential cycles, evolution has reversed to the point where the message from the 47th incumbent of the White House has become: "I see things as they aren’t, and you better all see them the same way or else." A leader, darkly obsessed with conquering new frontiers, who plans to dumbly go where no man has gone before. And he is determined to "re-educate" the people so they can blindly follow into his new golden age of American ignorance. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news from the Irish Mirror direct to your inbox: Sign up here.