Category: science journals behaving badly

Colin Wright on trans data epistomology: a new “way of knowing” that prioritizes ideology over truth

November 4, 2025 • 11:00 am

One of the recurrent themes on this site—and in the new anthology The War on Science, including the paper byLuana and Maroja and me—is the erosion of scientific standards by ideology.  Now a new paper in the peer-reviewed journal Big Data & Society (first title below), analyzed by Colin Wright on his website (second title), shows more than anything the explicit antiscientific aims of some ideologues. And those aims include clear guidance to prioritize ideology and politics over truth. Nowhere else have i seen this aim stated more blatantly.

In this case, the ideology promoted to distort or efface truth is “trans data epistomology”: a way to deal with data on trans issues. (As you know, empirical data, because they sometimes counteract accepted trans ideologies, have been controversial, leading to withholding of data that has real effects on human beings.)

I hasten to add that the distortion of data and prioritizing of politics over truth can be and has been applied to any group that does “science” with a political agenda—not just minority groups but entire organizations like scientific journals, medical schools, and professional organizations.  I emphasize this because trans matters are the hottest of political hot potatoes, but what this paper exemplifies is not at all unique to trans issues, and calling it out is not “transphobic”. In this time of extreme political division, science has become a tool not for finding truth, but for advancing your cause, no matter what the cause may be. Damn the truth, and full steam ahead.

The authors of this paper (again, it’s peer-reviewed) conducted 13 interviews of activists involved in “trans community care” and, from the 16 people involved in these interviews, the authors derived four pillars of what they call “trans data epistemology”, which turns out to involve, as Colin notes, ways you can use data to advance your cause.

Click the title below to read the paper:

Here’s part of the abstract; I’ve bolded the four pillars, but pay attention to the third one: “community well-being is more important than ‘accurate’ data”.  The last one, “data makes us visible to institutions,” apparently means “reframing your data in a way that serves your needs.”

 Drawing on literature from trans theory, data activism, critical data studies, philosophy, and critical social theory we offer a narrative of trans people as creators of knowledge, data-based and otherwise, undergirded by four pillars of a trans data epistemology: categories are provisional and productive, data can be a tool of community care, community well-being is more important than “accurate” data, and data makes us visible to institutions.

This is from the paper’s section on “pillar 3”: prioritizing ideology over truth:

Community well-being is more important than “accurate” data

Trans communities are experiencing an emergency. Well, it was already an emergency, but this is an epidemic. This is a crisis. This is, stop what you’re doing. We have to help now, today. And sometimes these pieces of data really can be a very strong call to action. (George)
In this pillar, we examine how participants prioritized actionable data for the trans community. Our participants reflected an understanding of data as rhetoric, as merely “one mode of conveying information” (Haarman, 2021: 35), not the only mode. When data is simply one of many ways of conveying information, it does not need to be viewed as the canonical source of truth. Our participants repeatedly emphasized that actionable and useful data for community care was the utmost priority over true, accurate, or verifiable data. We do not mean to undermine the meticulous data work of our participants but to emphasize the desired outcome of community well-being of their data work. This aspect of trans data epistemology is consonant with the idea that data is for community care.

This is an academic way of saying that there are other ways of knowing besides the data itself, and data doesn’t have to be the “canonical source of truth.” In fact, when the data conflict with “community care,” you give priority to the latter.  For things like “affirmative care” in gender medicine, this has obvious implications. One example is the withholding of data that counteract accepted ideology, like recent data showing that untreated gender dysphoria does not increase the suicide rate, or that affirmative care does not bolster mental health.

I’ll leave you to read the paper itself and Colin’s analysis below (I’ll quote him a bit), but want to add one part of the paper that’s becoming increasingly commonplace: “author positionality”—statements in which authors reveal aspects of their personal life, including their activities and ideologies. Here’s the positionality statement of the second author from the University of Washington (the first author works at MIT):

Amelia Lee Doğan: I came to this project after its development as a trans person interested in activism and data. My experience include working part-time for a university LGBTQ+ office for several years and researching other activists communities’ data and technical needs. I had no direct contact with any of the interview participants but their words and work truly made me cry at how other trans people are making this world a little better for us. Especially, as a trans young person of color, it was an honor to get to hear our elders talk about how they have fought and continue to fight and care for us.

Stevens’s statement is pretty much the same, except for the crying part. But is it any wonder that authors so deeply dedicated to a specific ideological aim are willing to allow distortion of data to achieve that aim?

