Two pieces by Alan Sokal on the pollution of science by ideology

I don’t often read The Critic—a British cultural and political site that’s been going for five years—mainly because it’s UK-centric and I can’t fathom the intricacies of British politics. But it’s my loss, as I’ve missed some good articles. Fortunately, Alan Sokal told me that he’s recently put up two pieces at the site, both about the incursion of ideology in science and both relevant to a paper that I coauthored. I’ve put Sokal’s headlines below, which you can click to read for free.

Sokal, of course, became publicly famous for his 1996 hoax paper published in Social Text, but he’s also written numerous papers and books analyzing and criticizing philosophical and scientific problems with postmodern academia.  He writes well, deals with topics I like, and is always worth reading.

The first piece below has a purpose similar to that of the paper I wrote with Luana for Skeptical Inquirer: exposing the incursion of ideology (mostly from the Left) into science, but it deals with all science rather than just evolutionary biology, the ambit of our paper. It also has lots of examples we didn’t use. Click to read

This shorter piece is a complement to the first, and deals more with the injurious effects of wokeness in STEM:

I could give lots of quotes, but I’ll try to limit myself.  As in the Coyne/Maroja paper, Sokal concentrates mostly on Left-wing intrusions into science, but he doesn’t fail to call out Right-wing intrusions as well, including objections to evidence on climate change and conservative attacks on environmentalism. Since you should read both pieces, I’ll mix quotes from the two papers, lumping them under a few themes.

The sexes.  As Luana and I realized, nowhere is the misguided intrusion of ideology into science more evident than in the pervasive claim that humans have more than two sexes. The only people who reject that palpable truth are ideologues, especially academic ones.  Sokal makes sex a big part of his papers, and I’ll give a few quotes (all indented).

Now the entire American medical establishment, from the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics to the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association and even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, insists that sex — as in male or female — is, in the AAP’s words, “an assignment that is made at birth”. What could this mean?

Sokal then goes into the facts: all animals and vascular plants have only two sexes, male and female, defined by gamete size. He’s peeved at the “sex-assigned-at-birth” mishigass.

A baby’s name is assigned at birth; no one doubts that.  But a baby’s sex is not “assigned”; it is determined at conception and is then observed at birth, first by examination of the external genital organs, and then, in cases of doubt, by chromosomal analysis[1]. Of course, any observation can be erroneous, and in rare cases the sex reported on the birth certificate is inaccurate and needs to be subsequently corrected. But the fallibility of observation does not change the fact that what is being observed — a person’s sex — is an objective biological reality, just like their blood group or fingerprint pattern, not something that is “assigned”. The medical associations’ pronouncements are social constructivism gone amok — this time about a subject that has been more-or-less accurately understood by humans (albeit without all the scientific details) ever since the beginning of our species. Sex, unlike quarks, is not subtle[2].

What could have impelled sober-minded scientists to advocate such an easily refutable view? The cause is evidently political. The medical establishment’s new-found reluctance to speak honestly about biological reality — and its insouciance in speaking dishonestly about it — presumably stems from a laudable desire to defend the human rights of transgender people.  But while the goal is praiseworthy, the chosen method is misguided.  Protecting transgender people from discrimination and harassment does not require pretending that sex is merely “assigned”.

The bottom line is this: It is never justified to distort the facts in the service of a social or political cause, no matter how just.  If the cause is truly just, then it can be defended in full acceptance of the facts about the real world; if that cannot be done, then the cause is not just.

That’s good writing.  And he adds this in the footnotes, a further attack on the “assigned at birth” hypothesis that I haven’t seen:

[1] Alice Sullivan has kindly drawn my attention to data showing the sex ratio at birth, in various countries, from 1950 to 2021. In several countries, mostly in Asia and Central Asia, there has been, since the mid-1980s, a huge preponderance of boys over girls, reaching a peak ratio 118:100 in China in 2005 (it has now decreased to 112:100). The obvious cause of this disparity is the cultural preference for boys, combined with the availability of sex-selective abortion. And the latter is possible precisely because sex is determined at conception and is observable in utero, well before it can be “assigned” at birth. (Indeed, aborted fetuses, which are never born, also have a sex: in some countries preferentially female.)

Decolonization and Indigenous “Ways of Knowing”

There is also some pressure on the physical sciences and mathematics from the “woke left”, but at present it is mainly concerned, not with the content of research, but with vague calls for the “decolonisation” of curricula and for “decentering whiteness and cisheteropatriarchy” in pedagogy.

It’s tolerably clear what “decolonisation” can mean in history and literature, but it’s less clear what it might entail in the natural sciences and mathematics, which purport to produce — and in my view do often produce — universally valid knowledge. Some advocates of “decolonisation” take the radical position that scientific and mathematical knowledge is not in fact universally valid. For instance:

[U]nique forms of racism and cisheteronormativity are insidiously reinforced through ideological constructions of STEM as neutral. Such neutrality is a function of objectivity and depoliticization as epistemological values in science … (numerous similar citations can be found in this article).

