Our new book on ideological threats to science

July 25, 2025 • 8:15 am

By “our,” I mean a group of 39 essays (and more than 39 people) about how science is being corrupted by the Left.

Now I know what you’re gonna say: the 39 chapters in the book below (find it here on Amazon) deal exclusively with threats to science from the Left but, as we all know, at the moment the threats to science from the Right (aka, the Trump Administration) are far more serious. In the short run that may be the case, but in the long run, well, who knows, but the threats from the Left continue, and that’s for sure. So think of it as a bunch of scientists and other academics analyzing how our trade is being hurt by “progressives.” And, at the time we submitted our manuscripts to editor Lawrence Krauss (who added a nice introdution), Trump hadn’t yet started slicing federal grant money from “bad” universities (I see that Penn and Columbia have just caved).

Luana and I have reworked our Skeptical Inquirer piece, “The Ideological Subversion of Biology” for the book, but there are lots of new and exciting contributions, at least judging by the titles (I’ve been gone and haven’t read most of them).

One that I have read is the introductory piece by Richard Dawkins, a new 33=page essay called “Scientific truth stands above human feelings and politics.”  It’s really, really good. We have Alan “Hoaxer” Sokal writing on “How ideology threatens to corrupt science,” Sally Satel on “Social justice, MD: Medicine under threat,” Carole Hooven on “Why I left Harvard,” Alex Byrne and Moti Gorin on “A deafening silence: bioethics and gender-affirming health care,” Elizabeth Weiss on “Burying science under indigenous religion,” Nicholas Christakis on “Teaching inclusion in a divided world,” Steve Pinker on “A five-point plan to save universities from themselves,” and 31—count them, 31—other essays. If you want to see the state of the art in how progressives ruin science, this is your book. Buy it ($35 hardcover, $17 on Kindle) and curl up in bed with these essays and a glass of sherry.  But wait! There’s more! See below the picture.

The book comes out in only four days, so get yours now. I’m not saying this to sell books; I can’t even remember if we get any remuneration for our contributions, but I don’t care.

UPDATE: I’ve put screenshots of the Table of Contents below”

Krauss is also releasing daily podcasts in the same order as the book’s chapters (sadly, Luana and I didn’t record one).  Below is the first one (one hour) with Richard Dawkins discussing his chapter with Lawrence, and Niall Ferguson’s interview is also up (they may have skipped Alan Sokal as there are 20 podcasts from 31 essays). You can find all the podcasts here.

Although Dawkins is dismissed by a certain group of know-nothings as a “white old man” whose thoughts are irrelevant, his chapter (and the interview) show that he hasn’t missed a lick, even at 84. Would that I could be half that cogent at that age!

The table of contents:

U

UPDATE: As a reader noted (and I predicted), the Great Benighted, which includes the Hateful “Friendly”  Atheist, has gone after the book before it was even issued.  I very strongly doubt that the HA even read the book before he went after it.  So, you know, ignorance.

60 thoughts on “Our new book on ideological threats to science”

  1. On the Wishlist. Annoying that Amazon doesn’t have the Read Preview option on this one; I would like to see the TOC.

      1. Wow! What a line up. Put in my pre-order.

        Thanks. And thanks for the travelogue. Looking forward to more on the trip.

    3. Amazon does not include previews until the book has been released, so nothing sinister there, but it is an annoying practice none-the-less.

  3. On my wishlist as well.
    But I am confident that the political right will continue their special kind of anti-science well into the post-Trump era.

    1. But they may not have the political power to do what Trump is doing now. Progressives, on the other hand, don’t need political power to tarnish scientists. They are loud and have outsized influence in science (the editors of Lancet, Science, and Nature, for example, are all Social Justice Warriors).

      1. Editors as SJW’s yes, I’ve been forced to that conclusion, despite emotional resistance (can this be…??). I didn’t pester you with “Most men have a Y chromosome…” in a recent commentary on an article about Y chromosome & cancer — or was it “most people with Y chromosomes are men”, you get the gist. Of course, more overt was that terrible Claire Ainsworth article & other examples you’ve featured here. And it does tarnish the astonishing, high level work in those otherwise fine journals.

