In what ways should scientific organizations remain politically neutral?

Agustín Fuentes is surely bucking for Social Justice Scientist of the Year, as I’ve documented in numerous posts. Whenever there’s an article about how scientists are bigoted, racist, and sexist, including Darwin, or there’s an article to be written that extols social justice in science but will have little or no effect on society, you’re likely to find Fuentes’s name on it. (He’s a professor of anthropology at Princeton.)

In his latest attempt to introduce politics into science, he’s written an “eLetter” to Science that you can read by clicking on the headline below. I didn’t know of eLetters before, but they’re constitute “a forum for ongoing peer review. eLetters are not edited, proofread, or indexed, but they are screened.”  Perhaps I should have submitted this as an eLetter instead of posting it here, but I’ve already started writing it, so let’s proceed.

In this eLetter Fuentes argues at great length that scientific journals and organizations should use their expertise to pronounce on political, social, and moral issues of the day. In other words, these organizations should not be institutionally neutral, as the University of Chicago is (see our Kalven Report).  But I think he’s dead wrong and that these institutions should strive to be neutral except when pronouncing on political issues that directly affect the science or branch of science that an organization represents. The reasons, of course, are the same ones that created our Kalven Report: official pronouncements on debatable issues tend to chill speech, they require someone to be the arbiter of what is the “right” view, and are often likely to be deeply conditioned by an ideology that’s transitory. This is the problem with many pronouncements on racial and gender disparities in the past; our views have become more moral and egalitarian, as well as more informed by data; and this will continue.

Well, read Fuentes’s view on how organizations should be making the “right” statements about society, and of course Fuentes is the arbiter of what is “right”:

Here are three statements that, says Fuentes, are ones that scientific organizations have made and should have made because they are scientifically true. (His words are indented except when noted otherwise). Only the first lacks obvious social import.

The following are three incontrovertible statements of scientific fact:

“Biological evolution is the central organizing principle of modern biology.”

“Genetics demonstrates that humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct subcategories.”

“While ‘race’ is not biology, racism does affect our biology, especially our health and well-being.”

While the first statement seems true, it is still debatable, and I have in fact seen scientists take issue with it. I would simply say that “evolution” is the explanation for how things got the way they are, and that the alternative of creationism is false. The sentence “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, a famous pronouncement by my scientific grandfather Theodosius Dobzhansky, is ambiguous unless you carefully explain what “making sense” and “in the light of evolution” means. But I am less concerned with this than with the other statements.

The second statement is true in one sense, in that we cannot divide humanity into a finite and agreed-upon number of populations with big genetic differences, but in fact “race” is not a social construct, either. There’s biology behind it, even in the “crude” races that most of us can name.  If it were a purely social construct, companies like 23andMe wouldn’t work, and you couldn’t tell someone’s ancestry with a high degree of accuracy using multiple loci or even morphology.  Here’s a bit that Luana Maroja and I wrote on race in our Skeptical Inquirer paper dealing with the erosion of biology by ideology.

Even the old and outmoded view of race is not devoid of biological meaning. A group of researchers compared a broad sample of genes in over 3,600 individuals who self-identified as either African American, white, East Asian, or Hispanic. DNA analysis showed that these groups fell into genetic clusters, and there was a 99.84 percent match between which cluster someone fell into and their self-designated racial classification. This surely shows that even the old concept of race is not “without biological meaning.” But that’s not surprising because, given restricted movement in the past, human populations evolved largely in geographic isolation from one another—apart from “Hispanic,” a recently admixed population never considered a race. As any evolutionary biologist knows, geographically isolated populations become genetically differentiated over time, and this is why we can use genes to make good guesses about where populations come from.

More recent work, taking advantage of our ability to easily sequence whole genomes, confirms a high concordance between self-identified race and genetic groupings. One study of twenty-three ethnic groups found that they fell into seven broad “race/ethnicity” clusters, each associated with a different area of the world. On a finer scale, genetic analysis of Europeans show that, remarkably, a map of their genetic constitutions coincides almost perfectly with the map of Europe itself. In fact, the DNA of most Europeans can narrow down their birthplace to within roughly 500 miles.

Of what use are such ethnicity clusters? Let’s begin with something many people are familiar with: the ability to deduce one’s personal ancestry from their genes. If there were no differences between populations, this task would be impossible, and “ancestry companies” such as 23andMe wouldn’t exist. But you don’t even need DNA sequences to predict ethnicities quite accurately. Physical traits can sometimes do the job: AI programs can, for instance, predict self-reported race quite accurately from just X-ray scans of the chest.

As for the third statement, it’s totally debatable. Yes, the idea that “racism affects some people’s biology” is trivially true. But statements like “racism is responsible for the higher mortality of  black than of white both mothers and babies in America” (something widely touted in the press) assigns a debatable cause to an undisputed fact. Yes, that difference exists, but there are other explanations as well, including cultural and dietary differences, physiological conditions like liver disease and blood pressure, drug use, and so on, and nobody has bothered to even mention these alternatives in the literature. Taking the default explanation as “ongoing racism” for a phenomenon with several possible explanations is not good science. Fuentes’s third statement is debatable and can’t be taken as prima facie true. It is potentially resolvable by science, but it has not been resolved.

