Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
If you’re interested in STEM subjects, it’s salubrious to follow the Heterodox STEM Substack site, where you’ll see takes on science that are sufficiently heterodox that they’d be hard to publish in regular journals. Also, there are useful summaries of the literature, including as this one on scientific censorship published today by Anna Krylov and Jan Tanzman.
Their article has an introduction, a report on the increase in scientific censorship, and then a useful list of articles about the nature, causes, and effects of that censorship. If you don’t think the practice exists, or is exerted only minimally, have a look at the piece and the papers it cites.
Click on the screenshot to read:
The introduction:
We have prepared a compilation of recent articles documenting present-day censorship in science and explaining the mechanism by which censorship in science operates.
Recently, science journals and publishers have opened a new and disturbing chapter in the history of scientific censorship: the censorship of scientific articles that are alleged to be “harmful” to a particular group or population, a practice that violates the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The practice began with scientific journals retracting articles in response to the demands of online mobs, but has since been codified into policy by various editorial boards and scientific publishers.
Censorship is objectionable on both philosophical and pragmatic grounds. On the philosophical side, the notion that that the public must be protected from dangerous or harmful knowledge is at odds with liberal Enlightenment values, according to which knowledge is power, which the public is capable of using responsibly. On the practical level, by hiding selected facts, censorship distorts our understanding of the world, thereby undermining our ability to solve challenging problems. Censorship also leads to distrust in science. When scientists hide selected facts to promote their political agendas, the public rightfully perceives them as politically motivated agents rather than objective and trustworthy experts.
Despite the long history of scientific censorship and its current prevalence, the mechanisms by which censorship operates, the agents who impose censorship and their motives, and the ultimate costs of censorship have not been systematically investigated. A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Cory Clark and 38 co-authors, Prosocial Motives Underlie Scientific Censorship by Scientists: A Perspective and Research Agenda (Clark et al. 2023), takes a stab at this issue. The paper lays out important questions regarding the nature and consequences of censorship and puts out a call for systematic research on the subject.
One of the paper’s co-authors, psychology professor Steve Stewart-Williams, summarizes the evidence for the current wave of scientific censorship and self-censorship, as well as the rise of censorious attitudes among scientists, which motivated the paper:
Increasing numbers of scientists report being sanctioned for conducting politically contentious research.
Retractions of papers have become more and more common over the last decade, and at least some of these appear to have been driven primarily by concerns other than scientific merit. One group of scholars even retracted their own paper, not because it was scientifically flawed, but because it was being cited by conservatives in ways the authors didn’t approve of.
Several lines of research suggest that studies reaching politically unpalatable conclusions may have a harder time negotiating the peer-review process than they would if the conclusions were in the opposite direction. As the paper notes, “When scholars misattribute their rejection of disfavored conclusions to quality concerns that they do not consistently apply, bias and censorship are masquerading as scientific rejection.”
Recent surveys suggest that many academics support censuring or censoring controversial research, with support being strongest among younger scholars.
Unsurprisingly, recent polls also suggest that many academics now self-censor on even mildly controversial topics.
A large number of academics express a willingness to discriminate against conservatives when it comes to hiring, publications, grants, and promotions. Unsurprisingly, conservative scholars are particularly likely to self-censor.
A growing number of journals have explicitly committed to judging scientific papers not just on the quality of the research but also on their (supposed) social or political impact. “In effect,” note Clark et al., “editors are granting themselves vast leeway to censor high-quality research that offends their own moral sensibilities.”
Table 1 of Clark et al. presents the following taxonomy of censorship:
As the Table shows, and as Luana and I emphasized in our paper on the ideological subversion of biology, this wave of censorship differs from previous ones because scientists and science journals themselves are involved in censoring. We’re muzzling ourselves!
The intro continues:
. . . Motivated by publication of this foundational paper (Clark et al. 2023), we have compiled a virtual collection of scientific papers, viewpoints, and op-eds that document the modern rise of censorship in science. Our list is most likely incomplete and we encourage readers to add relevant references in the comments.
