A critique of Scientific American

May 8, 2024 • 10:00 am

If you’ve read this site for a while, you’ll know that I’ve documented the decline and fall of the magazine Scientific American (see all my posts here). Under the editorship of Laura Helmuth, the magazine has become increasingly woke. And by “woke”, I mean “neglecting science in favor of pushing a progressive ideology.”  One of the classic examples of this decline is a hit job that the magazine published on E. O. Wilson, accusing him of racism—along with other scientists like Charles Darwin and yes—wait for it—Gregor Mendel. A quote:

Wilson was hardly alone in his problematic beliefs. His predecessors—mathematician Karl Pearson, anthropologist Francis Galton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel and others—also published works and spoke of theories fraught with racist ideas about distributions of health and illness in populations without any attention to the context in which these distributions occur.

Darwin, of course was an abolitionist, though he did share the view of his time that white people were in general superior. But the article doesn’t mention that, for it violates the dprogressive tendency to indict people of the past for not conforming to today’s beliefs. And if Gregor Mendel ever wrote a racist word, I don’t know about it!

The author, Monica McLemore, also took it upon herself to “problematize” the normal distribution of statistics. Check out the first two sentences, which are totally bogus:

First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against. The fact that we don’t adequately take into account differences between experimental and reference group determinants of risk and resilience, particularly in the health sciences, has been a hallmark of inadequate scientific methods based on theoretical underpinnings of a superior subject and an inferior one.

Oy! Several of us, all scientists, sent a defense of Wilson to the magazine as a response to McLemore’s piece, but our defense was summarily rejected.  There’s no “search for truth” in this magazine if your views contravene progressive “presentism”.

And here’s a list of ten articles pushing progressive ideology published within the single year of 2021 (if the links to the stories aren’t visible in the posts, click on the icon anyway). The first one is a gem:

1.) Bizarre acronym pecksniffery in Scientific American.Title: “Why the term ‘JEDI’ is problematic for describing programs that promote justice, diversity, equity, and Inclusion.”

2.) More bias in Scientific American, this time in a “news” article. Title: “New math research group reflects a schism in the field.”

3.) Scientific American again posting non-scientific political editorials.Title: “The anti-critical race theory movement will profoundly effect public education.“

4.) Scientific American (and math) go full woke.  Title: “Modern mathematics confronts its white, patriarchal past.”

5.) Scientific American: Denying evolution is white supremacy. Title: “Denial of evolution is a form of white supremacy.”

6.) Scientific American publishes misleading and distorted op-ed lauding Palestine and demonizing Israel, accompanied by a pro-Palestinian petition. Title: “Health care workers call for support of Palestinians.” (The title is still up but see #7 below)

7.) Scientific American withdraws anti-Semitic op-ed. Title of original article is above, but now a withdrawal appears (they vanished the text): “Editor’s Note: This article fell outside the scope of Scientific American and has been removed.”   Now, apparently, nothing falls outside the scope of the magazine!

8.) Scientific American: Religious or “spiritual” treatment of mental illness produces better outcomes. Title: “Psychiatry needs to get right with God.”

9.)  Scientific American: Transgender girls belong on girl’s sports teams. Title:  “Trans girls belong on girls’ sports teams.”

and one more for an even ten, as I’m not going to spend another minute doing this:

10.) Former Scientific American editor, writing in the magazine, suggests that science may find evidence for God using telescopes and other instruments. Title: “Can science rule out God?“

But I digress. The topic here is a long article published in the City Journal by James Meigs, documenting the downfall of the magazine as one example of a general degeneration of science journalism. Click to read:

Meigs begins with how Michael Shermer wrote a monthly “Skeptic” column in Sci Am for seventeen years, but they gave him his pink slip after he started criticizing the claim that abused children tend to grow up to become abusers themselves. Shermer then argued, unforgivably, that there’s been progress in racial relations, and in eliminating pollution and poverty, reprising the theme of several recent books by Steven Pinker. Apparently progressives frown on the idea that there’s been progress in anything.

Shermer tells his story in a Skeptic column called “Scientific American goes woke.” As he said,

My revised December column, titled “Kids These Days,” focused on the growing concern over Gen Z kids having significantly higher rates of depression and anxiety, which Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt attribute to “coddling” by helicopter parenting and the larger culture of safetyism.