        Hey — I understand that Science finally retracted the Arsenic-DNA article that had me canceling a subscription some years ago. Later I re-upped for digital only.

        1. I don’t know the context of that, but at times it is best to do some hedging since a small % of XY people are pretty much female, and a small % of XX people are male for lack of a better term. There is Swyer syndrome, where a person is XY but they are anatomically female inside and out. Their gonads are vestigial and don’t suggest any sex.
          Even better, there is XX male syndrome. This is where the male critical SRY locus of the Y chromosome had translocated to an X chromosome. These individuals are anatomical males and they even have testes.

  4. Errr comment disappeared /

    Yeah! Looking forward to this!

    … the Left (Rousseau, Hegel’s descendants) are Woke (worldview, Weltanschauung ), but bear in mind that the Left’s rejects also think they can do Leftism, but just better than the Left – this, this forms the Woke Right Weltanschauung.

    1. The hate never ends. Remind us again, Bryan, which is the forest and where are the trees?

  5. Anti-science on the left is the more odious, in my view, because the young occupy the left, and the young are the leaders of the future.

  7. Are there plans to translate the book into other languages, such as German?

    I have a good command of English (mainly due to my job 😀), but with such a important topic, it would be beneficial to read the essays in my native language to avoid misunderstandings or overlooking details.

  8. Hemant Mehta has taken some time out from calling out obscure American preachers in obscure US towns, to cry and mope about you promoting the book.

    He tweets: “This idiotic book barely even pays lip service to how the right is decimating the entire scientific establishment. But the left tried to make science fields less racist and sexist.”

    But it isn’t the right who deny basic aspects of biological science, especially around the topic of sex. That would be part of the left, including eejits and extremists like Mehta. His blog literally has commentators who make repeated death threats.

    1. There’s a word for Mehta which starts with a C, though if I use it here the boss (rightfully, probably) deletes my post. 🙂

      Anyway.. not a fan of the guy.

      D.A.
      NYC

      2. Crank? Clown? Contemptible? Compromised? Cretin?
        There are lots of non-anatomical possibilities…. 🙂

  9. OH! I was just tweeting Elizabeth Weiss (whom I absolutely adore) and Krauss (who I also like a lot) about the book…thinking “Should get that one.”

    Didn’t know PCC(E) was there. I’ll get it online, and a copy for my neighbor, an eye surgeon friend of many years who only bothers reading when I buy him books*. 🙂
    Cheers!

    D.A.
    NYC
    *I last bought him Douglas Murray’s War on the West.

  10. I’m very pleased I know the work of 90% of the authors there! Pardon my flex 🙂

    What a great dinner party invitation list that would make. I bet all of them visit Manhattan at least occasionally and I have a nice apartment (prob not quite large enough…). I’d serve puffin … or threaten to!

    D.A.
    NYC

  11. I can understand an update of Gross & Levitt’s 1994 Higher Superstition focused on the internal threat posed by the academic left, but it is wrong to think that the right’s attack on science and universities is just now emerging with Trump. Trust in science has been declining among Republicans for decades, anti-vaccine rhetoric has been rampant long before this administration, denial of the scientific consensus about global warming, attacks on the “elite” and “experts” use euphemisms for academics, political mockery of research studies based on titles, … Trump exploited these sentiments and continues to do so, he did not create them. I hope that this book does persuade more of our colleagues about the “troubles in academia,” but fear it might instead be exploited by the right leading to more not less polarization. Similar problems with HxA academy casting heterodoxy so much in terms of political orientation. The problems in academia are better cast as problems with ideology, irrationality, and authoritarianism than with left, progressives, right wing, or whatever flavour dominates at the moment.

    1. Because it jumped out at me, I want to mention that anti-vaccine rhetoric has also been popular on the left–at least, in the USA, it’s got a firm foothold among the sort of people who tend to vote blue. Has for some decades.

      “The problems in academia are better cast as problems with ideology, irrationality, and authoritarianism than with left, progressives, right wing, or whatever flavour dominates at the moment.”