There follow a list of 38 papers, with some commentary by Anna and Jay. It’s an extremely useful compilation of discussions about how scientific truths are prevented from coming to light, usually because they are politically unpalatable or present data and conclusions that make people uncomfortable in a “progressive” climate.
To be a wee bit self-aggrandizing, I’ll show two examples given by Anna and Jay of useful scientific critiques that had a hard time finding a home (I helped write one of them). I’m familiar with both, and the first one (not mine) is a doozy. The first one is discussed in the paper by Reichhardt et al. (2023), Resistance to Critiques in the Academic Literature: An Example from Physics Education Research, Eur. Review31 547, 2023.
The authors present a rebuttal of a paper recently published in the physics education journal Physical Review—Physics Education Research. The paper, which is titled Observing Whiteness in Introductory Physics: A Case Study, arguably sounds more like a hoax than an actual paper with content relevant to physics education. But the rebuttal treats the paper seriously and offers a substantive, professional, and detailed critique. The rebuttal, which was submitted to the same journal as the original paper, was rejected by the editors. The main reason cited for the rejection was that the rebuttal was “framed from the perspective of a research paradigm that is different from the one of the research being critiqued”—indeed, the authors used scientific methods to debunk a postmodernist paper. The communication between the authors and the journal revealed the true nature of rejection.
The second example is the story of how a paper with the seemingly mundane title In Defense of Merit in Science (Abbot et al. 2023) wound up being published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. The story is narrated by Coyne and Krylov in The ‘Hurtful’ Idea of Scientific Merit, an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal (for a non-paywalled transcript see Our Wall Street Journal Op-ed: Free at Last!, published by Coyne on Why Evolution is True).
The reference list gives a lot more, some of which cite papers like the “whiteness in physics one” which are so off the rails that they instantiate the last thing Luana and I wrote:
Unless there is a change in the Zeitgeist, and unless scientists finally find the courage to speak up against the toxic effects of ideology on their field, in a few decades science will be very different from what it is now. Indeed, it’s doubtful that we’d recognize it as science at all.
15 thoughts on “Censorship in science: a compilation of references”
Krylov and Tanzman contribute a valuable piece. It’s just sad that some of today’s best thinkers have to spend their time defending science rather than doing it. But defend science we must!
Thank you PCC(E) for contributing to this necessary cause and for providing a forum for conversation.
“The main reason cited for the rejection was that the rebuttal was “framed from the perspective of a research paradigm that is different from the one of the research being critiqued”…”
This is a paradigmatic example of the Postmodern Multicultural Left’s relativism in the context of science: The epistemology and the methodology of science—now called “western/white science”—are no longer regarded as universally valid. If there are other research paradigms which are fundamentally different from and incommensurable with “western/white science”, then, so they say, those mustn’t be subjected to external criticism by it, because doing so is an illegitimate hegemonial attempt at oppressing alternative “knowledges”.
I once tried to criticize a particular New Age program for understanding Truth to some friends who had bought into it and they dismissed every criticism with the explanation that I was working from the wrong paradigm. I was using logic and reason and starting with the assumption that there was an objective reality.
The Woke Left’s relativism reminds me of what Ludwig von Mises calls “polylogism”:
“The socialists declare that there is irreconcilable conflict among the interests of the various social classes of a nation; while the interests of the proletarians demand the substitution of socialism for capitalism, those of the exploiters demand the preservation of capitalism. The nationalists declare that the interests of the various nations are irreconcilably in conflict.
It is obvious that the antagonism of such incompatible doctrines can be resolved only by logical reasoning. But the opponents of the harmony doctrine [= the idea of the common weal in the sense of a harmony of the interests of all members of society] are not prepared to submit their views to such examination. As soon as somebody criticizes their arguments and tries to prove the harmony doctrine they cry out bias. The mere fact that only they and not their adversaries, the supporters of the harmony doctrine, raise this reproach of bias shows clearly that they are unable to reject their opponents’ statements by ratiocination. They engage in the examination of the problems concerned with the prepossession that only biased apologists of sinister interests can possibly contest the correctness of their socialist or interventionist dogmas. In their eyes the mere fact that a man disagrees with their ideas is the proof of his bias.