Shortly after the December 2018 column I was given my walking papers, but was allowed one more farewell column in January, 2019. In it I noted that in accordance with (Herb) Stein’s Law—“Things that can’t go on forever won’t”—closed out my streak at 214 consecutive essays, my dream deferred to another day, which has now come in accordance to Davies’ Corollary to Stein’s Law—“Things that can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think.”

Back to Meigs, who notes the decline of science journalism and its infusion with au courant ideology:

American journalism has never been very good at covering science. In fact, the mainstream press is generally a cheap date when it comes to stories about alternative medicine, UFO sightings, pop psychology, or various forms of junk science. For many years, that was one factor that made Scientific American’s rigorous reporting so vital. The New York Times, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and a few other mainstream publications also produced top-notch science coverage. Peer-reviewed academic journals aimed at specialists met a higher standard still. But over the past decade or so, the quality of science journalism—even at the top publications—has declined in a new and alarming way. Today’s journalistic failings don’t owe simply to lazy reporting or a weakness for sensationalism but to a sweeping and increasingly pervasive worldview.

This dogma sees Western values, and the United States in particular, as uniquely pernicious forces in world history. And, as exemplified by the anticapitalist tirades of climate activist Greta Thunberg, the movement features a deep eco-pessimism buoyed only by the distant hope of a collectivist green utopia.

Meigs indicts intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, queer studies, and postmodern notions of truth as factors in this decline.  Here are a few areas where Meigs argues that Scientific American failed after Laura Helmuth, who had sterling credentials, became editor of Sci Am in April, 2020.

Covid

 . . .  those difficult times represented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for an ambitious science editor. Rarely in the magazine’s history had so many Americans urgently needed timely, sensible science reporting: Where did Covid come from? How is it transmitted? Was shutting down schools and businesses scientifically justified? What do we know about vaccines?

Scientific American did examine Covid from various angles, including an informative July 2020 cover story diagramming how the SARS-CoV-2 virus “sneaks inside human cells.” But the publication didn’t break much new ground in covering the pandemic. When it came to assessing growing evidence that Covid might have escaped from a laboratory, for example, SciAm got scooped by New York and Vanity Fair, publications known more for their coverage of politics and entertainment than of science.

The magazine apparently had no patience with the “lab leak” theory for the origin of the virus:

During the first two years of the pandemic, most mainstream media outlets barely mentioned the lab-leak debate. And when they did, they generally savaged both the idea and anyone who took it seriously. In March 2021, long after credible evidence emerged hinting at a laboratory origin for the virus, Scientific American published an article, “Lab-Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth.” The piece compared the theory to the KGB’s disinformation campaign about the origin of HIV/AIDS and blamed lab-leak advocates for creating a poisonous climate around the issue: “The proliferation of xenophobic rhetoric has been linked to a striking increase in anti-Asian hate crimes. It has also led to a vilification of the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] and some of its Western collaborators, as well as partisan attempts to defund certain types of research (such as ‘gain of function’ research).”

The author faults Fauci for repressing information supporting this theory, but my pay grade isn’t high enough to judge whether that’s true.

Social Justice (the “JEDI” article is a gem, and note my self-aggrandizement)

At the same time, SciAm dramatically ramped up its social-justice coverage. The magazine would soon publish a flurry of articles with titles such as “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” and “The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity.” The death of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed biologist was the hook for “The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson,” an opinion piece arguing that Wilson’s work was “based on racist ideas,” without quoting a single line from his large published canon. At least those pieces had some connection to scientific topics, though. In 2021, SciAm published an opinion essay, “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.” The article’s five authors took issue with the effort by some social-justice advocates to create a cute new label while expanding the DEI acronym to include “Justice.” The Jedi knights of the Star Wars movies are “inappropriate mascots for social justice,” the authors argued, because they are “prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic light sabers, gaslighting by means of ‘Jedi mind tricks,’ etc.).” What all this had to do with science was anyone’s guess.

Several prominent scientists took note of SciAm’s shift. “Scientific American is changing from a popular-science magazine into a social-justice-in-science magazine,” Jerry Coyne, a University of Chicago emeritus professor of ecology and evolution, wrote on his popular blog, “Why Evolution Is True.” He asked why the magazine had “changed its mission from publishing decent science pieces to flawed bits of ideology.”