On his site Reality’s Last Stand, Colin gives a succinct and, in my view, an accurate summary of the paper and its problems. Click below to read it:

I’ll give a few quotes, but if you like Colin’s analysis and work you should subscribe to his site.

Over the past few decades, universities have churned out a steady stream of papers so detached from reality that they often read like parodies. Many of them have been highlghted right here on Reality’s Last Stand: the infamous “feminist glaciology” paper that sought to “decolonize” ice; the surreal paper where two “hydrosexual” researchers married brine shrimp and made love to a lake; and the deeply disturbing pieces on “queering babies” and questioning childhood sexual innocence. Those were insane. Others—like those calling to “Indigenize” and “decolonize” medicine by rejecting the scientific method—are not just ridiculous, but genuinely dangerous.

Now, a new peer-reviewed article in Big Data & Society breaks new ground by openly arguing that lying with data is not only acceptable but morally required when it comes to transgender issues.

The paper, titled “Trans Data Epistemologies: Transgender Ways of Knowing with Data,” was written by Nikko Stevens, an assistant professor of statistical and data sciences at Smith College, and Amelia Lee Doğan, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington and research affiliate with MIT’s Data + Feminism Lab. What makes this paper truly remarkable is how the authors openly admit that “truth” in their work takes a back seat to politics. “Actionable and useful data for community care,” they write, is “the utmost priority over true, accurate, or verifiable data.”

They are so ideologically blinkered that they’re not even hiding the fact that they’re committing research misconduct. They’re openly celebrating it in a peer-reviewed journal. The very existence of “data activism” as an academic field shows just how thoroughly higher education has been captured by ideology.

. . .The paper presents this approach as a “trans data epistemology,” supposedly a new “way of knowing” based on “trans experiences.” The authors argue that “mainstream Western epistemology”—the normal way of doing science—has historically favored the perspectives of the dominant group—white, cisgender, heterosexual men.” Because there’s “no universal knowledge system,” they claim, “epistemologies based solely on the perspectives of one group are necessarily limited and incomplete.” Every group must therefore have its own truth, and the truth according to marginalized groups trumps all others.

In other words, they believe truth itself depends on identity. Instead of minimizing bias, as real scientists strive to do, these authors maximize it.

Colin goes through the four pillars of the new epistemology, which remind me of the indigenous “ways of knowing” capturing New Zealand. Colin views the new epistemology as “an assault on the scientific method itself, and it erodes public trust in the very institutions built to safeguard truth.”  Note that this assault comes from the left flank of politics.

There’s a lot more, but I’ll just give Colin’s conclusion and, below that, one of my favorite quotes about science.

Colin:

Underlying all of this is the belief that scientific standards are oppressive. The authors proudly conclude that their “trans data epistemology stands apart from hegemonic values about data, in which data is a mimetic representation of reality [and] a way to discern truths about the world through big data insights.” The idea that “represent[ing] reality” with data is “hegemonic” is absurd.

It’s hard to overstate how blatantly this paper rejects the basic principles that make science possible. Principles that have slowly evolved over centuries to reduce bias and uncover truth. That this paper survived the gauntlet of peer-review at Big Data & Society—supposedly a top journal in the field by impact—shows just how far the academic world has fallen.

And Richard Feynman, on the Challenger disaster:

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

The only silver lining to this dreadful paper is that hardly anybody will read it, as it’s buried in a rather obscure journal. On the other hand, people need to know stuff like this so they can see how real, objective science is going down the drain, washed away by the shower of ideology. And “regular” people are starting to realize this because some ideological nonsense, like the view that there is a spectrum of biological sex in humans, has made it into the public ear.

Shame on this journal, and shame on the peer reviews who denigrate truth in favor of politics.

The erosion of medical journals

October 28, 2025 • 11:30 am

Of all the papers in the special issue of the Journal of Controversial Ideas on censorship in science, the one below is perhaps the most important, as the censorship being imposed can cause permanent damage to humans. I’ve described this censorship before: it involves papers on or critiques of extreme claims of gender ideologues, especially those touting the benefits of what’s called “affirmative care” (adolescent dysphoria—> doctor on board prescribes puberty blockers almost immediately—> hormones, surgery, and gender transition). The recent history of the field, documented in the first paper below, involves repeated attempts to allow questionable claims to stand in the literature. Two examples of this are the unsupported claim that affirmative care prevents suicide, and the release of the paper by Johanna Olson-Kennedy et al, which was held back because the results (puberty blockers did not improve mental health) were not in line with what author thought gender activists wanted to see.  The paper by Cohn below (click to read), summarizes many of these forms of censorship or distortion.

