Category: science journals behaving badly

The National Academies tell editors, authors, and reviewers not to be be bullies or harassers

March 8, 2024 • 12:15 pm

My colleague the troublemaker Anna Krylov sent me this announcement from the prestigious National Academies of Sciences (NAS). I quote her with permission: “I read the policy and it is super annoying — patronizing and overreaching.”

This is a new policy for those engaged in NAS activities. There is to be no bullying, harassment, or discrimination among editors, authors, and reviewers. Not threats or intimidation, either, or “coercion to dominate others,” whatever that means. And if you commit these behaviors at meetings, workshops, conferences, or social functions that involve the National Academies in any way, you can get reported (a helpful link is given).

Now the behaviors singled out are indeed uncivilized behaviors that people should obey, and some are already illegal. However, to spell them out under threat of punishment is something you do to a two-year-old, not a grown-up scientist. It is indeed patronizing and offensive. Also, “aggressive behavior” or “coercion to dominate others” are slippery terms, and could be taken to mean being “domineering”—a regular feature of any group of scientists.

At any rate, it looks as though the latest trend in science is to not only specify minutely how they must and must not behave, but also threaten them if they don’t behave that way.

I wonder why this is happening now? I would guess that one reason might be legal liability, but these behaviors are already verboten in most venues, and there are already ways to prevent them.  Your guess is as good as mine.

On “whiteness in physics”, its rebuttal, and a symposium of papers about the dangers of authoritarian control to science

October 20, 2023 • 12:15 pm

In April of last year I posted about the paper below, “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study” (published in Physical Review and Physics Education Research). and I wrote this (tweaked a tiny bit for publication now):

I cannot emphasize enough how bad the paper is. Have a butcher’s [look]. First, read the abstract above, and then have a look here [there was a link to the preliminary version, which is gone now].

The first paragraph sets the tone:

Critical Race Theory names that racism and white supremacy are endemic to all aspects of U.S. society, from employment to schooling to the law [1–7]. We see the outcomes of this in, for example, differential incarceration rates, rates of infection and death in the era of COVID, and police brutality. We also see the outcomes of this in physics.

. . . and in the short incident analyzed at great length in this paper. The entire paper is, in fact, a lengthy and tendentious exegesis of six minutes of observing a presentation by three physics students, seen as “a case of whiteness”:

In this paper, we analyze a case of whiteness as social organization from an introductory physics course at a large public institution in the Western United States. We use the analytic markers from Sec. II to illustrate how whiteness shows up in this context, and we identify and discuss a number of mechanisms of control that co-produce whiteness in the six-minute episode of classroom interaction. We draw on tools of interaction analysis [59], including discourse, gesture, and gaze analysis, to unpack how whiteness is being constituted locally or interactionally. Our hope is that illustrating whiteness as social organization can contribute to readers’ awareness of and vision for disrupting and transforming this social organization in their own contexts [56,60] and support other researchers who want to do similar analyses.

You can read it for yourself by clicking on the screenshot below, and I used it as an example of how “critical studies” was pushing science toward the drain, or at least coopting science for ideological purposes.

Lawrence Krauss also went after the paper on his “Critical Mass” Substack site, saying this:

That this got published in a peer-reviewed physics journal is what makes this so surprising.  It means there is something fundamentally wrong with the system, and it isn’t systemic racism.  It is sheer stupidity combined with lethargy.

The natural tendency of academics, and scientists in particular, is to ignore this kind of nonsense and focus on their own work.   But once the bar gets this low, and the flood waters are rising, you can be certain a lot of nasty effluence will be flowing out as well.    And with the pressing need for better physics education at all levels (that is, better ways to actually teach physics), this garbage filling up journals and taking away precious research resources means that there is less room for the good stuff.

The standards of a field are determined by the practitioners in the field.  That means it is about time that physicists started doing something about it.

But rebuttal on our websites isn’t as powerful as rebuttal in a peer-reviewed journal.  And that has finally happened. Three authors wrote a critique of the article, but of course the original journal wouldn’t even look at it.  They then added to the critique of Robertson’s and Hairston’s paper their own analysis of the difficulties they getting the rebuttal published.