“The old Scientific American that I subscribed to in college was all about the science,” University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller told me. “It was factual reporting on new ideas and findings from physics to psychology, with a clear writing style, excellent illustrations, and no obvious political agenda.” Miller says that he noticed a gradual change about 15 years ago, and then a “woke political bias that got more flagrant and irrational” over recent years. The leading U.S. science journals, Nature and Science, and the U.K.-based New Scientist made a similar pivot, he says. By the time Trump was elected in 2016, he says, “the Scientific American editors seem to have decided that fighting conservatives was more important than reporting on science.”

The magazine also broke with tradition and endorsed Joe Biden for President in 2020 (Nature, Science, and New Scientist did the same). Unless you can make a solid argument that one candidate will damage science more than another, this kind of advocacy violates the kind of “institutional neutrality” that should pervade science journals.

Gender issues  Meigs criticizes the magazine for being gung-ho for “affirmative therapy”:

In such an overheated environment, it would be helpful to have a journalistic outlet advocating a sober, evidence-based approach. In an earlier era, Scientific American might have been that voice. Unfortunately, SciAm today downplays messy debates about gender therapies, while offering sunny platitudes about the “safety and efficacy” of hormone treatments for prepubescent patients. For example, in a 2023 article, “What Are Puberty Blockers, and How Do They Work?,” the magazine repeats the unsubstantiated claim that such treatments are crucial to preventing suicide among gender-dysphoric children. “These medications are well studied and have been used safely since the late 1980s to pause puberty in adolescents with gender dysphoria,” SciAm states.

The independent journalist Jesse Singal, a longtime critic of slipshod science reporting, demolishes these misleading claims in a Substack post. In fact, the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria is a new and barely researched phenomenon, he notes: “[W]e have close to zero studies that have tracked gender dysphoric kids who went on blockers over significant lengths of time to see how they have fared.” Singal finds it especially alarming to see a leading science magazine obscure the uncertainty surrounding these treatments. “I believe that this will go down as a major journalistic blunder that will be looked back upon with embarrassment and regret,” he writes.

The truth will out, but not due to Scientific American!

It’s not just popular magazines about science that have been ideologically colonized, either. Technical cience and medical journals are going the same route; these include Science, Nature, Lancet, JAMA, New Scientist, and PNAS. The same is happening with scientific societies, which increasingly are becoming enclaves of progressive ideology, with keynote speeches, once devoted to science, now devoted to ideology.  This is what Luana Maroja and I meant when we concluded our Skeptical Inquirer paper on the ideological subversion of biology with these words:

Progressive ideology is growing stronger and intruding further into all areas of science. And because it’s “progressive,” and because most scientists are liberals, few of us dare oppose these restrictions on our freedom. 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.

When I wrote that last sentence, I thought it might be a wee bit hyperbolic, but now I’m not so sure. When scientists are forced to see nature through the lenses of progressive ideology, indicting Mendel for racism and renaming every animal whose popular name came from a person’s name, it doesn’t fool the public. They know that politics are warping science. The results are that the public loses trust in science—a trust based on the increasingly false assumption that scientists are objective researchers whose job is simply to figure out how nature works, not ideologues bent on twisting science to fit a progressive ideology. As Meigs notes:

 When scientists claim to represent a consensus about ideas that remain in dispute—or avoid certain topics entirely—those decisions filter down through the journalistic food chain. Findings that support the social-justice worldview get amplified in the media, while disapproved topics are excoriated as disinformation. Not only do scientists lose the opportunity to form a clearer picture of the world; the public does, too. At the same time, the public notices when claims made by health officials and other experts prove to be based more on politics than on science. A new Pew Research poll finds that the percentage of Americans who say that they have a “great deal” of trust in scientists has fallen from 39 percent in 2020 to 23 percent today.

That’s a drop in trust of over 40% in just four years.  The way to regain that trust, if it’s even possible now, is to stick to the truth, leaving out your politics.  Unfortunately, Scientific American and many other journals and magazines can’t refrain from injecting ideology into science.

h/t: Simon

65 thoughts on “A critique of Scientific American”

  1. I didn’t notice at the time this started oozing out, but writing of the sort being pointed out here is dialectical. Think Aufheben der Darwin, where negation (Adorno) effectively rejects the target, as it is now understood in its sublated (higher level) Historical context.

    When dialectic is done with scientific ideas that directly promote human flourishing (agriculture, medicine) – well, there’s a word for that – and PCC(E) has covered it well here.