      Those things are at the root of the problem (I’d add Postmodern-style epistemology to the list.) I think it’s a good and healthy thing, though, when people challenge the orthodoxies of their own “side.”

      EDITED TO ADD: I look at it this way: tribalism is also part of the problem. It’s how ideology gets a foothold. And the tendency to stifle dissent is an authoritarian one. Look at how trans activists try to dismiss all their critics as right-wing. The more people speak out against the idiocies of their own tribe, the harder it becomes for the ideologues and authoritarians to dismiss their arguments.

    2. I very very much hope that heterodox-ers don’t devolve into L/R political camps! I am hanging a lot of hope on them.

      1. I’m a bit nervous about the heterodox-ers veering off to L/R, R being more likely since it seems that the illiberal left academics spurred this het-dox — a bit tough to tell L from R in some instances. Self styled contrarians in medicine & climate could find an audience.

  12. I of course pre-ordered The War On Science weeks ago. Don’t the cave-ins by Columbia and Penn imply two things? (1) Holding research funding hostage, as the Trump admin did, has therapeutic value in curing academia. (2) If research funding has been largely restored for Columbia and Penn, then this therapeutic tool does not
    necessarily “decimate” US science. If Harvard holds out, it can return to its old specialty of training men of the cloth (the wokely cloth now), as in the 17th century.

  14. I will order the book. I really liked the piece you and Luana Maroja wrote for Skeptic and I’m sure the other chapters will be good as well.

  16. I still can’t understand why you all think the Left’s threat to science far outweighs that deeply seated anti-science woven into the fabric of the right wing ideology (anti evolution, stem cell research separation of church and state etc) that you devoted a whole book to counter and refute it (which I agree). I don’t consider myself as a leftist but I share some progressive leaning and I am 100% against anti-science tendencies on the left. It would have made since if you wrote as much about the rights mortal threat to science and science institutions for the past century at least.

    1. My answer to all cavils in this vein is that anything an author writes (or an editor includes in a collection) should be judged on what he wrote, not about what someone else thinks he should have written about but didn’t. Put together your own jeremiad against religious fundamentalism if you wish.

      More to the point, the submissions in this book focus on how the practitioners of science and academic thought are undermining scientific enquiry from within to further their agenda inside the academy. They are the fifth column if you like. The external enemy we all understand. We know what he looks like and he’s outside the gates. What’s not so clear is what we are doing to ourselves, and this book sounds a warning. What medicine, my little corner, has done in genderism it has done all by itself and has only itself to blame. We are supposed to be self-regulating, remember? And now we are going to need a vengeful state to whack us upside the head with “instrusive”, “tyrannical”, and “hateful” legislation to protect children, because we abdicated.

      1. +++

        Leslie, do you have any thoughts about why medical associations and med schools have been particularly soft targets for infection by DEIitis?

        1. I do, Jon, but I would rather express them in an oral face-to-face setting with multiple participants who could interrupt me and force clarification of half-baked ideas, or even shout them down, before I served them out in written form.

      2. YES, Leslie. The left is hollowing out science by sabotage from within. The right is withholding funds until academia cures some of the ills that have occurred as a result of social justice excesses in higher ed. Which side is worst ebbs and flows and depends on the group with which we each identify. Those of us who identify with the road kill centrists can comfortably shake our heads at the antics of both groups. Equally obnoxious probably. Primates!

    2. Well, the anti-science ideas stemming from academia are not from a right wing source.

      There is very little right wing influence in academic departments.

    3. Although I am very agreeable that the political Right is also a threat, and maybe even a bigger threat, do see Jerry’s comment to me above as it is a salient point about that issue.
      If one tried to write a book about both the L and R attacks on science, the book would be easily 2x as long. Or, if kept to this length, it would need to be 2x as thin on details. I’m sure tough choices had to be made.

      1. Thinness is of course expressed in units of thinth, not yet part of SI. Like slowth (Brit “sloth”), dumbth, etc.

  17. Preordered the Kindle version, only to discover it’s released two months from today! Is it because they want to protect the initial sale of hardcover books? Oh well, I’ll just have to wait. I am up to my neck in physical books, can’t bear the thought of yet more, no matter how good.