And, mirabile dictu, it’s now published. The author said:

We spent a long time trying to get a critical comment published in the journal to no avail. However, with the help of Anna Krylov we managed to get an article published in European Review, discussing the “whiteness” article, our critique of it, and the journal’s resistance to our critique.

Anna is a real force in pushing back against ideologically-tainted science! And now you can read the rebuttal/recount, published in European Review, for free by clicking on the screenshot below:

And the abstract:

Research framed around issues of diversity and representation in STEM is often controversial. The question of what constitutes a valid critique of such research, or the appropriate manner of airing such a critique, thus has a heavy ideological and political subtext. Here, we outline an attempt to comment on a paper recently published in the research journal Physical Review – Physics Education Research (PRPER). The article in question claimed to find evidence of ‘whiteness’ in introductory physics from analysis of a six-minute video. We argue that even if one accepts the rather tenuous proposition that ‘whiteness’ is sufficiently well defined to observe, the study lacks the proper controls, checks and methodology to allow for confirmation or disconfirmation of the authors’ interpretation of the data. The authors of the whiteness study, however, make the stunning claim that their study cannot be judged by standards common in science. We summarize our written critique and its fate, along with a brief description of its genesis as a response to an article in which senior officers of the American Physical Society (which publishes PRPER) explained that the appropriate venue for addressing issues with the paper at hand is via normal editorial processes.

Read and enjoy!

In fact, this is only one of a bunch of papers in a special issue of the European Review, derived from a symposium in Israel on the dangers of ideology and politics to science.  Here is the screenshot of the contents, and you can see all the papers (and read them) by clicking anywhere below. The title of the issue is right at the top:

I’ll single out three papers of special interest, to me at least.  First, the paper by my Chicago colleague Dorian Abbot at the bottom is about the three “foundational” principles of the University of Chicago, which Dorian calls the “Chicago Trifecta”.  Its abstract:

The purpose of this article is to discuss practical solutions to the threat to free inquiry at universities coming from the illiberal left. Based on my experiences at the University of Chicago, I propose that all universities should adopt and enforce rules requiring that: (1) the university, and any unit of it, cannot take collective positions on social and political issues; (2) faculty hiring and promotion be done solely on the basis of research and teaching merit, with nothing else taken into consideration; and (3) free expression be guaranteed on campus, even if someone claims to be offended, hurt or harmed by it. Faculty need to work together with students, alumni, journalists and politicians to get this done.

Second, the article by Ahmad Mansour points out the dangers of authoritarianism in science using his own tortuous biography, involving growing up in Israel and Palestine, and connecting that with the “cancel culture” of Germany. It resonates with the present situation going on there, and is a courageous article.

Finally, Anna and Jay Tanzman have a piece on how scientific publishing is being corrupted by ideology. The abstract:

The politicization of science – the infusion of ideology into the scientific enterprise – threatens the ability of science to serve humanity. Today, the greatest such threat comes from a set of ideological viewpoints collectively referred to as Critical Social Justice (CSJ). This contribution describes how CSJ has detrimentally affected scientific publishing by means of social engineering, censorship, and the suppression of scholarship.

Just peruse the titles, click here or on the screenshots, and download what you’d like (or read on the screen, which I can’t do). If you think that science is immune to corruption by ideology (and it’s always been, but rarely more than now—except perhaps in the Soviet Union), then you should definitely read all the pieces.

Article on gender dysphoria retracted, probably for ideological reasons

July 11, 2023 • 9:15 am

I’ve mentioned this result before, but only as an item in Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary.  Now one of the authors of a controversial paper, J. Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern who works on sexual behavior (and whose work up to now is well known and respected), has written extensively about how that coauthored paper was retracted by the prestigious journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. But it wasn’t retracted because the data were wrong, fraudulent, or plagiarized. No, it was retracted because the topic, “Rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD), has been rendered by activists too taboo to discuss, and because a mob of scientists attacked its publication—as well as attacking the editor who accepted it, Kenneth Zucker.

