Category: science journals behaving badly

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

Science journalists supposedly circle the wagon around Laura Helmuth, defending her work at Scientific American

November 27, 2024 • 11:15 am

We all know about Laura Helmuth, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American, who left the journal (most likely under duress) after she published a rant on Bluesky on the night Trump was elected (see here here, and and here if you haven’t follow this kerfuffle).  And of course I’ve spent several years calling out the magazine’s missteps, attributable largely to the Helmuth’s “progressive ideology” (see here, for example).

In general, I think Helmuth’s departure will be good for the magazine so long as the owners find a decent replacement—one not infused with an ideology that will bleed into the magazine. As for Helmuth, I feel bad for her but see the rupture of her own making. Still, I hope she finds a job where her talents at science writing, sans polemics, will be useful.

The article below by investigative journalist Paul Thacker on his site The DisInformation Chronicle (click headline to read) is a bit harsh and even a tad mean, but still makes many of the points that Michael Shermer and I have been making about the magazine for a long time—points that others also noted independently. I won’t review them, because I want to concentrate on one part of the article: the part where Thacker says that science writers “circled the wagons” around Helmuth after she left, arguing that she did a very good job at the magazine. I’ve posted one example of this: John Horgan’s blog piece defending Helmuth: “Scientific American loses its bold leader.” It turns out that Horgan wasn’t alone.  Thacker gives several examples, and says that this wagon-circling is bad for science journalism as well as bad for science.

Click to read:

Some excerpts giving Thackar’s view that the journalistic praise harmful.  First, the conclusions:

Helmuth tweets on Bluesky have long served as a political water cooler for members of the scicomm community and when she announced that she was leaving Scientific American, several prominent voices in the science writers rushed to praise Helmuth, not condemn her for awful behavior and her grim tenure as editor-in-chief.

It’s important for science writers that no lessons be learned.

. . .As you can see, nothing is likely to change because the science writers in Laura Helmuth’s world fail to understand that she did anything wrong. Science writers report for, not on science, as I explained in an extensive critique of the profession.

Helmuth will be fine and will likely announce her latest gig in the coming months. She may have betrayed the journalism profession, but her actions certify her work as an inspiration to science writers.

And Thacker’s examples, with his comments indented:

Adam Rogers is a senior tech correspondent at Business Insider, covering science and technology.

Maryn McKenna is a contributing editor at Scientific American who teaches science writing at Emory University.

Tanya Lewis and Clara Moskowitz both work at Scientific American and reported to Laura Helmuth, before she was shoved out the door last week.

Maggie Fox is health and science writer and formerly at CNN. Two years back, I reported how Maggie Fox broke the news at CNN that Pfizer’s COVID vaccine was 95% effective, a story she wrote by copy/pasting Pfizer’s press release into her CNN story.

I’m not sure what are the “coming battles” to which Fox refers, but presumably they involve fights between Trump and his minions on one hand and science on the other.

More:

Dan Fagan teaches science writing at NYU and Deborah Blum is the Director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. Like Helmuth, Blum is a former president of the National Association of Science Writers.

According to her bio on X, Amy Cooter is a sociologist and expert in contemporary US militias. If you have any clue why Helmuth had this type of person write an article on citizen militias for a science magazine, please explain in the comments.

Lila Guterman and Jake Yeston both work at Science Magazine and are colleagues of Jon “Crooked Cohen”.

Brendan Maher and Alexandre Witze both work for Nature Magazine, which has been exposed for financial ties to China and formerly employed Amy Maxmen.

This sounds like simple smearing, for surely not everybody who works for Nature can be tarred for having financial ties with China.

Note first that at least four of these journalists wrote for Scientific American and their praise thus can’t be counted as coming from someone outside Helmuth’s ambit.

Further, perhaps science journalists who are critics of the magazine or of Helmuth’s work didn’t call attention her departure because it wouldn’t help your reputation to denigrate a colleague in public. Thus counting tweets of praise doesn’t give an idea of the tenor of the science-writer community.

I asked one well-known science writer/journalist about the DisInformation piece, and got thius reply, reproduced with permission.