Because of default explanations involving ongoing and structural racism or sexism have now become pervasive in official pronouncements of scientific journals and societies—and not just about society but about internecine matters like promotions, grants, and acceptance of papers—we should be wary of statements like the following, also coming from Fuentes:

As part of this cultural shift over the past 5 years, a range of scientific organizations that focus on human biology, psychology, and health have released powerful, scientifically grounded statements against the misuse, misperception, and misrepresentation of data and analyses on human variation. These include clarifications on why and how races are not biological divisions of humanity, what human genetic diversity looks like, how racism shapes and affects human health, why IQ and economics are not best understood through aspects of one’s biology, and how disease patterns relate to human biological and social diversity. Many of these organizations have also produced critiques of their own historical and core roles in propagating bias, bad scientific practice, and harms, such as eugenics, discriminatory medical and psychological treatment, and miscegenation laws. Such statements have been released by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine; the American Medical Association; the American Psychological Association; and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, the publisher of Science).

But, as Luana and I showed, scientific organizations are still propagating bias, misconceptions, and misunderstanding by trying to hew to a “progressive” ideological agenda.  The sword of non-neutrality cuts both ways.

True, many of the statements to which Fuentes refers are “scientifically grounded” in that they invoke science and sound scientific, but they’re often based on assumptions that have not been scientifically tested. In other words, they’re debatable, and that means that promoting them as if they’re “incontrovertibly true” is wrong.

Here’s what Fuentes thinks we’re doing wrong: being politically neutral:

There are, however, individual scientists, politicians, and members of the public who decry public statements by scientific organizations as “political,” asserting that the only reason they weigh in on societal issues is because of partisan pressures. Their core argument is that science should be neutral and forays into the political realm damage scientific integrity. It is true that some organizations’ statements endorsing political candidates or particular human rights stances are intentionally political and not exclusively tied to the organizations’ focal areas. In such cases, the organizations should be extremely careful and fully consider the impact, negative and positive, on their standing and credibility. Simply put, not all organizations should weigh in on all, or even most, societal topics. But it is also true that science as a field of practice, and scientific organizations as entities, have never been neutral.

Of course scientists have never been completely neutral on political, ideological, or moral issues, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to be neutral.  And that means avoiding making political, ideological, or moral pronouncements that don’t affect the progress of science (or of the branch of science promoted by a journal or society).  If there are important social issues whose outcome depend critically on science, then perhaps scientists can weigh in, but the science has to be nearly irrefutable, and people have to be careful. Far better to comment as a “private citizen” scientist (even writing op-eds like Fuentes’s, properly labeled as “personal opinions”) than for scientific organizations and journals to make official statements.

Equally important, although Fuentes pronounces early on that “science, as a human undertaking, cannot be neutral,” he’s wrong. Science is a set of tools to find out truths about the world: observation, experiment, replication, hypothesis-making and -testing, doubt, double-blind tests, and so on.  It is scientists who break neutrality, not science itself. Just because science is a human endeavor doesn’t give us license to go around making official statements about human society. Of course scientists are free, like all Americans, to give their personal views, so long as it doesn’t involve harassment, false advertising, or defamation.

If you want some examples of where this non-neutrality goes wrong, Fuentes supplies them, though inadvertently:

Case in point: As of March 2024 there are there are more than 490 legislative bills in consideration in 41 states seeking to criminalize the use of public restrooms that match one’s identified gender for some individuals, limit or deny access to gender-affirming care, and a range of other legal restrictions targeting transgender and nonbinary youth and adults. These legislative actions fly in the face of contemporary scientific understandings and the recommendations from the major medical professional organizations, including the US National Institutes of Health. At their heart, the bills have little to do with evidence-based research, science, or data, relying on decidedly unscientific contentions to support their agendas. Recently, seven professional scientific organizations that focus on human biology, human evolution, and human genetics released a joint statement in support of trans lives, including transgender, nonbinary, gender and sex diverse, and queer communities. The statement affirms the power of all persons to make the ultimate decisions over what happens to their own bodies, and based on contemporary scientific understandings opposes legislation rooted in biological essentialism affecting reproductive justice and access to health care, especially the discrimination and denial of health care for youth and adults, including care that is gender and life affirming. Although this is a small act, the reaction that it stimulated, and the likelihood of more professional science organizations acting as well, such as the American Psychological Association’s recent statement, illustrate that such organizations can, and should, effectively contribute to critical societal issues. Scientific data and analyses matter, even when their public presentation can be considered “political.”

Seriously? What can science tell us about restroom use? That is a social problem that is at best minimally informed about science, and science journals and organizations best stay well away from it. In fact, the “science” of gender-affirming care also consists largely of subjective evaluations or statements lacking evidence, and, at least in the U.S., scientists appear to have gotten it largely wrong. We don’t know the long term effects of puberty blockers, and perhaps objective rather than “affirming” therapy could kids from surgery, allowing them to become gay instead of snipping of their parts. There is very little good science behind “affirmative care.” And there is no science supporting the gender-activist issue (one supported no doubt by Fuentes) that transwomen should be allowed to compete in athletics against biological women. The science in fact says exactly the opposite: transwomen retain, perhaps for life, substantial athletic advantages over natal women. Has that stopped scientists from arguing that “transwomen are women” in every relevant sense? Nope.

To support the view that “affirmative care” isn’t supported by science, observe that countries in Europe, but not the U.S., are doing away with a lot of gender-affirming care, including deeming puberty blockers as clinical rather than normal treatments.  That’s because the science is unsettled! It is clear what Fuentes’s agenda is here, and it’s pure, unsullied gender activism, which at present rests largely on scientifically unsupported claims. Fuentes is touting ideology here, not the weight of scientific evidence.

Which brings me to my final point. Science not only gets political and ideological pronouncements wrong, but often gets the science itself wrong—and gets it wrong because the “science” touted by activists is distorted to reflect ideology. Luana and I wrote about five such areas in our paper, including “race” differences, gender differences, evolutionary psychology, and indigenous “knowledge.” If journals and societies can get the very science wrong because they are blinkered by ideology, what hope do we have for getting political or ideological issues right?

h/t: Luana