In light of this pushback, Springer, the journal’s editor, retracted the article. The grounds for retraction were very flimsy: that Bailey and his co-author, a pseudonymous mother of a girl who had what seemed to be ROGD, hadn’t obtained permission for the data of the investigated group to be published in this particular journal.  But in fact they had obtained permission from the subjects for their data to be published—just not in this particular journal.  That is a distinction without a difference. The paper was almost certainly rejected because one is simply not allowed to discuss ROGD in public. If you do, you get called a “transphobe”.

As Bailey notes:

Retraction of scientific articles is associated with well-deserved shame: plagiarism, making up data, or grave concerns about the scientific integrity of a study. But my article was not retracted for any shameful reason. It was retracted because it provided evidence for an idea that activists hate.

If you’d like to see the original article, reader ThyroidPlanet has published a link to it below; the paper is here.

Click the screenshot to read his piece, which is in The Free Press. (If you think that places like the NYT or Washington Post would publish this, you’re living in a dream world):

ROGD, like the effects of puberty blockers, is one of those gender-related issues that really needs study since the phenomena are understudied but have very important implications for the study of gender and especially for how to deal with children or adolescents suffering from gender dysphoria. The taboo on discussing both of these issues is thus particularly unfortunate, but is part of the program of some gender activists who don’t want their views questioned or discussed.

You might remember that Abigail Shrier, whose book on the topic, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, was attacked viciously on social media for even talking about ROGD, with the odious ACLU gender-activist lawyer Chase Strangio saying that he wanted the book banned. (It was banned for a while at Target, but then reinstated.) Here’s Strangio’s tweet, which he’s now deleted. It’s beyond belief that an important figure in the ACLU would call for the banning of a book and its ideas (Strangio is transgender). This is censorship: the banning of Wrongthink.

But exactly what is ROGD? It is a postulated syndrome, involving social contagion, suggested to explain the recent rapid rise in girls asking to change their gender from female to male—that is, to become trans men. ROGD seems to be different from “classical” gender dyphoria and thus provoked a new explanation:

ROGD was first described in the literature in 2018 by the physician and researcher Lisa Littman. It is an explanation of the new phenomenon of adolescents, largely girls, with no history of gender dysphoria, suddenly declaring they want to transition to the opposite sex. It has been a highly contentious diagnosis, with some—and I am one—thinking it’s an important avenue for scientific inquiry, and others declaring it’s a false idea advocated by parents unable to accept they have a transgender child.

I believed that ROGD was a promising explanation of the explosion of gender dysphoria among adolescent girls because these young people do not have gender dysphoria as usually understood. Until recently, females treated for gender dysphoria were masculine-presenting girls who had hated being female since early childhood. By contrast, girls with ROGD are often conventionally feminine, but tend to have other social and emotional issues. The theory behind ROGD is that through social contagion from friends, social media, and even school, vulnerable girls are exposed to the idea that their normal adolescent angst is the result of an underlying transgender identity. These girls then suddenly declare that they are transgender. That is the rapid onset. After the declaration, the girls may desire—and receive—drastic medical interventions including mastectomies and testosterone injections.

There is ample evidence that in progressive communities, multiple girls from the same peer group are announcing they are trans almost simultaneously. There has been a sharp increase in this phenomenon across the industrialized West. A recent review from the UK, which keeps better records than America, showed a greater than tenfold increase in referrals of adolescent girls during just the past decade.

But there have been virtually no scientific data or studies on the subject.

ROGD is considered taboo for several reasons, mainly because it invokes social contagion as a cause of the desire to transition. This idea is apparently repugnant to those who think that the desire to transition is innate, not malleable to pressure from others, and, of course, must be “affirmed” through therapy, hormones, and possibly surgery. (This is my take on the issue; those who demonize ROGD don’t often talk about why they despise it.)

At any rate, Bailey wrote an article with a pseudonymous mother, “Suzanna Diaz”, an article called “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases.” It appears to be a load of self-reported case studies about the phenomenon, and at this stage a huge number of case studies is useful, particularly if there is any commonality in them.  Because they were self-reported, you can’t use their prevalence to show that social contagion is a primary cause of ROGD, but you can show, if the data be credible, that it is not vanishingly rare. And, of course, if you find no social contagion, that supports the thesis of gender activists.   So I think the studies are of value, and apparently the journal did, too.