I’d say many science writers are staying out of it because there’s no possible way to know whether she quit, was fired. and if fired, whether she violated company policy in any way. Of course some of her colleagues rushed to her defense but there are hundreds of people in the profession. It’s remotely possible I’m the only one among those hundreds busy working on articles and ignoring her plight but I wouldn’t bet on it. 

And so the saga of Scientific American and its now departed editor-in-chief comes to an end in these pages, at least for the time being.  We’ll see if the magazine is able to recover its reputation. I’m not betting on it, as the many readers who canceled their subscriptions are unlikely to give the venue another look.

A fake paper published in a peer-reviewed journal?

November 24, 2024 • 12:30 pm

I presume that the International Journal of Surgery Case Reports is a real, peer-reviewed journal rather than a complete fake, as this paper is listed in PubMed Central and the journal in the University of Chicago online journals. You can see the paper by clicking on the weird title below, or download the pdf here; if the paper disappears just ask me for it.

I suspect that this was written by AI given the quote below, which sounds stilted, but perhaps the authors, from France and Germany respectively, may just write English that way. Either way, you be the judge.

It is not an April fool joke as it was published in September, and although the introduction (below) mentions that the Saturnians, who came from Earth, introduced both the terrestrial systems of private and public healthcare, my notion that this paper would really contrast them here and take a position was dispelled.

The references and authors’ locations

The first part of the three-page letter:

We practice Neurosurgery on SATURN in a country called « ILLUSIONLAND ». 60 million homo sapiens sapiens who live in this country migrated 30 years ago from the Earth. According to anatomical data, there is no difference between terrestrial and Saturnian homo sapiens sapiens. Modern medical and surgical technology has also been imported from Earth. The Saturnians of earthling descent of the earth-lings have roughly kept the same way of life, society, habits, etc. they inherited from their earthly ancestors.

In our country, ILLUSIONLAND we have two health systems. Private independent doctors and government-employed doctors who practice in hospitals. We present two clinical cases of the practice of Neurosurgery on SATURN. The main difference between the cases on Saturn with clinical cases on Earth is that on Sa-turn, both doctors’ and patients’ clinical cases are simultaneously presented.

1.1. Saturnian clinical case 1

1.1.1. First part

Doctor D.P. 52 terrestrial-year-old male (Saturnian 1 year 10 months old), obtained his doctoral degree of specialization at the age of 29 and was recognized as the second for its promotion in Medical School. As a young neurosurgeon, he is as active as when he was a resident and passed his fellowship. He operates every day, visits many patients during the day, and stays late at the hospital. He always offers to cover his colleagues’ on-call shifts if they have difficulties. He holds three master’s degrees and a Ph.D. He writes medical papers. He attends different congresses and seminars. As an example, he takes the Saturnian rocket to participate in the annual conference of the world Saturnian Federation of Neurosurgeons which takes place in “Utopia” the country located 200,000 km from his workplace. He is curious and wants to know everything about everything in his profession, especially about new surgical techniques. He asks his hierarchy about their experiences. He wants to participate in all the surgeries. In general, he stays in the hospital until 10 p.m. To have time to read an article or two, he quickly grabs a sandwich for lunch instead of going to the canteen. At home, even in bed, he thinks of cases he has seen during the day (Saturnian day which lasts only 10 h 30). When his secretary or a colleague from the emergency room calls him for a patient, he says: “Add them to my patient’s list. I’ll see them” so the consultation which officially lasts 4 h lasted 6 h sometimes 7 h. His colleagues know that they can count on him to take a night’s call or take care of an additional patient because he does this with joy.

Today, 23 years after (10 Saturnian months) Professor D.P. realizes that he is married and has two children, but he knows nothing about them. He does not even remember any details of his marriage. He just remembers that reading medical papers on his own was the best moment of his rare holidays with his wife. Today, he realized progressively that surgery makes him more tired, physically, both mentally. Today, unlike 20 years ago, when there is a new addition to the consultation list, he grumbles and answers the secretary with this leitmotif: “Is it really urgent? Is it a matter of neurosurgery? or as usual the guy has boo-boos and he comes to piss us off!”

