Since I was a member (and President) of the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), it’s become—like many journals—way woke, which you can ascertain by perusing its website. It’s removed all the awards and prizes named after people who did anything deemed unsavory (e.g., Ronald Fisher), they have Pecksniffs (“Evo Allies“) who roam the meetings searching for “inappropriate behavior,” as if attendees were not adults, they are big time into DEI, even giving out awards for those who promote it best, and, as you’ll recall, they endorsed the idea (along with two other evolution-related societies), that sex is a spectrum, not just in humans but in all animals.
A campaign by several of us, mostly Luana Maroja, gathered names of evolutionists who didn’t agree with the “spectrum” idea, which was presented as if it were a consensus of evolutionists. It is not! Eventually, the SSE took down this pronouncement, which of course came from ideology rather than biology, saying they’d revisit it some day. They won’t.
One would think that after that embarrassing debacle, the SSE might rethink its ideological strategy and, perhaps, get back to its old mission of promoting meritorious work in evolution instead of promulgating ideology. But I’m pretty sure they won’t, because this type of virtue signaling is passed on from cohort to cohort. I’m just putting up this post as a suggestion for the SSE, and, if the past is any guide, they will resolutely ignore it.
One of the members sent me a list of where their journal Evolution ranks among all evolution journals. It’s in a three-way tie for #21 below (rectangle is mine, click to enlarge). Now I don’t know if this ranking is “normal” among years, as some of the journals at the top are “biggies”, but I was still surprised to see journals that I considered less interesting to be ranked more highly (I won’t name them). If this position has remained steady, fine. If it’s slipped, well, the SSE might do even more thinking. Regardless, I am embarrassed by the Society that I used to head, and I’m sure they’re embarrassed by me for calling them out (however, in the case of the “sex spectrum” they more or less admitted they screwed up).
But what’s even more embarrassing is that this society is not uniquely woke. At least the journals in my field that I know are all like that. The College Fix describes the Wokefest that was “the Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology in late July, which brought together the American Society of Naturalists, European Society for Evolutionary Biology, Society of Systematic Biologists, and Society for the Study of Evolution.” Have a look at the kind of stuff that permeates these meetings. (Ignore the right-wing slant of that site and just check the ridiculous and almost humorous things they describe.)
This is the kind of ideological erosion of science that has made Americans less trusting of STEMM. And yes, this comes from the Left rather than the Right. Is it worse than what the Right is doing now? Perhaps not, but, as I say, this kind of stuff is more insidious because it comes from within science, and may last a very long time.
The rankings:
I resigned my membership in the American Chemical Society way back in 2012 for several reasons. First, ACS refused to oppose intelligent design/creationism taught in schools as science. ACS claimed ID/C had “nothing to do with chemistry.”
Second, ACS ‘s priorities are not chemists, chemical safety, or education. They are first and foremost the official mouthpiece for the chemical industry. Industry can do no wrong. Our climate crisis’s cause is simply a mystery. Individuals, not industry, must do our part to mitigate it. Government regulations on the poor chemical and pharma industries are always bad. ACS never holds industry accountable for chemical accidents or environmental damage.
Third, ACS does nothing to advocate for chemists in this terrible job market. They never hold industry accountable for mass layoffs or moving US jobs to Asia and the Middle East. ACS doesn’t care about grad students, either. Being abused and exploited are their jobs, so shut up and stop complaining.
Third, ACS doesn’t care about women chemists. They insist that TWAW and eliminated all women-only groups.
Anyway, now ACS is completely woke. Their Journal of Chemical Education used to be valuable. Now, however, all it publishes is wokeism. It’s truly embarrassing how far ACS has fallen. For example, ACS wouldn’t let me register for a regional conference unless I declared my pronouns. So I checked Other and left it blank. That worked. Before I received my badge at the conference, a staffer again asked me to choose pronouns to print on my badge. I declined politely. Are you sure, asked the staffer. Yes, I replied.
At the conference, I deliberately checked attendees’ badges, and NO ONE had declared their pronouns except ACS staff. No one, even the undergrads.
Maybe members can push ACS on its wokeness. Until ACS changes meaningfully, I see no reason to rejoin.
As usual, YMMV.
The last part about current wokeness is not surprising. The first part about industry is also not surprising, I guess, given the nature of the job market and funding sources. But how do the two priorities get along?
ACS’s cognitive dissonance, I think. They frequently compartmentalize, then say that many issues have nothing to do with each other.
As the spokespeople for the chemical industry, ACS has a major conflict of interest. They’re supposed to be unbiased and objective in their reporting but they’re not. ACS has a buttload of investments in the chem industry — of course they do as an org, plus individual officers have personal investments — and industry advertises a lot. So ACS is entangled with the industry on which they report.
When a corporation lays off thousands of chemical professionals, ACS praises this as a smart, cost-cutting move. They don’t care about their members who are now unemployed. They will report on the bad US job market, but never acknowledge WHY the US job market is bad. It’s all a big mystery.