    #Lysenkoism
    #Scientific Dialectician

    1. Post-edit deadline addition:

      Adorno’s book is on Negative Dialectics (1973) : the premise that we see the true nature of things using negation. The preface (only bold added):

      “Negative Dialectics is a phrase that flouts tradition. As early as Plato, dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of negation; the thought figure of a “negation of negation” later became the succinct term. This book seeks to free dialectics from such affirmative traits without reducing its determinacy. The unfoldment of the paradoxical title is one of its aims.

      […]

      Stringently to transcend the official separation of pure philosophy and the substantive or formally scientific realm was one of his [ed: Adorno, I think] determining motives.”

      … if that sounds “interesting”, I recommend getting a copy!

  3. The term ‘helicopter parenting’ is new to me 🙂 I expect another magazine (perhaps Quanta?) to fill the space. That is what I expect given the way things usually work. The deterioration of SciAm is an opportunity for someone to come up with a better science magazine. Then SciAm will either go out of business or its readership will change — even tabloids have readers.

  4. SciAm still publishes some good science stories, but unfortunately their editorials have made it so that not only do I cringe just thinking about going to the site, I also wonder if some information was withheld from published articles to please the editor. In other words, I no longer trust the hard science in the magazine because of the agenda that they preach in the opinion side. I stopped my sub many years ago due to this. I grew up eagerly awaiting each issue for Martin Gardner’s column and the Amateur Scientist column especially. I canceled when SciAm canceled Shermer’s column.
    When I read what’s published now, I get the feeling that Helmuth is trying really hard to be accepted within a certain circle. Instead of just publishing science, she’s going out of her way to espouse the woke (for lack of a better word) philosophy so she can be part of the cool crowd.

    1. +1 Martin Gardner

      Lots of good books to get from him.

      I’d note : I liked .. I think it’s Phyllis Freeman and … they co-wrote a column.

        1. Sorry sorry. The dialectic just got me all fired up.

          OK, a promise : I’ll lay out the next … five posts.

          🙁

  5. Good article. I can’t vouch for Meigs’s conclusions on the specific controversies he cites, but he is surely correct that Scientific American has missed amazing opportunities to help clarify and even adjudicate some of the most consequential scientific questions of the day.

    I, too, noticed the changes coming on over the past several years, starting with the cancellation of Shermer’s column. It also seems to me that the publication used to have more articles by working scientists and that it has come to rely mostly on science writers. It would be interesting to know if anyone has documented this trend or if it’s just in my imagination. It seems to me that working scientists would be more likely to stick to the actual science than would science writers, as science writers are interpreters of science and not scientists themselves.

    In any case, Science American is going down the tubes. I have several years left on my print subscription, and I read almost all of the articles. The printed magazine seems to be less woke than what I read online—maybe Helmuth regards the print magazine as being the permanent record, with the web being ephemeral, but I don’t know. My sincere hope is that the magazine will turn around at some point, but it may be too late.

    1. It is not your imagination, Norman. Fifteen years or so ago, I started to smell a rat, and I did collect some author data as I had a physical collection of issues dating back to my father’s subscription in 1952. I cannot recall the actual data but observed it just getting worse and worse to the point that I soon dropped my subscription that had been renewed in three-year increments close to continuously for fifty years. I don’t do well with change in general, and am told by my wife to get over it, because that’s life….but this change is just not right…unless of course Quanta Magazine is a good substitute that has been there in the wings all along.

      1. Wow. My first subscription to SciAm was a gift from my Aunt Ethel (now over 90) for my 10th birthday in 1967. It’s sad that the magazine has come to this. Yes, change happens as your wife says, but there is such a thing as change for the worse, and Scientific American exemplifies this.

        Yes. Quanta Magazine is quite good, I agree.

      2. My over-simplified view is that writing well about science needs good scientific journalism and this can be expensive. Writing about science gossip and opinion is easy – and you can use some of the many recent graduates who have no scientific expertise and that are cheaper to employ.

        That many of the recent journalists and editors are ‘post Enlightenment’ and write from their preconceptions is regrettable, but gossip and opinion are ephemeral and therefore difficult to question.

        2. As people cancel their subscriptions in reaction to the woke trend, they lose money. Vicious circle?

          Although I expect the problem is the ultra woke editor. Helmuth has a strong science background according to her (glowing) Wikipedia page.