Any explanations from readers?

Addendum by Greg Mayer

The paper has already drawn attention on PubPeer. The following query was posted:

Could the authors and the journal explain the rationale behind the publication of this ‘case study’?

The authors replied, beginning with

This paper possesses a symbolic nature.

and went on from there, including the statement that “science” encompasses “human sciences”, which are not restricted to

the study of molecules, statistical figures, false negatives, false positives, clinical trials, biological aspects, or specific p-values such as 0.003, as well as percentages, meta-analyses, or observations made under a microscope.

Another commenter, tongue firmly in cheek, applauds that

At least informed consent was obtained from all participants. No violations of research ethics on Saturn.

The authors, in a second reply, say their paper focuses on situations that are “fictitious.” You can’t make this stuff up, folks!

I think the paper is neither a fake (intended to get the authors publication credit for nonsense), nor a hoax (seeing what nonsense can get published), nor a parody (making fun of someone else’s nonsense by mimicking it). Rather, it is akin to science fiction, using an imaginary situation to explore real world situations. A case report journal, though, is certainly an odd place for such fiction!

The journals Science and Nature politicize science over the recent election

November 14, 2024 • 9:30 am

It is surely within the ambit of scientific journals to take stands on issues that affect the fields they cover, but endorsing political candidates is a dangerous matter. In 2020, for example, Nature endorsed Joe Biden for President (a first for them). It did not change the readers’ views of Biden, but it eroded the credibility of both the journal and science in general. This is according to a study by Floyd Zhang published in Nature Human Behavior, and is summarized in a later issue of Nature:

Overall, the study provides little evidence that the endorsement changed participants’ views of the candidates. However, showing the endorsement to people who supported Trump did significantly change their opinion of Nature. When compared with Trump supporters who viewed Nature’s formatting announcement, Trump supporters who viewed the endorsement rated Nature as significantly less well informed when it comes to “providing advice on science-related issues facing the society” (Fig. 1). Those who viewed the endorsement also rated Nature significantly lower as an unbiased source of information on contentious or divisive issues. There was no comparable positive effect for Biden supporters.

Zhang also found that viewing Nature’s political endorsement reduced Trump supporters’ willingness to obtain information about COVID-19 from Nature by 38%, when compared with Trump supporters who saw the formatting announcement. This finding echoes other work on how partisanship influences interest in scientific information5. Furthermore, Trump supporters who viewed the endorsement also rated US scientists, in general, as much less well informed and unbiased than did Trump supporters who viewed the formatting article. There was no comparable positive effect for Biden supporters.

This lesson was apparently lost on Nature‘s American competitor, Science, which (like the new Nature article below it), is calling for scientists to hold Trump to account on things like climate change, pandemics, and so on.  That’s fair enough, but then they politicize the whole thing by demonizing Trump from the outset, doing exactly the thing that will erode confidence in the journal and its pronouncements.

The article was written by Science‘s editor, Holden Thorp. He considers himself “progressive,” and has debated my partner in crime, Luana Maroja, on the role of politics in science (see also this video).  Thorp also devoted a column in his journal to criticizing a paper on which both Luana and I were coauthors, a paper on “In Defense of Merit in Science” by Abbot et al.

Click to read:

Here’s the way it starts, guaranteed to alienate Republicans:

The reelection of Donald Trump for a second, nonconsecutive term as US president—mirroring only Grover Cleveland’s 22nd and 24th presidencies after the Civil War—underscores a reality: Although his success stems partly from a willingness to tap into xenophobia, sexism, racism, transphobia, nationalism, and disregard for truth, his message resonates with a large portion of the American populace who feel alienated from America’s governmental, social, and economic institutions. These include science and higher education. Winning back this disaffected group will require science leaders to foster and promote a more inclusive scientific landscape for all Americans and lay out how science can be successful under Trump.

How willing will readers be to take these lessons to heart if they are Republicans? (Granted, most readers, who are budding scientists, will be Democrats, but then they don’t need these lessons.) Who wants to be implicitly told that they are xenophobes, racists, sexists, and nationalists?