When carried to its ultimate logical consequences this attitude implies the doctrine of polylogism. Polylogism denies the uniformity of the logical structure of the human mind. Every social class, every nation, race, or period of history is equipped with a logic that differs from the logic of other classes, nations, races, or ages. Hence bourgeois economics differs from proletarian economics, German physics from the physics of other nations, Aryan mathematics from Semitic mathematics. There is no need to examine here the essentials of the various brands of polylogism. For polylogism never went beyond the simple declaration that a diversity of the mind’s logical structure exists. It never pointed out in what these differences consist, for instance how the logic of the proletarians differs from that of the bourgeois. All the champions of polylogism did was to reject definite statements by referring to unspecified peculiarities of their author’s logic.”
(Von Mises, Ludwig. /Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution./ New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957. pp. 31-2)
Recently, science journals and publishers have opened a new and disturbing chapter in the history of scientific censorship: the censorship of scientific articles that are alleged to be “harmful” to a particular group or population…
When I’ve seen laypeople complain that a scientific paper is “harmful,” they invariably say that its conclusions are false. The study is poorly designed; the statistics are off; the method was biased; the subject were cherry-picked, other findings were ignored or dismissed for bad reasons, etc.
The “this is true, but don’t let it be known” attitude only seems to apply to Little People in an out group. It’s not used by activists or allies trying to support a cause. I’m not sure where these scientists who censor scientific papers fall. Do they explicitly argue they’ll exchange truth for being inoffensive or do they hedge their bets with “besides it’s not any good anyway?”
Sastra, you are mostly right. As we wrote in the Compilation, “Because editors often mask ideological censorship as methodological criticism, it is often difficult to differentiate between the two.” Clark et al. elaborate.
However, editors have begun to reject papers explicitly because they are deemed to be harmful or hurtful (which is deemed to be harm). Indeed, this is now policy at Nature Human Behavior, as we discussed here (search the page for “NHB”). In fact, when our (Anna, Jerry, me, and 26 others) Merit in Science paper” was rejected from PNAS, the editor stated in this decision letter that our paper was “downright hurtful” to marginalized groups.
They emailed hundreds of physicists and got 12 to sit for interviews and answer questions (biased, not representative, mostly white, drastically changed the interview questions after the first half were done, total methodological disaster). Then they cherry-picked answers in which participants failed to agree that systemic racism explains why there are few black physicists.
The positionality statements are a hoot: “Robertson is a chronically ill and disabled, physics-Ph.D.-holding, thin wealthy white woman” (the whole section is ~1100 words).
Fun fact: Hairston is not a physicist or a teacher. He’s a Presbyterian minister with a PhD in Educational Leadership.
Another fun fact: Robertson received a PhD in physics in a universty physics dept alright, but her dissertation topic was k-12 education..ie education and teaching research, not physics research. So in my book, this is not a real physics PhD.
In my biology department the teaching faculty members all have graduate research training in biology (most with PhDs, a few of the old guard with just a Master’s). We haven’t yet had a search where we’d have to think about hiring someone who has a graduate degree in biology education rather than biology research. I guess this is another way for the camel to get its nose in the tent.
In the USSR, the debate in scientific fora about “Mendelism-Morganism” went on throughout the 1930s, although Lysenko, Prezent, and their allies managed to entangle it with the paranoid atmosphere of the great purge. It was not until 1948 that the Ministry of Education explicitly banned Mendelian Genetics in preference to Lysenko’ alternative twaddle. Muffled resistance to this continued underground, and Lysenkoism’s ascendancy pretty much ended by 1964, when articles critical of it were published, and 1965 when Lysenko himself was dismissed as director of the Genetics Institute of the Academy of Sciences. So, the Lysenkovshchina lasted about 17 years in the Soviet police state. It remains to be seen how soon the US academic and scientific establishments can cure themselves of their postmodernist DEIshchina.