Here are the findings, which implies something we already know: gender dysphoria is connected with psychological distress, and in this case, the distress often preceded the desire to transition, which appears to have been largely prompted by “gender specialists”.  More than half the parents reported that they felt pressured by the gender specialist to practice “affirmative care”: facilitating the gender transition.

Our article was based on parent reports of 1,655 adolescent and young adult children. Three-fourths of them were female. Emotional problems were common among this group, especially anxiety and depression, which many parents said preceded gender issues by years. Most of these young people had taken steps to socially transition, including changing their pronouns, dress, and identity to the other sex (or in some cases, to neither sex). Parents observed that after their children socially transitioned, their mental health deteriorated. A small number—seven percent of those whose parents answered Suzanna’s survey—had received medical transition treatment, including drugs to block puberty, or cross-sex hormones.

Disturbingly, those young people with more emotional problems were especially likely to have socially and medically transitioned. The best predictor of both social and medical transition was a referral to a gender specialist. Some 52 percent of parents in our study who had received a referral said they felt pressured by the gender specialist to facilitate some sort of transition for their child.

Note that the authors were explicit in their paper about the study’s limitations, particularly the cherry-picking of parents who responded:

Our study had two obvious limitations: the way we recruited parents guaranteed that only those who believed their children had ROGD would participate, and we had only the parents’ perspectives. We clearly acknowledged and discussed these in our paper, beginning with the words “At least two related issues potentially limit this research” followed by three paragraphs laying out the limitations.

These are rather serious limitations, at least insofar as assessing the prevalence of ROGD. There’s no mention in this piece, though perhaps there is in the article, about other social influences besides “gender specialists”.  But the fact that referral to a “gender specialist” was a huge predictor of social and medical transition needs to be studied further. So does the observation that social transitioning was injurious rather than salubrious for mental health.

Then the mob descended, forcing retraction. I don’t find Springer’s reason convincing, especially because I think the journal has been lax in enforcing the “consent” issue and, in this case, there was consent, which Springer deemed the wrong kind of consent.

On May 23 [the paper was published on March 29 of this year], we received an email from Springer informing us that they were retracting our article. The ostensible reason:

The Publisher and the Editor-in-Chief have retracted this article due to noncompliance with our editorial policies around consent. The participants of the survey have not provided written informed consent to participate in scholarly research or to have their responses published in a peer reviewed article. Additionally, they have not provided consent to publish to have their data included in this article. Table 1 and the Supplementary material have therefore been removed to protect the participants’ privacy.

We appealed after consulting a lawyer, but Springer retracted our paper on June 14.

Springer’s reasoning was preposterous and simply an excuse to retract an article they wanted to go away in order to stop the controversy. Springer accused us of not obtaining informed consent from the parents in our study. There are two aspects to informed consent in research: you should understand what you’re being asked to do, including any substantial risks and benefits, and you should be able to opt out. All parents completing Suzanna’s survey knew they were being asked questions about their children’s ROGD, and they decided to answer. Parents were promised privacy of personal information, and they got it.

Springer’s additional complaint was that we did not have consent to publish survey results. This is plain wrong. We did inform participants that we would publish their data. At the end of the survey participants were told: “We will publish our data on our website when we have a large enough sample. . . ”

My assessment: the journal used the “consent” issue as a confected reason to reject a paper whose thesis was ideologically unpalatable. (That’s what Bailey thinks, too.) While the paper may not be dispositive about the prevalence, presence, and causes of ROGD, it was worth publishing as an impetus to do a bigger and more thorough study.

And that is what Bailey and his co-author are about to do, although of course they’ll never find funding for it (and thus they appeal to the public below). Note, too, that the paper got a fair amount of approbation:

The campaign against our article, from the open letter to the final retraction, has generated immense publicity by academic standards, so far largely favorable. Our academic article has been viewed online more than 100,000 times in not quite three months, an astonishing number for an article of this nature. This reflects a thirst for knowledge about this important subject.