Here’s the abstract:

The integrity of the gender medicine research literature has been compromised, not only by censorship of correct articles, but also by censorship of critiques of articles with unsupported (for instance exaggerated), misleading or erroneous statements. Many such statements concern the evidence base, which can be evaluated rigorously using a key component of evidence-based medicine, systematic reviews of the evidence. These reviews currently find there is limited to very little confidence that estimates of benefit from (and sometimes harm from) medical gender intervention, that is, puberty blockers, hormones and/or surgeries, are likely to match true outcomes. Several medical societies and articles in medical journals have been claiming otherwise, misrepresenting the evidence base as a whole and/or relying upon unsupported or non-representative individual study findings or conclusions. For example, high likelihood of benefit and low risk of adverse outcomes from medical gender interventions are often claimed, while less invasive alternative treatment options are either omitted or mischaracterized. Other unsupported, erroneous or misleading statements occur when studies minimize or omit mention of significant limitations, or report findings or conclusions not supported by their own data; these are then sometimes quoted by others as well. In addition, correctly reported studies are sometimes misrepresented. Critiques which attempt to rectify such statements are frequently rejected. Some examples are presented here. Such rejections have stifled scientific debate, interfering with the continual scrutiny and cross checks needed to maintain accuracy in the research literature. Currently, erroneous and unsupported statements circulate and repeat between journals and medical society guidelines and statements, misinforming researchers, clinicians, patients and the general public.

If you want a three-page summary of the paper above, which you really should read in toto if you’re interested in gender medicine, read the article below (click headline to read) gives a terse summary.

I can’t summarize the first paper in detail, and you really should read it for yourself. I can, however, give a few quotes from Linehan’s summary on his Substack, which is a bit choppy (quotes indented below). Linehan begins by citing the paper above:

‘Censorship of Essential Debate in Gender Medicine Research’ has the dullest possible title for what it reveals. In yet another example of trans ideology destroying everything it touches, the most prestigious journals in medicine are refusing to publish corrections to papers that contain demonstrably false claims about gender medicine.

The author, J. Cohn, didn’t set out to write about censorship. She tried to correct errors in published papers. When that didn’t work, she described what happened. She found that multiple systematic reviews (the gold standard in evidence-based medicine) have found low or very low-certainty evidence for the benefits of medical gender interventions. This includes puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery. ‘Low certainty’ means there’s limited confidence the estimated effects will match what actually happens to patients.

The Cass Review, published in 2024, found the evidence for paediatric interventions “remarkably weak.” Several other systematic reviews found the same for patients under 21 and under 26.

None have found that these interventions reduce suicide risk.

Meanwhile, major medical journals keep publishing papers claiming the opposite.

Papers in JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Pediatrics have variously claimed that gender-affirming medical interventions are:

  • “Widely recognised as essential, evidence based, and often lifesaving”
  • Known to “clearly improve health outcomes”
  • Associated with “demonstrated health and well-being benefits”
  • Linked to regret rates “less than 1%” or “exceedingly rare”

The regret claim is particularly bold given that the studies cited have major flaws. The often-quoted Bustos review included 27 studies, of which 23 had moderate-to-high risk of bias. All included studies suffered from premature follow-up, significant loss to follow-up, or both.

And one more bit:

Medical guidelines are supposed to work like this: researchers conduct systematic reviews of all available evidence, assess its quality, and make recommendations that match the strength of that evidence. Strong evidence gets strong recommendations. Weak evidence gets weak recommendations or no recommendation at all.

That’s not what happened here.

The American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement recommending gender-affirming care wasn’t based on systematic reviews. A subsequent analysis found its cited references “repeatedly said the very opposite of what AAP attributed to them.”

The Endocrine Society guidelines make strong recommendations based on evidence they themselves rate as low or very low certainty. They don’t explain why.

WPATH commissioned systematic reviews, then interfered with them. After publication, they dropped all but one minimum age recommendation (for phalloplasty) under pressure from the Biden administration and the AAP.

This whole field is rife with a form of advocacy so extreme that researchers not only hesitate to publish results that go against the preferred ideological narrative, but also repeatedly distort studies that criticize affirmative care.

This is not the way science is supposed to be done, but it’s what happens when ideology begins to erode the norms of science. This of course is not new: it’s what happened with the Lysenko affair in Soviet Russia (documented in our paper, Jussim et al.), when ideological distortion (and outright cheating) ultimately killed millions of people.  Nobody’s claiming that kind of toll for gender medicine, but there is still a palpable human cost to sloppy research.

h/t: Joolz

“Citation justice”: turning science into social engineering

October 21, 2025 • 10:30 am

This proposal promoted by “progressive” scientists on how to change the scientific literature is not new. But it may hang around for decades, as it’s also being pushed on young people by scientific societies. It may even persist in the coming years when we have a Democratic President and Congress (fingers crossed).