In New Zealand this postmodernist idea has now become official policy. The National Curriculum explicitly mandates “equal status for mātauranga Māori [Maori knowledge]”, asserting that it has “equal value with other bodies of knowledge”, presumably including modern science. Indeed, the chemistry curriculum was revised to include the concept of mauri — the “life principle, life force, vital essence” and “the binding force between the physical and the spiritual” — that students are taught “is present in all matter”. As one chemist perceptively commented:

Who discovered this binding force between the physical and the spiritual? And what evidence was involved in its discovery? If this binding force is real, then everyone needs to know about it. It needs to be in the chemistry syllabus of every country, not just in New Zealand.

(It now appears that the inclusion of mauri in the chemistry curriculum was quietly rolled back after protests from scientists.)

Confirmation Bias

Science — and that includes both the natural and the social sciences — is, or at least is supposed to be, a truth-seeking enterprise. The phenomena that one decides to study may be chosen for their conceptual significance, for their social or economic importance, or simply out of personal curiosity. But whatever topic a scientist decides to investigate, she is intellectually and morally obliged to follow the evidence wherever it leads: even (or especially) if that evidence conflicts with her preconceptions or her desires.

Science doesn’t always work this way, of course — scientists are, after all, human — but that is anyway the ideal towards which we strive. And if there is freedom of debate within the scientific community — freedom to hold each others’ ideas to stringent conceptual and empirical scrutiny — then the scientific community collectively is more likely to reach objectively true conclusions than any of its members could do alone.

A scientist’s political and social values may, of course, influence her selection of topics to study — that is perfectly legitimate. But those values should be carefully put to the side when evaluating the evidence. The goal of the scientific endeavour is to find out how things really are, not to confirm how we wish they were.

And that reminded me of my favorite Richard Feynman quote, which epitomizes what science is all about:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.  So you have to be very careful about that.

The Harm of an Ideologically-Based Science

And when an organization that proclaims itself scientific distorts the scientific facts in the service of a social cause, it undermines not only its own credibility but that of science generally. How can the public be expected to trust the medical establishment’s declarations on other controversial issues, such as vaccines — issues on which the medical consensus is indeed right — when it has so visibly and blatantly misstated the facts about something so simple as sex?

. . .But as [Carole] Hooven and [Colin] Wright are at pains to emphasize, the harm arising from this politicisation of scientific inquiry is not just — or even primarily — the manifest injustice done to researchers like themselves. Rather, the principal harm is done to the scientific endeavor itself: by inducing researchers to self-censor as a matter of personal and professional preservation, “cancel culture” undermines the freedom of debate that is the cornerstone of the scientific community’s claims to knowledge. As John Stuart Mill pointed out a century-and-a-half ago, giving the example of Newtonian mechanics:

The beliefs which we have most warrant for have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of … This is the amount of certainty attainable by a fallible being, and this the sole way of attaining it.

When that freedom of debate is curtailed, even true ideas stop being rationally justified.

An incident

 Sokal recounts an incident connected with a dreadful published paper. I wrote about that paper (Sokal’s too charitable to name the authors), but didn’t know the aftermath:

What about decentering whiteness and cisheteropatriarchy in teaching? One article on “dismantling whiteness” in physics teaching was published recently in the journal Physical Review Physics Education Research: this is the section of the prestigious Physical Review devoted to “experimental and theoretical research relating to the teaching and learning of physics and astronomy”. I won’t enter into the details of the article; see here for a thoughtful and balanced critique. More interesting is what happened when four physicists took up the editors’ invitation to contribute “constructive and respectful criticism of published articles” — referring specifically to this one — “in the form of Comments”. The four authors’ duly submitted Comment — which you can read here — was rejected by the PRPER editor on the grounds that it was “framed from the perspective of a research paradigm that is different from the one of the research being critiqued”. As the authors dryly but accurately pointed out:

This is akin to stating that an astronomer must first accept astrology as true before critiquing it. Such notions should be, at a minimum, dispiriting for anyone who sees educational practices as worthy of empirical investigation.

Nature‘s misstep

But the best part of both papers is Sokal’s analysis of a misstep made by the journal Nature.

Two years ago, the prestigious journal Nature issued a new “ethics guidance” concerning proposed submissions. But the guidance does not pertain simply to the protection of human research subjects; that issue has been strictly regulated for decades. Nor is it about restricting the publication of information that poses serious material dangers, such as facilitating the production of nuclear or biological weapons. Rather, the guidance purports to address other forms of “harm” that could be caused by a scientific publication. And on these grounds, the editors arrogate to themselves an astoundingly broad power:

Regardless of content type (research, review or opinion) and, for research, regardless of whether a research project was reviewed and approved by an appropriate institutional ethics committee, editors reserve the right to request modifications to (or correct or otherwise amend post-publication), and in severe cases refuse publication of (or retract post-publication):

. . . Content that undermines — or could reasonably be perceived to undermine — the rights and dignities of an individual or human group on the basis of socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings.

That vague and subjective language is an open door to ideological censorship of valid scientific contributions — a censorship that the editors do not even attempt to disguise. It is therefore imperative to evaluate the justifications that the editors of Nature have offered in support of this brave new policy.

Sokal’s evaluation that follows this in the second paper above is wonderful. But you can read that for yourself.