Years ago, I was sent a voting form by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) on which one of the candidates was listed as “William J. Wiley (deceased)”. I was proud to be a member. An organisation which has found a way of conducting committee business by seance, I thought, is clearly at the forefront of human endeavour and its meetings would be unmissable.

Sadly, the explanation was more prosaic. Poor Mr Wiley had succumbed between the close of nominations and the day of the ballot, an eventuality for which the association’s constitution was unprepared. On second thoughts, I am not sorry that I never attended the AAAS meetings. The association’s annual convention, whose findings have been widely reported this week, does not exactly sound enlightening.

I was once tempted to train for a career in science because I assumed scientists spent their days trying to explain the big questions — how the universe emerged from nothingness and how life began.

I know there are people working on these questions, but they are not the public face of science. Rather, the Earth-shattering discoveries which the AAAS has announced to the world this week are typified by the macaque monkeys who have been caught out engaging in lesbian sex by Dr Paul Vasey, of the University of Lethbridge in Canada.

Of course, like many an animal scientist, Dr Vasey has wrapped up his discovery in Darwin’s theory of evolution just to make it sound more worthy.

But is this really the best that the cream of America’s boffins can deliver: a video of macaques poking and tickling each other? “If I have seen further,” wrote Sir Isaac Newton, paying tribute to the scientists who had preceded him, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Little did he know that 21st-century scientists would be using his shoulders to access a bestial peep show.

Among the highlights from the AAAS conference has been Professor Jon Kleinberg, of Cornell University in New York, revealing that President Reagan built his speeches around colloquialisms. You don’t mean to say? How does it take 20 years of scientific analysis to establish what was obvious to the rest of us the moment the great man clambered on a rostrum and addressed the electorate as “you folks back home”? Professor Richard McNally, of Harvard University, claims that people who say they have been abducted by aliens are really suffering from “sleep paralysis” and that they suffer from “post-traumatic stress disorder” when they are talking about their imagined experiences.

That all sounds very scientific, but where does it get us other than to conclude, as Reagan would have put it, that they’re nuts?

Worthy scientific organisations such as the AAAS and the British Association always complain that not enough young people take up scientific careers. The main reason, I suspect, is that they are put off by the goofiness of those working in the laboratories. A respected British scientific journal once devoted a column to a story about thousands of scientists around the world who were idling away their hours watching the webcam image of a coffee pot in a laboratory in Cambridge. At this year’s AAAS conference the collected PhDs came up with Project Steve, an internet hunt to find as many scientists called Steve and Stephanie as possible.

A week in such company would have been enough to make Einstein turn to accountancy.

The work of scientists ought to be central to the culture of an advanced civilisation. Instead, they have reduced themselves to peripheral figures who play party games in cyberspace, spy endlessly on the personal habits of furry animals and dress up banal observations on human life in inpenetrable language.

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