And there’s a statement whose first part is tautological and the second part is debatable:

Make no mistake, the political assaults on science stem largely from those who seek to undermine the truth for political gain, and this dynamic is the major contributor to declining trust in science.

Some of the declining trust in science is also due to scientists’ changing their views, as during the COVID crisis, but much of that was simply due to the acquisition of new information and is not the fault of scientists. We are supposed to change our minds when new data undercuts our previous stands. But that erosion is not due to scientists “undermining the truth for political gain”. There is no mention of Nature’s contribution to declining trust in science by simply endorsing a candidate in 2020.  Other erosion of trust occurs when scientists or journals make statements like “human biological sex is a spectrum,” something that is flatly wrong and contradicts what people already know.

The article above, then, is not only bound to do precisely what it’s decrying—eroding trust in science by politicizing it—but is also disingenuous by neglecting the causes of distrust in science that come from progressive politics, as well as from the infusion of politics in science.

The rest of the article is anodyne, urging scientists to change their minds when they’re wrong, not to engage in falsifying results (duh!), and not to blame “their students and postdocs for problems” (duh again!).  The article ends by taking another swipe at an administration that hasn’t yet begun:

The attacks [on science] are going to keep coming and probably accelerate for the next 4 years. As painful as that will be, it’s up to the scientific community to respond in a way that makes those blows less successful.

The “four years” implies that the Trump administration will be bad for science. That may well be true, but we don’t know yet! Here we have journals playing Chicken Little.

Nature, already stung by its endorsement of Biden in 2020, didn’t endorse anyone in the last election, but might as well have endorsed Biden if you read this article. The piece also contains a survey showing that nearly 40% of  Nature readers in the U.S. would consider moving out of the country if Trump won. I wonder how many actually will move?

At any rate, the new Nature article below also evinces fear of the Trump administration, but does so in a fear-mongering way that I wouldn’t employ were I editor. It also gives anodyne advice. But it’s not as bad as the Science article:

A few excerpts:

When Donald Trump was first elected to the US presidency in 2016, Nature advised scientists to constructively engage with Trump. We said that the incoming president’s contrary approach to evidence, among other things, had no place in modern society. We added that the science community had a responsibility to step up and work with the president and his new administration so that they govern on the basis of research and evidence.

. . .The United States has now re-elected Donald Trump as president. Many researchers have told Nature that they are in despair, seeing the election result as a step backwards for facts, reason, knowledge and civility.

Last week, Nature said that the United States needs a leader who respects evidence. The incoming administration must embody this principle. On behalf of the research community, we will hold it to account if it falls short.

We hope that the incoming administration will govern in the best interests of the United States. That means holding on to the best of what the previous administration did, and not returning to some of the policies of the first Trump presidency.

Is it journalism to cite the “many scientists who are in despair” without mentioning that some scientists (granted, a minority, given our political leanings) are happy?  This is a slanted take.

The article then calls out the Trump administration (properly) for its weakness on recignizing climate change and for threatening to defund the World Health Organization.  But then it becomes anodyne like the Science article above, and ends on a lame note:

The research community must engage with the new administration with courage, tenacity, strength and unity. At the same time, scientists in the United States must know that they are not alone. The research community is a global one. We need to stand together and stand strong for the challenges that are to come. And that will mean continuing to speak facts to power.

“Stand together” clearly means “stand together against the Trump administration,” and I think that’s obvious to any reader with eyes.

Readers here know that I abhor Trump, but even more than that I abhor the ideological erosion of my beloved science. In four years Trump will be gone (hopefully to be replaced by someone who’s not mentally ill), but any damage done to the reputation of science by journals rushing to take sides will last a lot longer.

A critique of Scientific American

May 8, 2024 • 10:00 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Covid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Progressive ideology is growing stronger and intruding further into all areas of science. And because it’s “progressive,” and because most scientists are liberals, few of us dare oppose these restrictions on our freedom. Unless there is a change in the Zeitgeist, and unless scientists finally find the courage to speak up against the toxic effects of ideology on their field, in a few decades science will be very different from what it is now. Indeed, it’s doubtful that we’d recognize it as science at all.

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

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

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

h/t: Simon