The Physics Education Research volume of Phys Rev was created around 2005. It focuses on methods of teaching physics in the K12 and early college classroom and lab. I appreciate this WEIT post if only because it made me go back this afternoon and see what is available to high school physics teachers these days. When I taught high school physics in the early 70’s, we had the American Journal of Physics, The Physics Teacher, and Physics Today; Phys Rev was the realm of serious physics research and did not sport a volume that focused on educational pedagogy.
In any case after reviewing titles of articles from several years of this journal, it appears to me that the Robertson Whiteness article and a few others like it are really an exception of a genre that seemed to sneak in starting around 2018, with the vast majority of articles, however, still being concerned with teaching methodologies no different than I read last century. In those days there were a few articles on gender gap, socio economic gaps and the like which now seem to have morphed into race-based critical theory and post modernist exposes masquerading as legitimate research. As many have said above, this is too bad, but most disturbing is the refusal of journals to have further discussions of the issues raised by refusing to publish rebuttals. MORE speech, not less!
“…the censorship of scientific articles that are alleged to be “harmful” to a particular group or population…”
“Harm” is a central term in the Wokabulary, but it leaves wide room for interpretation. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as:
1. evil (physical or otherwise) as done to or suffered by some person or thing; hurt, injury, damage, mischief
2. grief, sorrow, pain, trouble, distress, affliction
The German Dictionary by the Brothers Grimm gives the following Latin meanings of the German noun “Harm” (which corresponds to the English noun “harm”):
1. calamitas: misfortune, disaster, ruin, calamity
2. contumelia: insulting language or behaviour or an instance of it, indignity, affront
3. iniuria: unlawful conduct, damage unlawfully inflicted; unjust and injurious treatment or an instance of it, a wrong, injustice
4. acerbitas: a painful experience, suffering, distress; ill feeling, bitterness, spleen
5. aegritudo: physical sickness, illness, disease; mental distress or anguish, grief, sorrow, anxiety
6. aerumna: trouble, affliction, distress
7. luctus: a mournful feeling, grief, sorrow
8. maeror: grief, sorrow, mourning
Peter Boghossian gave a talk (see YouTube) in which he describes how a censorious atmosphere inhibits parrhesia, which is :
“is candid speech, speaking freely.[1] It implies not only freedom of speech, but the obligation to speak the truth for the common good, even at personal risk.”
The physics-whiteness paper seemed hoaxlike to me but after checking appears genuine. In acknowledgements there is NSF grant 1760761 and googling will locate an nsf.gov page with the grant and these all-but-literally unbelievable papers, plus the $$ of the grant.
A well-read mathematician like myself jumps to the conclusion that the grant number was a clue to a hoax, because 176-761 is the ‘form’ of the prison ID numbers for the Beagle Boys (Uncle Scrooge comics). But the nsf.gov website looks legit.
Krylov and Tanzman contribute a valuable piece. It’s just sad that some of today’s best thinkers have to spend their time defending science rather than doing it. But defend science we must!
Thank you PCC(E) for contributing to this necessary cause and for providing a forum for conversation.
+1
“The main reason cited for the rejection was that the rebuttal was “framed from the perspective of a research paradigm that is different from the one of the research being critiqued”…”
This is a paradigmatic example of the Postmodern Multicultural Left’s relativism in the context of science: The epistemology and the methodology of science—now called “western/white science”—are no longer regarded as universally valid. If there are other research paradigms which are fundamentally different from and incommensurable with “western/white science”, then, so they say, those mustn’t be subjected to external criticism by it, because doing so is an illegitimate hegemonial attempt at oppressing alternative “knowledges”.
I once tried to criticize a particular New Age program for understanding Truth to some friends who had bought into it and they dismissed every criticism with the explanation that I was working from the wrong paradigm. I was using logic and reason and starting with the assumption that there was an objective reality.