Up until recently, the normal way to write a paper is this: when you make a statement of known fact, or refer to previous literature, you cite the most important, comprehensive, or relevant papers in parentheses after your assertion An example: “Humans are animals” (Sanders 1856; Jones and Kirkman 1940; Cel-Ray and Tonic, 1956).

The “progressive” scientific ideologues want that changed, as the first article below (just published by the Heterodox Academy and written by Erin Shaw, a woman researcher for the Academy) describes. Instead of citing papers you think best support your statement, one is supposed to cite papers written by people from marginalized groups (usually people of color or women) as a way of bringing equity to the field. This practice is called “citation justice”.

But there are several problems with this practice. Here are a few:

1.) “Citation justice” does not advance science, but is a form of social engineering, turning the scientific literature into a form of affirmative action. It values ethnicity or gender above merit or readers’ knowledge of the field. As Shaw says at the end of her piece:

Engaging with a variety of ideas, texts, and research from an array of scholars across the field is essential to the spirit of the academy and scholarship itself—not to mention necessary for knowledge production. It should be second nature for academics to wade deeply into the literature of their disciplines. As Erec Smith observed last year regarding Nature Reviews Bioengineering’s reasoning for requesting citation diversity statements, “… thoughtfully choosing references and giving sufficient time to survey an entire field is already considered a significant part of scientific research, academic discourse, and critical thinking in general. If scientists are not doing this, the problem isn’t that they are biased; it’s that they are bad scientists.” References should be included in an article because of the ideas within them, not because of the skin color or gender identity of the writers.

Much like DEI statements in faculty hiring, citation diversity statements function as another ideological filter that forces academics to contort themselves and their professional pursuits into ideologically palatable shapes. In explicitly asking authors and reviewers to consider the demographic characteristics of cited sources (and tally them up for presentation), these journals jeopardize the scholarly rigor of scholars and of the journals themselves, which, for better or worse, are the cornerstone of scholarly dissemination.

2.) This practice is often justified, as noted in Shaw’s piece, by saying that minoritized groups are under-cited relative to the quality of their published work.  Well, one can’t dismiss that out of hand, but before you go changing the practice of citation, you need to document your claim (this is, after all, science). And I can’t find any evidence that published research by minority groups is cited less than it should be. Also, undercitation is supposed to reflect bigoty, but that too has not been demonstrated and, as those of us in science know, departments are falling all over themselves to hire women and minority scientists and accept them as grad students. If you are indicting “structural racism” as the cause of this phenomenon, which is implicitly the case, then you must show that.

3.) Even if you are committed to this practice, how do you know which authors are to be moved up the citation scale? Well, women may be told apart by their names, though authors are often listed by initials.  And imagine what you’d have to do to show undercitation: determine whether a paper should be cited but was not. I haven’t found any literature supporting that (I may have missed some), but without that data one has little empirical justification for initiating “citation justice”. One can’t just show that minoritized authors are under-cited relative to these authors’ publication rate; rather, one has to show that their papers are as good as or better than papers that ARE cited. This becomes even more difficult when one realizes that most scientific papers are never cited at all, or cited maybe once or twice, regardless of authorship.

4.) How do you determine whether a paper is by someone in a minority group? Shaw notes the problem:

Prompting scholars to consider author demographics as they develop their reference lists threatens scholarly rigor. Instead of grappling with the complexity of arguments, theories, and data presented by fellow researchers, academics may find themselves Googling photos of scholars they might cite to see if they can (literally) get more diversity tallies in their reference list to appease the journal. Consequently, the actual accomplishments of scholars, many of whom may have indeed worked very hard to overcome obstacles, risk being tokenized by identitarian orthodoxies.

5.) Inequities in citations may reflect inequities of output, perhaps caused by discrimination in the past that has prevented minorities or women from going into science. But the tweet below shows that a paucity of publication may be more to blame than bigotry:

But of course citation justice is supposed to remedy citation inequities, whatever their cause.

6.)  There are other groups that are said to be oppressed, like people who are disabled or “neurodiverse”.  How would one ever find these? Or is the search limited only to women and scholars of color? Shaw’s conclusion is this:

In theory, citation diversity aims to broaden representation; in practice, it reduces scholarship to a superficial numbers game. True intellectual diversity emerges when scholars engage deeply with the best ideas, wherever they originate—not when journals ask researchers to audit the demographics of their bibliographies. If the goal is to advance science, then intellectual rigor, not ideological conformity, must be the guiding principle.