      1. Maybe for thee, but not for me. I live in Norway – maybe that explains the difference. Argh.

        1. Strange. I just checked and it won’t be released in the UK either until September.

          1. I think the technical term is differential marketing. Highly irritating.

  18. But Trump. Yes, Trump. Because liberals of the intellectual left largely sat in ignorance, denial, avoidance, cowardice, and fecklessness over the last decade the door was opened for Trump to wage a sort of war against the excesses of the “progressive” left. He is not imposing creationism in college classrooms; he is not mandating a return to “the best that has been thought and said.” He is trying to roll back forces destroying our educational and cultural institutions from within—forces that the liberal left has either allowed or been mostly powerless to confront. And, yes, we will see collateral damage.

    Like the Olympic committee using Trump as cover to act as they should have done long ago, perhaps some university administrators can now enact effective change that requires a courage that they lack: “I understand, I am with you [progressives], but Trump . . .” Perhaps in providing arguments and options from the left, this book that Jerry touts can facilitate such change. But while I look forward to reading it, I can’t help but wonder about the impotency of its arguments and contributors were there a Harris Administration in place—or that of any other nationally prominent Democrat. Liberals failed to stop the “progressives” from advancing as far as they have in our cultural and educational institutions, yet they would gladly welcome another Administration that would, like Biden’s, take the coercive power of the federal government and forcefully advance “progressivism” in the same way Trump is fighting it.

    Trump (or his staff) realizes something that few on the liberal left appear to: the “progressives” are not interested in a two-state solution in which they coexist with liberal colleagues. They are interested in control. They have weaponized liberal tolerance, empathy, desire for fairness, and academic freedom. Whether by intent or by foolishness, they would destroy all the above—along with objectivity, freedom of speech, and freedom of association. “Progressive” coercion is softer, lacking the physical violence of earlier illiberal movements. That doesn’t mean it is any less revolutionary in its objectives or damaging to what it opposes.

    Sometimes it is useful to have a bastard in charge when all the “kind” people refuse to take necessary action.

    2. “He is trying to roll back forces destroying our educational and cultural institutions from within—forces that the liberal left has either allowed or been mostly powerless to confront. And, yes, we will see collateral damage.”

      On a few things, like DEI or men in women’s sports, I welcome the corrective.

      However, I’m concerned about what RFK Jr is doing. It’s looking very bad indeed.

  19. Who specifically by name is this “Zeus blessed” group of know-nothings who view Dawkins as a “white old man” whose thoughts are irrelevant? Bloody infuriating is the arrogance of the omniscient younger set.

    They should hope to live to at least Dawkins’s age.

  20. (OT-ish: this is not directly about the book or science, but about Trump and woke and lawyers.)

    Just posed the following question to Duck.ai:

    How did the season 27 opener of South Park manage to get passed by Paramount’s lawyers etc. ??

    Its answer, as far as it went, was (ISTM) accurate but not sufficient. I really want to know, being stunned by the episode’s full-bore take-no-prisoners approach, even relative to other SP episodes. IMO this is plausibly Trump’s “Do you feel lucky, punk?” decision moment. We’ll see if he does, and is….

    1. I assumed that this was just the consequence of normal adjective order – adjectives of age generally precede adjectives of colour, as any ESl teacher can tell you.

      Having just yesterday completed a submission to Parliament critical of proposed management structures and principles which would undemocratically privilege pre-scientific, animistic notions in the regulation and management of NZ’s freshwater, I wonder if those people who scorn Dawkins as an old white man would listen reverently to old brown men and women talking non-scientific bunkum.

  22. If I had a rich patron, I would purchase 100 copies of this book and distribute them to the small neighborhood libraries located in front of my neighbors’ homes in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over time, I would distribute other books on my list, such as Cynical Theories, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate, When Race Trumps Merit, On Settler Colonialism, The War on the West, The Constitution of Knowledge, Fashionable Nonsense, and, of course, Faith vs. Fact.

    Any other books I should share under the cover of darkness with my “progressive” neighbors?

Comments are closed.