Well, see, there’s your problem right there.
The Woke Left’s relativism reminds me of what Ludwig von Mises calls “polylogism”:
“The socialists declare that there is irreconcilable conflict among the interests of the various social classes of a nation; while the interests of the proletarians demand the substitution of socialism for capitalism, those of the exploiters demand the preservation of capitalism. The nationalists declare that the interests of the various nations are irreconcilably in conflict.
It is obvious that the antagonism of such incompatible doctrines can be resolved only by logical reasoning. But the opponents of the harmony doctrine [= the idea of the common weal in the sense of a harmony of the interests of all members of society] are not prepared to submit their views to such examination. As soon as somebody criticizes their arguments and tries to prove the harmony doctrine they cry out bias. The mere fact that only they and not their adversaries, the supporters of the harmony doctrine, raise this reproach of bias shows clearly that they are unable to reject their opponents’ statements by ratiocination. They engage in the examination of the problems concerned with the prepossession that only biased apologists of sinister interests can possibly contest the correctness of their socialist or interventionist dogmas. In their eyes the mere fact that a man disagrees with their ideas is the proof of his bias.
When carried to its ultimate logical consequences this attitude implies the doctrine of polylogism. Polylogism denies the uniformity of the logical structure of the human mind. Every social class, every nation, race, or period of history is equipped with a logic that differs from the logic of other classes, nations, races, or ages. Hence bourgeois economics differs from proletarian economics, German physics from the physics of other nations, Aryan mathematics from Semitic mathematics. There is no need to examine here the essentials of the various brands of polylogism. For polylogism never went beyond the simple declaration that a diversity of the mind’s logical structure exists. It never pointed out in what these differences consist, for instance how the logic of the proletarians differs from that of the bourgeois. All the champions of polylogism did was to reject definite statements by referring to unspecified peculiarities of their author’s logic.”
(Von Mises, Ludwig. /Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution./ New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957. pp. 31-2)
When I’ve seen laypeople complain that a scientific paper is “harmful,” they invariably say that its conclusions are false. The study is poorly designed; the statistics are off; the method was biased; the subject were cherry-picked, other findings were ignored or dismissed for bad reasons, etc.
The “this is true, but don’t let it be known” attitude only seems to apply to Little People in an out group. It’s not used by activists or allies trying to support a cause. I’m not sure where these scientists who censor scientific papers fall. Do they explicitly argue they’ll exchange truth for being inoffensive or do they hedge their bets with “besides it’s not any good anyway?”
Sastra, you are mostly right. As we wrote in the Compilation, “Because editors often mask ideological censorship as methodological criticism, it is often difficult to differentiate between the two.” Clark et al. elaborate.
However, editors have begun to reject papers explicitly because they are deemed to be harmful or hurtful (which is deemed to be harm). Indeed, this is now policy at Nature Human Behavior, as we discussed here (search the page for “NHB”). In fact, when our (Anna, Jerry, me, and 26 others) Merit in Science paper” was rejected from PNAS, the editor stated in this decision letter that our paper was “downright hurtful” to marginalized groups.
Thanks for the link to the physics paper. Amazing.
This is from the same authors back in March:
“Race-evasive frames in physics and physics education: Results from an interview study”
https://journals.aps.org/prper/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.19.010115
They emailed hundreds of physicists and got 12 to sit for interviews and answer questions (biased, not representative, mostly white, drastically changed the interview questions after the first half were done, total methodological disaster). Then they cherry-picked answers in which participants failed to agree that systemic racism explains why there are few black physicists.
The positionality statements are a hoot: “Robertson is a chronically ill and disabled, physics-Ph.D.-holding, thin wealthy white woman” (the whole section is ~1100 words).
Fun fact: Hairston is not a physicist or a teacher. He’s a Presbyterian minister with a PhD in Educational Leadership.