Again, click the screenshot to read:

I’ve given above some of the problems with “citation justice”.  But the article above also documents journals that recommend it. I’ll give a few quotes:

Nature Reviews Psychology editors ask authors to describe how they “explore[d] relevant studies from a diverse group of researchers (including but not limited to diversity in gender, race, career stage and geographical location) before writing their first draft.” The editors suggest these optional citation diversity statements are a way that “scientists can demonstrate their commitment to DEI through actions that are not mandated by institutions or subject to institutional control.” In other words, authors are expected to remain steadfastly committed to the same principles that the federal government is attempting to aggressively quash within universities.

Nature Reviews Psychology’s decisionto encourage citation diversity statements appears to be the latest in a small yet noteworthy movement to embed equity goals explicitly in the scientific publishing process. Several papers have advocated for the practice, and a small number of journals have adopted optional citation diversity statement requests as a part of their article submission processes. Nature Reviews Bioengineering, a sister publication of Nature Reviews Psychology, may have served as an early pilot of the citation diversity statement with Nature after it adopted such a policy in 2023.

The Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) was an early adopter of citation diversity when, in 2021, editors integrated an optional citation diversity statement into the article submission process for its four journals, Annals of Biomedical Engineering, Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering, Cardiovascular Engineering and Technology, and Biomedical Engineering Education.

BMES editors followed the suggestions of citation diversity advocates to straightforwardly ask authors to tally up diversity points. Authors opting into the diversity statement are asked specifically for “the proportion of citations by gender and race/ethnicity for the first and last authors” and “the method used to determine those proportions and its limitations.”

BMES even provides detailed instructions on how proportions should be presented: “The proportions of authors by gender should be divided into four categories based on first/last author combinations: woman/woman, man/woman, woman/man, and man/man. Race and ethnicity proportions should similarly be divided into four categories based on first/last author combinations: author of color/author of color, white author/author of color, author of color/white author, white author/white author.” This numeric scheme raises many unanswered questions about target proportions, cross-cutting identities, and whether authors are deciding which scholars to reference based on perceived demographics rather than scholarly ideas and data presented in their papers.

The practice is spreading into other scientific areas, most distressingly into my own field of evolutionary biology. An article in The College Fix describes an entire session on citation justice at a (2024) 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:

“We recognize that we have the responsibility to engage critically with the ideologies and guiding ethics behind our theory and our research and we strive to engage with decolonial practices and methods that have been put forward by indigenous scholars,” said Queen’s University graduate student and self-described “settler” scientist Mia Akbar in her introduction of a symposium she co-organized on “The Politics of Citation in Evolutionary Biology.”

“We’re very committed to trying to make space for voices and perspectives that have been erased by dominant science,” she added.

Haley Branch, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, while giving a presentation titled “Ableism as foundation for evolutionary biology,” voiced concern over how the “axiological assumptions” of evolutionary biology are built off of a “white, heteronormative, Christian, Western, male framework.”

I now see that ableism has made it into the list of factors to be considered when citing papers.  But Christianity and “heteronormativity”?  Are we supposed to cite more non-Christian and gay authors? And how would you know? This suggestion is invidious.

At any rate, here’s the Nature Reviews Psychology paper, which you can access by clicking on the screenshot below:

A quote:

. . . . scientists can demonstrate their commitment to DEI through actions that are not mandated by institutions or subject to institutional control. For example, in a Comment in this issue, Carolyn Quam and Teresa Roberts describe how researchers can move scholarship away from narratives that perpetuate societal biases by writing inclusively. Inclusive writing is an iterative, multi-step process that aims to ensure that scientific writing (including review articles, grant applications and literature-review portions of original research reports) does not centre privileged identities as optimal and normative. Quam and Roberts provide an example of an inclusive writing process for a paper they wrote about language development, illustrating that inclusive writing need not be limited to research that is explicitly about marginalized groups or diversity. Importantly, although inclusive writing is an individual act, it can inform systemic change by influencing scientific norms.

At Nature Reviews Psychology, we are now explicitly encouraging authors to take up one of the steps involved in inclusive writing discussed by Quam and Roberts: diversifying citation practices.

