Human capability peaked before 1975 and has since declined

You might want to look over some of the frankly racist and reactionary stuff on Charlton's blog before buying into this simplistic thesis. Or the story about how he got fired from the editorship of his flaky pseudoscience journal: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/03/elsevier_to_medica...

Hm, actually you don't need to read past the linked post for obvious indications that the man is a complete crackpot. Molecular biology is trivial?

...and nostalgia isn't what it used to be either.

The world is a much, much, much better place now than 35 years ago. We are healthier, happier, richer, and better off than then. The world is a freer, richer, more democratic, more connected, more diverse, more tolerant place now:

http://www.gapminder.org/world/

The author can't see the difference betwen focus and capability. We're spreading all the human capability more evenly now, because we're not stuck in a myopic and monomaniac cold-war world where the only thing that matters is beating the other guy.

Very weak premise, basing human capability on lunar landings alone. I can argue that if we do not reproduce the Higgs boson in forty years that we've peaked right now; more likely, the interest simply isn't there in repeating an experiment for the good of science unless capitalist interest catches up, which we are seeing in spades with private companies making strides toward suborbital and orbital flight.

> 40 years ago we could do it – repeatedly – but since then we have not been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.

This sentence makes a lot more sense of you replace instances of "could" with "wanted to" and "capability" with "desire". As does the remainder of the article. There's no particular reason to go to the moon and it's extraordinarily expensive, so we don't do it.

Edit: I guess this guy is just a little irrational. Here's another example where he says that science is a curse that comes from not having a shared theology: http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2010/06/cancer-of-epist...

This is so ridiculous I don't even know where to begin. Apparently, and without any evidence given, humans cannot fly to the moon anymore and that's why we don't go: we lost the ability to do so and we're ashamed to admit it. Again, there's no evidence for this, and no attempt to explain how or why we have advanced so far in so many other areas.

Then, as if this stupid theory wasn't enough to offend the intelligence of the reader, we get this gem: affirmative action and media whoring committee members stole our ability to fly to the moon.

Just wow. Why was this posted? As a spot-the-fallacies exercise?

Frankly, this guy seems supremely uninformed.

That landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans.

How or why was it the most difficult problem solved? Why was is the supreme human achievement? We'll never know, because the author is too poor of a thinker to bother with justifying his assumptions.

It's post-hoc reasoning if I've ever seen it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc)

The author's entire argument rests upon this proposition:

"That landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans."

Yet there utterly no justification of this statement.

I would have thought that a professor of theoretical medicine would have some understanding of the importance of justifying one's arguments with hard evidence, but apparently not in this case.

I'd be interested to see comparisons between the engineering of getting humans to the moon versus keeping the LHC working.

I would argue the issue is more about the priorities of the American government and also its economic decline. America has fundamental issues that means it can not longer fund such a mission, but it is likely that other governments and economies that are healthier and with different priorities could do manned missions to the moon.

It is important to differentiate between human capacity and the capacity and priorities of the American government. They are not the same thing, even if when one lives in the US, it can seem like it.

One could argue (similarly incorrectly) that human capacity in Britain peaked in the late 1800s, but again that was because that was the peak of the Britian empire.