AFAIK, ACS doesn’t provide any employment assistance for its unemployed members. Before I left, members basically screamed at ACS before the org would offer its own medical insurance plan for its members. Many other STEM professional orgs have offered insurance for much longer than ACS. Other orgs also have strong positions opposing ID/C too, but not ACS.
I sympathize with many of your complaints about ACS. But I’m not sure I agree that a chemistry society should take an official stand on creationism. It is not in any direct way relevant to chemistry. Reaction enthalpies are as they are whether God created the universe in seven days or whether the Big Bang started the universe filled with quarks and leptons and force mediating bosons.
I do math and mathematical physics. I am not aware that the AMS (American Mathematical Society) has a position on creationism, and I don’t particularly want them to take a position on this. Nor do I want the AMS to take official positions on the history of slavery, or the nature of biological sex, or other things unrelated to math.
The American Physical Society strongly opposes creationism. How is creationism relevant to physics? Not directly.
However, I expect that any org for STEMM professionals strongly oppose pseudoscience, especially when it adversely affects STEM education. I think this is the minimum they can do. Bad or no science education hurts all of society.
STEMM orgs should NOT take positions on social issues unrelated to their field. They should adopt a Kalvern-like statement on organizational neutrality. So no org should be woke.
Postmodernism has produced nothing of value or interest. I have called myself “an old-fashioned modernist” for a long time. It’s not as oxymoronic as one might think.
“Postmodernism has produced nothing of value or interest.”
Really? It freed up whole realms of architecture, where it originated.
Yeah, I was on my second cup of coffee when I wrote that and I tend to overstate things when the caffeine kicks in.
Yes. The architecture is good.
I gave up my SSE membership in 2022. A senior professor apologized on social media for not attending an antiracism workshop at the 2022 annual meeting. He was dogpiled online by young black female SSE members for not doing the work. When I gently suggested to the SSE leadership that this dogpiling was bad, I was told the leadership thinks it’s good for SSE members to publicly shame other members.
The College Fix link includes a link out to one of the talks at SSE 2025 by Richard Prum. I’m listening to it now, it’s an informercial for his book “Performance All The Way Down”. Basically a refutation of evolutionary genetics and the sex binary as defined by gamete type. Lots of Foucault and Judith Butler; genes have agency; power relationships govern homeostasis; gene regulation is governed by discourse; performativity of sex in mammals.
Money quote from his abstract: the book is “a proposal for the creation or the establishment of an explicitly queer intellectual space in the heart of genetics, developmental and evolutionary biology.”
Thanks for the link — but on the basis of your comments, I’m not sure I have it in me to watch this one — if only we could think it could it be a Sokal-style subversion.
And a “queer intellectual space”? What could that be — something devoted to the subversion of… genetics. etc — just what on earth …is this an arm of the creationists or is it just some stalinism guise? Post-modern “queer” discourse seems devoted to obscurantism.
Richard Prum is a serious guy. Jerry reviewed Prum’s last book “The Evolution of Beauty” here.
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/11/25/a-critical-review-of-prums-the-evolution-of-beauty-in-evolution/
I can’t explain his turn towards queer theory, except that it’s possibly a consequence of his research and writing about mate selection and sexuality (birds) plus an effort to make himself culturally relevant (humans). But just a guess.
Prum’s first book showed signs of this wokeness, and I believe I mentioned that in my review (the three Evolution reviewers surely did!). But I have avoided his newest book for the same of my digestive system.
I started reading that book upon recommendation by a colleague. I even bought it, which was stupid of me. I got thru about 1/3 of the way and just gave up.
A significant pet peeve of mine is that he completely ignores invertebrates, which easily accounts for the majority of cases where males are ornamented and display to females. How can spiders, or mosquitoes even, experience a sense of “beauty”?? C’mon!
A serious guy, so noted — because I did treat this unseriously. I should not make the mistake of underestimating the erudtion and education of people whose arguments I quickly dismiss on the basis of wokeness or other intellectual rot of right-wing variety. But “queering’ this stuff gets me going. I mean, it’s one thing to queer John Milton’s works (See D. Ainsworth, U of Ala. English) but to queer genetics, developmental and evolutionary biology, well, that’s a step too far.
Sad for SSE. Sad for science.
Yes, this is just so dismaying. Glad i retired over a decade ago. Not sure I would recommend a career in science to any young person today.
In principle, there’s nothing wrong with the ant study, is there? I mean, the idea that a human cultural practice led to a change in allele frequencies in ants is at least plausible. I’m not interested enough to read the study, but the question, as the College Fix suggests, isn’t absurd.
Now, about that queer intellectual space…
Perhaps the impact factor rankings have to do with molecular-ness. That is, journals that more often cater to molecular genetics get more citations of their papers.
I like the term: molecular-ness.
Very sad.
Here the link: https://ooir.org/journals.php?field=Biology+%26+Biochemistry&category=Evolutionary+Biology
You can also see the position in the past