          Why some people are susceptible to wokeness I don’t know.

  6. Does anyone have any thoughts/opinions on the value of New Scientist magazine?

    1. I have issues with New Scientist also, especially after they pulled some marketing crap against Darwin on a cover a number of years ago. But Jerry is the expert on that, has written about on this website, so could better speak to the integrity of magazine overall I think.

      FWIW I have generally like American Scientist though I got it mostly for Henry Petroski’s regular engineering column which has gone away with Henry’s untimely death last Summer.

      1. I agree that American Scientist is a good alternative – most (if not all) of the articles are written by working scientists, and they generally manage to balance readability and technical accuracy well – a non-specialist with a scientific or engineering background can understand and appreciate what’s being presented. The magazine seems to be moving into the niche that Scientific American once occupied, that of popular but rigorous presentation of scientific matters for both the professional and the educated layman. That’s the impression I get, at least, when looking at more recent issues and recalling what the writing was like decades ago – then it was a bit more forbidding and the educated layman had to fend for himself. This more approachable presentation seems to be correlated with the advent of the magazine on news stands – as I recall, it used to be subscription-only, but that was perhaps only where I live.
        Agreed about the loss Petroski’s death represents – his column was generally the first thing I read in each new issue.

    2. Jerry mentioned New Scientist above: “It’s not just popular magazines about science that have been ideologically colonized, either. Technical [s]cience and medical journals are going the same route; these include Science, Nature, Lancet, JAMA, New Scientist, and PNAS.”

      Long ago I subscribed to New Scientist for a short while. I cancelled after deciding that it was too “lite” for my taste. (I’m not a professional scientist.) The occasional article headline I’ve come across online hasn’t changed my opinion.

      1. For no-nonsense science news summaries, and one or two longer articles, I’ve subscribed almost without break to Science News since I was a teenager five decades ago. The writers often display a good-natured sense of humor. I now also give a gift subscription to my wife’s son (a chemistry professor) and his family, including 3 grandkids.

        The magazine doesn’t seem to be distracted or derailed by the controversies and woke distortions other publications are experiencing.

        It used to be a weekly magazine, but now it’s roughly twice a month, or 22 issues per year. I still like getting the print edition — which also comes with full online access to just over a century of articles. (A digital subscription alone is cheaper.)
        https://www.sciencenews.org/about-science-news

        1. For general-interest space news and space exploration advocacy, I would also like to promote The Planetary Report, published by The Planetary Society, which boasts Carl Sagan as the best-known of 3 co-founders. (I’m a charter member.)

          It also seems able to navigate nimbly around current ultra-woke controversies, which is probably a continuing legacy of Sagan, who was concerned (and prescient) about the downward trend of scientific literacy that he already saw in his lifetime.
          https://www.planetary.org/about

    3. Just as bad as Scientific American. It may have even gone bad earlier. I canceled my subscription long ago.

      1. What is “just as bad as Scientific American”? Could you elaborate?

  7. For a bad example, an Anthropologist wrote an article for Scientific American. The title was ‘Why human sex is not binary’. The funny part is that the illustration for the article showed the sexual binary (ouch).

  8. Good piece overall but I strongly disagree with Meigs’ attempt to shoehorn climate science in with woke excesses.

    There is simply no comparison.

    Yes, climate activism attracts a similar cringe-inducing cohort as some other issues — eg, Greta Thunberg outed herself as a Hamas apologist recently — but actual climate science has zero in common with Queer Theory.

    Foucault’s pseudo-scholarship can’t remotely be compared to 50+ years of empirical data from multiple sources (global air and water temps, glacial retreat, tree rings, ice cores, etc), not to mention basic physics (the “greenhouse effect”).

    Climate change denial is the “transwomen are women” of the right.

    1. But recognizing the futility of trying to win a collective-action game when all the players except you are cheating with impunity is perfectly respectable game theory. The only rational choice then is to withdraw from the game, either explicitly, or surreptitiously by pretending to follow the rules when you are really cheating along with everyone else. The latter approach is sometimes necessary for political reasons related to Leftist voters who insist that they will support cuts to the standard of living
      of some people, just not themselves.

      One excellent way to cheat is to off-shore your smelting, meat-raising, and manufacturing to openly cheating countries who have left the game, and then import the products for domestic use. You can even ship your coal, oil, gas, and fertilizer to them, making money from the selling (which you will need to buy the imports) but booking no emissions from the burning. Voila! Non-emitting steel, beef, and concrete! (The bonus is that emissions from international ocean shipping and aviation are not booked to either country, certainly not yours.)