The number of citations a paper receives does not necessarily reflect the quality of its research. However, citations can influence a researcher’s career through speaking invitations, grants, awards and promotions. Thus, representation in reference lists has important consequences for representation in science: if citations are systematically biased against, for example, female authors, then female authors will have CVs or grant applications that are less competitive than those of their male counterparts. Moreover, a systematic citation bias against women means that the field is not properly benefiting from their scientific contributions.

To address such citation biases, we are encouraging authors to explore relevant studies from a diverse group of researchers (including but not limited to diversity in gender, race, career stage and geographical location) before writing their first draft. We are further encouraging them to include a citation diversity statement in the article to acknowledge these efforts (see here for an example from one of our sister journals) and to make others aware of citation imbalances.

Note that they add geography and career stage to the list as well as gender and ethnicity. It’s hard enough to write a paper when you know your research area, much less having to look up the age, ethnicity, gender, geographical location, and able-ness of an author.

And the Nature paper gives this as a peroration:

Part of the stated mission of Nature Reviews Psychology is to represent the diversity of psychological science and all those who consider themselves psychological scientists. We act with this mission in mind when we consider who we invite to write and review for us. We are now asking authors to participate in our mission by actively thinking about who they are citing, which will ultimately improve the diversity and quality of the science we publish.

The last paragraph explicitly equates (citation) diversity with quality of the papers that employ citation diversity. That is an assertion with absolutely no evidence to back it up. But it doesn’t need evidence because the editors are dissimulating here: they are not interesting in increasing the quality of science, but in promoting “equity” among scientists.

Science is best served not by using it as a tool to advance DEI, but as a tool to advance our understanding of nature.  If you want to engage in DEI, by all means do so on your own time, not in your scientific publications.

Further, it’s stuff like this endeavor that may have contributed to America’s declining trust in both academia and science. I have no proof for the causation of these phenomena, but I doubt that people would trust science more if they knew it was being used for social engineering in a “progressive” way, not to help us understand nature.

h/t: Luana

The journal “Evolution” and its sponsoring society aren’t doing so well . . . .

September 2, 2025 • 11:15 am

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:

 

Nature Human Behavior is back, this time touting “allyship”

February 24, 2025 • 12:15 pm

In the summer of 2022, the journal Nature Human Behavior put out a notice that it could reject articles that were “stigmatizing” or “harmful” to different groups, regardless of the scientific content. The problems with this stand, which were immediately called out by Steve Pinker, Michael Shermer, and others, is that what is seen as stigmatizing or harmful is pretty much a subjective matter, and, as Pinker tweeted:

I think the journal and its editor were taken aback by this and similar reactions to their statements, and on Day 2 of our USC conference on Science and Ideology in January, the Chief Editor of the journal, Stavroula Kousta, walked back their statement a bit in here 24-minute talk (go here to here her talk; it’s the first one on the video).

But the walking-back didn’t mean that Nature Human Behavior was becoming less woke. Indeed, it just published a ridiculously repetitive and trite paper about how science needs “allyship” to produce a “diverse, equitable, and inclusive academia.” It’s not that STEM isn’t seeking a diversity of groups and viewpoints—though, inevitably, “diversity” in their sense means “diversity of race or sex”—but that this article says absolutely nothing new about the issue. What the journal published now is a prime example of virtue-flaunting that, in the end accomplish nothing.  You can read it by clicking on the screenshot below (it should be free with the legal Unpaywall app), and you can get the pdf here.

The piece begins with the usual claim of “harm”: the same issue that the same journal discussed before:

In academia, despite recent progress towards diversity, biases and microaggressions can still exclude and harm members of disadvantaged social groups.

The person who sent me this article wrote “No citations are given for this claim about bigotry and discrimination at the most liberal, open, welcoming institutions that have ever existed in human history. Amazing.”

The article then gives these figures, which are baffling because one would expect younger women to drop out more rather than less frequently. But they may be correct; I am just not sure that they reflect misogyny:

Such patterns of marginalization are not specific to students. Among US faculty members, for example, women are 6%, 10% and 19% more likely to leave each year than their men counterparts as assistant, associate and full professors, respectively.

I suspect that these departures have little to do with ongoing “structural bias” against women academics, not only because no instances of inbuilt structural bias are actually given, but also, at least for women, a big and recent review by Ceci et al. found either no bias against women’s achievements in academic science or a female advantage—save for teaching evaluations and a slight difference in salary, about 3.6% lower salary for women.   However, the authors do not dismiss the possibility and importance of bias against women.

At any rate, if you haven’t heard come across this advice about “allyship” before, and are an academic, you must be blind and deaf. I’m not going to reprise the paper for you, as you’ve heard it all before.