Another fun fact: Robertson received a PhD in physics in a universty physics dept alright, but her dissertation topic was k-12 education..ie education and teaching research, not physics research. So in my book, this is not a real physics PhD.
[shaking my head]
In my biology department the teaching faculty members all have graduate research training in biology (most with PhDs, a few of the old guard with just a Master’s). We haven’t yet had a search where we’d have to think about hiring someone who has a graduate degree in biology education rather than biology research. I guess this is another way for the camel to get its nose in the tent.
In the USSR, the debate in scientific fora about “Mendelism-Morganism” went on throughout the 1930s, although Lysenko, Prezent, and their allies managed to entangle it with the paranoid atmosphere of the great purge. It was not until 1948 that the Ministry of Education explicitly banned Mendelian Genetics in preference to Lysenko’ alternative twaddle. Muffled resistance to this continued underground, and Lysenkoism’s ascendancy pretty much ended by 1964, when articles critical of it were published, and 1965 when Lysenko himself was dismissed as director of the Genetics Institute of the Academy of Sciences. So, the Lysenkovshchina lasted about 17 years in the Soviet police state. It remains to be seen how soon the US academic and scientific establishments can cure themselves of their postmodernist DEIshchina.
The Physics Education Research volume of Phys Rev was created around 2005. It focuses on methods of teaching physics in the K12 and early college classroom and lab. I appreciate this WEIT post if only because it made me go back this afternoon and see what is available to high school physics teachers these days. When I taught high school physics in the early 70’s, we had the American Journal of Physics, The Physics Teacher, and Physics Today; Phys Rev was the realm of serious physics research and did not sport a volume that focused on educational pedagogy.
In any case after reviewing titles of articles from several years of this journal, it appears to me that the Robertson Whiteness article and a few others like it are really an exception of a genre that seemed to sneak in starting around 2018, with the vast majority of articles, however, still being concerned with teaching methodologies no different than I read last century. In those days there were a few articles on gender gap, socio economic gaps and the like which now seem to have morphed into race-based critical theory and post modernist exposes masquerading as legitimate research. As many have said above, this is too bad, but most disturbing is the refusal of journals to have further discussions of the issues raised by refusing to publish rebuttals. MORE speech, not less!
“…the censorship of scientific articles that are alleged to be “harmful” to a particular group or population…”
“Harm” is a central term in the Wokabulary, but it leaves wide room for interpretation. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as:
1. evil (physical or otherwise) as done to or suffered by some person or thing; hurt, injury, damage, mischief
2. grief, sorrow, pain, trouble, distress, affliction
The German Dictionary by the Brothers Grimm gives the following Latin meanings of the German noun “Harm” (which corresponds to the English noun “harm”):
1. calamitas: misfortune, disaster, ruin, calamity
2. contumelia: insulting language or behaviour or an instance of it, indignity, affront
3. iniuria: unlawful conduct, damage unlawfully inflicted; unjust and injurious treatment or an instance of it, a wrong, injustice
4. acerbitas: a painful experience, suffering, distress; ill feeling, bitterness, spleen
5. aegritudo: physical sickness, illness, disease; mental distress or anguish, grief, sorrow, anxiety
6. aerumna: trouble, affliction, distress
7. luctus: a mournful feeling, grief, sorrow
8. maeror: grief, sorrow, mourning
Peter Boghossian gave a talk (see YouTube) in which he describes how a censorious atmosphere inhibits parrhesia, which is :
“is candid speech, speaking freely.[1] It implies not only freedom of speech, but the obligation to speak the truth for the common good, even at personal risk.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrhesia
The physics-whiteness paper seemed hoaxlike to me but after checking appears genuine. In acknowledgements there is NSF grant 1760761 and googling will locate an nsf.gov page with the grant and these all-but-literally unbelievable papers, plus the $$ of the grant.
A well-read mathematician like myself jumps to the conclusion that the grant number was a clue to a hoax, because 176-761 is the ‘form’ of the prison ID numbers for the Beagle Boys (Uncle Scrooge comics). But the nsf.gov website looks legit.