      1. Ah yes. This type of stuff is done all the time. We ship our sh*t to some far off land and let “their” children shuffle through the toxins. Out of sight, out of mind. On a much smaller scale, here in hick town Tucson we had a reporter clandestinely follow our recycling trucks from the blue bins on neighborhood sidewalks straight to the dump where all our neatly separated recyclables were added to the rest of our trash. They weren’t recycling anything!
        By the way, in another comment you mentioned ‘NRx”… What is that? I couldn’t tag on that comment to ask. If you don’t mind enlightening me?

        1. I don’t think it was I who mentioned NRx. I don’t know what it means either.

          Plastic is not recyclable. It never was. There is simply no economic case for recycling plastic. No one will buy plastic trash unless subsidized. The best place for plastic is a single trip to landfill where it acts as a permanent carbon sink, almost as if the petroleum used to make it had never left the ground. This keeps it out of the oceans instead of putting it in ships and sending it to developing countries who discover they can’t do anything with it either. They dump it into their harbours when it piles up too high on their wharves. Recycling is popular for virtue-signalling because for most people it is the only thing they do to “help the environment”, as long as the city sends a truck around to collect it for them, effortlessly. (Cans, glass, and paper may be worth recycling.)

          I wasn’t making a moral case against foreign manufacturing, just to show one way how the emissions racket can be gamed. I’m actually glad to be able to buy foreign goods which give better value for money than when they were domestically manufactured. Those countries will pay to protect their children from “toxins” as they become wealthier.

    3. As a boomer, I can see the climate changing myself. We used to get some snow most winters and lots of rain every winter here on the BC coast.

      Now I see next to no snow and much less rain. Forest fires are way worse than when I was young. And fire season is starting earlier

  9. The history of mysogyny and racism in science has been very well documented. I experienced it personally, but did not appreciate the extent of it until I read Steven Jay Gould’s wonderful book, “The Mismeasure of Man,” many years ago.

    What I find so appaling is the equivalency claimed that such things as microagressions, and claims of racism againt Darwin, are as bad as the “scientific” Eugeniscs movement of the early 20th Century. It is like calling the police, “Gestapo,” who are assigned the job of clearing demonstrators from campuses. Has no one studied history???

    Unfortunately, lots of writers practice hysterical irrational exaggeration, but as a progessive, and a retired participant in scientific endeavers, I feel science reporters should know better.

    1. I’m a big fan of Gould’s writing, but he isn’t perfect. Wasn’t that book in particular debunked, ironically because Gould bent the data to suit his foregone conclusion?

      1. The Internet has many references to the debunking of Gould. Indeed the NYT and Wired have written about it. The NYT published an article about Gould’s ‘inaccurate’ claims. See “Scientists Measure the Accuracy of a Racism Claim”. So did Wired. See “The Mismeasures of Stephen Jay Gould”.

        1. Thank you, Frank and Philip. Philip, in particular, I feel a “got ya!” But before I bow down to your superior knowledge, I like to make several points. First, I know Gould was not perfect and I know certain arguments in his book were debunked.

          Further, I still feel it was a “wonderful book” in that it opened my eyes into systemic racisim in science. In particular, I remember his discussion of how measuring the size of skulls does not correlate to measuring intelligence. I also think he addressed how that related to Eurgenics. I did not know that history before – it was not in my graduate program math logic classes. Telling me what I should or should not feel does not cut it with me.

          And, what sections of his book were debunked? The entire book? Did the NYT debunk the view that smaller skulls of women mean they were less intelligent than men? Did Wired debunk that view? Where did you read something that debunked Gould’s criticisms of Eugenics? Please send me those passages.

          Recently an extinct ape was descovered with smaller cranial spaces than chimps and those apes expended a lot of energy burying thier dead. That implies a social structure that is more sophisticaled than modernm chimps. But that cannot be!!! It is not true by definiition! Those apes must be dumber than chimps because Gould’s arguments about measuring skulls was debunked when the NYT debunked “The Mismeasure of Man.”

          I know I protest too much. But my comments were about scientific communication, and neither of you bothered to address those points.

          1. There’s a long discussion of Gould’s detractors on his Wikipedia page.

            There’s more than I realized.