I’m assuming that well-meaning people agree with me that marginalized scientists should be treated just like everyone else.  But how many times do we need to hear that? At any rate, this paper rings the chimes again, singling out six areas where we’re told how to behave. These are direct quotes.

1.) Listen to and centre marginalized voices.

2.) Reflect on and challenge your own biases (I guess you determine them by taking an “implicit bias” test, a procedure that’s been severely criticized

3.)  Speak up to include and support disadvantaged groups

4.)  Speak out against bias when it happens

5.)  Advocate for institutional initiatives to promote equity and inclusion

6.)  Dismantle institutional policies and procedures of exclusion

#4 and #6 are no-brainers, though, speaking personally, I don’t know of any institutional policies and procedures of exclusion in biology.  The rest are ideological statements assuming that everyone except for the marginalized is biased, and that the way to achieve inclusion is to promote “equity” (do they even know what “equity” means?) And, of course, the entire program reflects the tenets of DEI, which are on the chopping block in the U.S.

Now this article isn’t as bad as ones on feminist glaciology or ones maintaining that Einstein’s principle of covariance supports the view that minorities have an equal claim to objectivity..  No, it’s just superfluous, a farrago of what decent human beings already do, misleading assertions about bias, mixed with patronizing advice that we already follow. It accomplishes nothing save further erode the credibility of editor Kousta.

Here’s the conclusion:

For allyship to be effective in academia, it must be grounded in a deep commitment to DEI. This means recognizing that allyship is not a one-time event, but an ongoing process of learning, reflection and action. Moreover, it needs to go above and beyond symbolic or superficial acts (performative allyship) to demonstrate substantial and meaningful support that is recognized as beneficial by those it is meant to serve (substantive allyship). It is noteworthy to understand and accept that we will make mistakes along the way. No one is perfect, and as explained above, allyship requires a willingness to engage in humility and self-reflection. When mistakes are made, it is important to listen to feedback from disadvantaged groups, take responsibility for any harm caused, and commit to doing better in the future.

In conclusion, everyone can engage in allyship and work to challenge and dismantle systemic bias, creating a more just, equitable and inclusive academic community for all.

At least they used “equitable” properly, meaning “treating people fairly.”  But couldn’t the whole article have consisted of just that sentence?

More wokeness in biology

January 28, 2025 • 12:15 pm

I thought I was clever when I decided that an alternative word for a woke person could be a “Passive Progressive”, but then was told that woke people aren’t passive because they create a lot of noise and kerfuffle. I still like my new term, though, as by “passivity” I meant “performativeness”.  That is, a woke person espouses progressive Leftist ideals but does not do anything to enact them, ergo the passivity.

But I digress. While poring through some scientific literature yesterday, I came upon an issue of The American Naturalist from July 2022. This used to be one of the go-to journals for publishing evolutionary biology, and I was a corresponding editor for a while, but in my view it’s slipped a bit. This issue, with its special section on “Nature, data, and power” is about as ideologically captured as you can get. And this was three years ago! Well, capture started well before that. If you want to read any of these articles, just click on the screenshots below (there are two because the section is so long. There are other real science papers not soaked in politics, but I haven’t put them down.

Which paper is your favorite?

 

Holden Thorp, the editor of science, jettisons the journal’s ideological neutrality

January 9, 2025 • 9:00 am

This piece, by a pseudonymous researcher with a Substack, is another example of scientists decrying the journals and editors who make political statements in public. By so doing, the author points out, they simply decrease public confidence in science and scientists (down 10% in just five years, though still high). In other words, violating institutional neutrality in science is counterproductive. When Nature endorsed Biden four years ago, all it did was to erode confidence in the journal, and in U.S. scientists, while not moving any voters toward the Democrats.

Click the headline below to read the article for free:

The author speaks specifically about Holden Thorp, the editor of Science, certainly the most prestigious science journal in America. Thorp said this after the Democrats lost the election:

Holden Thorp, the Editor-in-Chief of Science, another preeminent science journal—the kind publishing in which makes or breaks careers of aspiring academics and the kind that defines funding and research strategies the world over, wrote a response, of sorts, to the voters “…who feel alienated America’s governmental, social, and economic institutions [that] include science and higher education”. His claim is simple: Trump’s message of “…xenophobia, sexism, racism, transphobia, nationalism, and disregard for truth…” resonates with them. It’s the people’s fault: the people voted wrong. Well… to borrow his own words, “Make no mistake.” Holden Thorp does not speak for me.

You can find Thorp’s op-ed here.