            I too read all of Gould’s books—he was a good writer, with one exception, I couldn’t figure out what he driving at in “The Mismeasure of Man.”

            But according to Wikipedia there’s dispute that he even got evolution right.

  10. Before it became ‘woke’ Scientific American published some rather good articles. As a child I read articles written by Glenn T. Seaborg about elements beyond Uranium. In 1992 Sciam published “Indochinese Refugee Families and Academic Achievement” by
    Nathan Caplan, Marcella H. Choy and John K. Whitmore. Of course, that was long ago.

  11. “ First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against. The fact that we don’t adequately take into account differences between experimental and reference group determinants of risk and resilience, particularly in the health sciences, has been a hallmark of inadequate scientific methods based on theoretical underpinnings of a superior subject and an inferior one.”

    I spotted *4 different problems within this short paragraph alone. I can’t imagine how many I would find in the full article.

    * 1. She misunderstands the normal distribution: it’s simply a mathematical concept used to model the distribution of phenomena. It does not assume the existence of “default humans” or a superior subject. It is simply a way to describe how data is distributed around a central value.

    2. She is confused about reference groups: in a study a reference groups is used as a basis for comparison, not as a “standard” or “superior” group. The choice of a reference group depends on the specific research question and does not imply any inherent superiority.

    3. She oversimplifies scientific methods: if you’re doing science right, you use methods that aim to account for differences between groups and potential confounding factors. Bias will always be a factor, but modern research practices place a strong emphasis on identifying and addressing potential sources of bias.

    4. She makes an unfounded generalization scientific research: there are plenty of instances of inadequate methods in the past, however, it is incorrect to claim that this is a “hallmark” of scientific methods, especially in contemporary research.

    I just can’t believe this was published in Scientific American.

    1. Thanks, Emily – all those errors in just two sentences. Unbelievable!

    2. Maybe it’s me, but I don’t even understand what her second sentence means.

      1. Risk and resilience, particularly as determinants of inadequate science, are hallmarks with theoretical underpinnings, making them both inferior and superior.

        Anyway, that’s what it means to me.

  12. I wish the still-existing information encoding the wokesters’ own problematic behaviors as children could be summoned for replay so they could be exposed, and canceled.

  13. SciAm, New Scientist, and even American Scientist have all partly fallen in the rabbit hole of publishing woke-ish tripe. Am. Scientist had one on gender studies not so long ago. I was also particularly amused by a cover article in SciAm on the “Women the hunter” hypothesis. It seemed to be mostly a few cherry-picked anecdotes and some downright false assertions.

    However, Meigs blew it at the Covid lab-leak section. Multiple papers in 2022 have concluded that the outbreak most likely began at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market and was unconnected to any laboratory. Lab-leak is possible but less probable than natural transmission from some animal in the market (no evidence to suggest which one, yet)

    The proponents of the lab-leak theory continue to scream on social media that they’re being oppressed. They insult their critics, but offer no real evidence, just innuendo and conspiracy theories*.

    I’m not even sure that Shermer really supports the lab-leak theory. I saw an episode of the “Michael Shermer Show” where he interviewed Paul Offit, the pediatrician specialist in infectious diseases. Shermer starts out by saying that he’s “50-50” on the lab-leak idea, and Offit responds by telling him that there’s no direct evidence for it**, whereas natural spillover has abundant evidence. Shermer didn’t dispute that.

    Anyway, we’ll never get to the bottom of this unless the Chinese government coughs up their data and evidence. They’re too embarrassed to concede that the pandemic originated anywhere in their country. This just contributes to the conspiratorial nonsense.

    *If anyone has such evidence, please write it up and get it published in a peer-reviewed journal. I’m not going to pay any more attention to the nonsense about this on social media.

    **And don’t mention that silly furin cleavage site idea. That one has been thoroughly debunked.

    1. I found an article from 2023, saying the origin is unclear:

      “The coincidence that the first cases of infection emerged in the city where the virology institute’s headquarters is located, the failure to 100% identify the virus’ RNA in any of the coronaviruses isolated in bats, and the lack of evidence on a possible intermediate animal host in the contagion’s transmission make it so that at present, there are doubts about the real origin of SARS-CoV-2. This article will review two theories: SARS-CoV-2 as a virus of zoonotic origin or as a leak from the high-level biosafety laboratory in Wuhan.”

      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10019034/

      1. My impression of the current scientific consensus is that spillover of the Covid virus from some animal to people in the Wuhan market is a much more likely origin theory than the lab-leak hypothesis. No one actually knows which animal, and the Chinese government isn’t admitting that any such thing occurred.

        The article you cite adds nothing. It actually admits that the evidence points to the Wuhan market as the center of transmission and then just pivots to whining about the fact that we still don’t know the exact origin. It’s innuendo, not evidence.

        The two other sources cited by Meigs in his article are not reliable either. The first, Bhattacharya, is not an epidemiologist, he specializes in medical economics. He cosigned the “Great Barrington Declaration” which was essentially an anti-lockdown proposal to let the virus run wild through the population. Herd immunity would develop and protect the survivors. We now know that such an approach could not have worked, given the virus’s ability to mutate and would have resulted in even higher death rates (as it may have done in Italy and Sweden). However, none of the GBD authors will admit this. The second source, Ebright, is a respected infectious disease scientist. He has rightly stated that there is no basis to think that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered as a bioweapon but it could have hit humans through a laboratory accident. Unfortunately, he seems to have gone off the deep end in his zeal to promote this possibility. see: https://www.science.org/content/article/lab-leak-proponents-rutgers-accused-defaming-and-intimidating-covid-19-origin

        Those continuing to “just ask questions” about the lab-leak theory, which seems to include Meigs, seem uncomfortable with the uncertainties that often accompany new phenomena. Lab-leak could have happened, it is provocative, it would lead to all sorts of interesting possibilities (coverups galore!), but the mainstream hypothesis of natural spillover, though mundane, is more likely.

        Labs, by design, have to be clean and contained. People working in them are trained to handle samples to minimize contamination both for their safety and for doing proper science. Even in China. Animal markets are the Wild West in comparison. Hundreds of people and thousands of animals (some alive) are crammed together in unsanitary conditions. Illegal trade in wild critters was known to be occurring in Wuhan market. All the early infections appear to be around the market, not the Wuhan virology institute, so if you want to insist on the lab-leak, then you have to figure out how to connect the two, which no one has done. So, natural spillover is still considered more likely by most real experts in the area. It’s also how practically every new epidemic gets started.

        So, it seems to me that Meigs is just revealing his own bias here. It weakens his article.

  14. I loved the old SciAm. It helped determine the course of my life. I still remember particularly impactful columns and articles from fifty years ago. As others have mentioned, Martin Gardner’s column and the Amateur Scientist columns were always great. The latter is where I learned that some kid discovered that warm water froze faster in a freezer than cold water. I remember a counter-intuitive article about the James-Stein estimator that opened my mind to rigorous statistical reasoning. Then there was Bernard D’Espagnat’s earthshaking explanation in the 1970’s of Bell’s Theorem, which determined (no pun intended) the future direction of my life. This was probably the very first popularization of the most mind-bending result in all of physics. What a thing to find in the mailbox!!!!

    Edit: The Bell’s Theorem artcile by DEspagnat is still avaialble on the internet!!
    https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/media/pdf/197911_0158.pdf

    So is the James-Stein paradox!
    http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~kk3n/simplicity/stein-paradox-sci-am.pdf

    And Jearl Walker’s 1977 Amateur Scientist column about the rate of freezing of hot vs cold water !
    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-amateur-scientist-1977-09/

  15. I don’t think the issue is so much that the lab leak hypothesis is true, or that climate change is not occurring, but rather that plausible alternative theories that go against a certain narrative are not allowed to be presented and are shut down not because of scientific evidence but because they violate certain social norms. It would be as if the Copenhagen Interpretation was the only allowed theory and others such as the Many Worlds Interpretation were not allowed to be published because that theory could cause harm to some marginalized peoples, or because the “wrong” people were advancing the theory.
    Then there’s the outright ignorance of actual science such as the rejection of the sex binary, or stating that males have no advantage over females if they reduce testosterone, and thus should be allowed to compete in female sports leagues. Who are you going to believe, me, or your lying eyes?

  17. All I can say is. So DAMN sad. It hurts (yes, hurts) to see science maligned this way.

    Am I imagining this or is there a correlation between female CEOs/Dir/Teachers/Presidents and increased “wokeism”? Anyone done a study on the feminization of academia -in particular- and consequences either positive/negative – is this a “thing”?

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