It’s not that the author is a Trump fan, for, like me, he despises the man:

. . . Harris’ legacy is tainted by her support for the diversity and social justice activism responsible for the damage that has been done to Western academic and social institutions in its name. She lost to Donald Trump, a conman and a charlatan of historic proportions who went as far as inciting a coup to remain in power the last time he was president, and a persona as anti-science as one could imagine after Lysenko’s death, second possibly only to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In many ways, 2024 was the year the Democrats handed the election to Trump

About the Pew surveys, with links in the article:

What these surveys and studies show is that people continue to trust scientists more, than they do politicians. It follows from this that the more scientists act like politicians, the less the public will trust us. Yet, in recent decades, scientific institutions and individual scientists have been acting more and more like the politicians by engaging in activism and social engineering.

I do not know who the author is, but he/she rejects being spoken for by Thorp simply because of Thorp’s dismissal of Americans as a “basket of deplorables” and declaring that his journal adheres to “progressive” politics:

Surveys and studies on public trust in science suggest that what people question is not the science, but “… the extent to which scientists’ values align with their own”, and how this alignment—or misalignment—affects the integrity of their findings. What are the values that people expect scientists to align with? According to Holden Thorps of academia, those values are xenophobia, sexism, racism, transphobia, nationalism, and disregard for truth. This disparaging message is nothing new. In fact, this has been the message communicated by individual academics and academic institutions to people on the outside for at least two decades, the message that can be found everywhere, from land acknowledgements to course syllabi. Academics are telling people that they stole “indigenous land”, that they are oppressors, colonizers, racists, misogynists, -phobes of all sorts, fascists, racists, nationalists. It is furthermore alleged that it is up to the enlightened academic elite to show the unwashed masses the path to salvation that lies through admitting one’s sins, accepting one’s guilt, and correcting the way one thinks, speaks, and behaves. Notably, the sins in question, as well as the alleged enlightenment of the accusers, are both imaginary.

It is not only that Holden Thorp and those like him have for decades been dripping disdain for the very people who pay their salaries, travel allowances, and research costs from their taxes; It is not only that his brand of academics have for decades been demonizing those regular voters he is talking about—bus drivers and fast food employees, teachers and policemen, servicemen and businessmen—as some sort of Nazi-adjacent monsters, accusing them of all sorts of imaginary sins. It is that those same people, while being demonized for their desire to live and enjoy normal, safe, and productive lives under the conditions afforded by the freedom and safety of Western civilization, the civilization built on the blood of the brave defenders of its values—those same people have at the same time witnessed the full-throttled support academia threw behind the black lives matter riots and Islamic terrorists—those real, living and breathing Nazis who behead children, rape women, burn entire families alive, and shoot their pet dogs; Hamas supporters were allowed to roam free on academic campuses, attacking people, vandalizing buildings, leaving a mess for the janitors to clean up, and, in general, destroying things built over generations by the very people the academics demonize.

In other words, those voters Holden Thorp is so disdainful of were witnessing the hypocrisy of the academic community, the members of which compromised the truth for political gain—exactly the sin Thorp is accusing his political rivals (Trump supporters) of. Against this backdrop, the surprising part is that trust in science and scientists remains as high as it does.

The article gives several more examples of the institutional capture and lack of institutional neutrality of science editors and journals, including the sad tale of Laura Helmuth and Scientific American (I note that the new, Helmuth-less journal seems to have retracted its wokeness). But the article ends on a note of hope. I have added the links from the original article.

As I was finishing this piece, there were several positive developments. As I have already mentioned, Laura Helmuth resigned from Scientific American, offering the journal a chance to reclaim its former scientific rigor. Marcia McNutt, the president of the United States National Academy of Sciences, wrote a powerful editorial Science is neither red nor blue, published in Science. The University of Michigan, formerly one of the hubs of diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology squandering some US$15M/year, resolved to no longer solicit diversity statements in faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure. A UofM physics professor offered a relatively mild testimony of the damage done by the DEI initiatives and the black lives matter grift, a testimony that was unthinkable only a few years ago. More generally, in the wake of October 7th, multiple institutions adopted political neutrality. These are important first steps in reversing and repairing the damage that was done to scholarship, research, innovation, and teaching over the decades of woke/DEI insanity.

As they say, “One can hope. . . .”

The next link gives FIRE’s list of schools that have adopted institutional neutrality à la the University of Chicago’s Kalven Principles. There are now 29 of them: a good start, but still a drop in the bucket given that there are about 6,000 colleges in the U.S.

A while back Luana debated Holden Thorp about the ideological takeover of science. Here’s a video of that debate, and I don’t think Thorp came out on top