Speaking for myself, this episode has guaranteed that I will study ROGD until we understand it.

That’s why I am about to launch a large, long-term survey of adolescent gender dysphoria, in collaboration with Lisa Littman and Ken Zucker. We will survey both gender-dysphoric adolescents and their parents, following them for at least five years. Among other things, we’ll have better information about adolescents’ early gender dysphoria, mental health, and sexuality; about parents’ attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs; and about the correspondence between adolescents’ and parents’ accounts of the same phenomena.

I guarantee two things. First, it will be a huge, important study with the potential to establish the validity of ROGD. (And if ROGD is an incorrect idea, we will show and publish this.) Second, between the three of us—Littman, Zucker, and me, three previously cancelled scientists who are among the world’s foremost experts in what we are studying—we don’t have a chance in hell of receiving government funding for this project.

We’ll do it anyway. (You can help if you want.)

Censors have tried to stop scientific progress before. Now, as then, the pursuit of truth requires scientists and researchers who refuse to cow to puritans, ideologues and activists.

The one thing I do think is true is that gender dysphoria leading to gender transitioning, rapid or not, can be promoted by social pressure. I’ve seen some of the back-and-forth on the Internet showing how those who transitioned urge those who are questioning to follow in their “affirming” pathway.  If you’re in psychological difficulties that often accompany puberty and early teen years, the internet and one’s peers can provide a supportive and comforting environment that facilitates gender transitioning. It’s almost as if it’s “cool” to transition, while being gay is dull and boring.

The problems with this are twofold: most cases of gender dysphoria (I think around 80%) resolve themselves without medical intervention, often by the dysphoric child ultimately becoming gay—a much less dangerous and less medicalized outcome. Second, therapists have started mimicking this supportive environment: instead of exploring a child’s feelings, therapists who are “affirmative” simply agree with their patient’s notion that they’re in the wrong body and often prescribe hormones (including blockers) after just a visit or two.

The effect of social environment is plausible, but not scientifically tested. The data on resolution of un-“affirmed” dysphoria and eagerness of some therapists is already known (viz., the Tavistock Gender Centre in London). All, in all, this paper shows that there is a phenomenon that needs to be investigated more closely because of its huge implications for how to treat dysphoric youth. The Bailey and “Diaz” paper is just a start, and they’re prepared to accept and publish the fact that ROGD is a myth—if that’s what they find.  But they are immensely courageous to continue along this path.  Concern for young people demands that they do so.

Gender activists get a paper retracted for unjustified technical reasons—just to discredit its results

June 15, 2023 • 12:15 pm

Colin Wright, who’s turned out a number of clear and well written pieces on gender issues, has by so doing inserted himself into a maelstrom, for there are no activists so authoritarian and unforgiving as gender activists. In fact, their actions in getting a paper retracted is the subject of Wright’s latest piece in City Journal (click on first screenshot below)m which recounts a fracas that I think we should know about.

Why? Because it shows very clearly how ideology can distort science, and how activists can get a paper retracted for no good reasons, just to discredit the contents of that paper. Much of the science around gender issues is currently unsettled, including the notion of a syndrome called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), its possible influence by social pressure, and, of course, whether puberty blockers can cause permanent damage or are completely reversible.

Instead of allowing open discourse on these issues, activists try to shut down all discourse, including scientific publication, in favor of their own views: that ROGD doesn’t exist, that children “know” instinctively if they’re in the wrong body, and that any child or adolescent who’s confused about their gender must immediately receive “affirmative therapy”, which appears to involve enthusiastic rather than objective support by therapists coupled with a nearly instantaneous prescription for puberty blockers.

Any deviation from this scenario produces a storm of opprobrium.  You already know about the demonization of Abigail Shrier’s 2020 book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters, which proposed that ROGD might be real and might be promoted by social-media pressures. Shrier’s book was briefly canceled and taken out of bookstores, and an ACLU lawyer called for its banning.  But the concept of ROGD itself came from Lisa Littman earlier (passages from Wright’s article are indented):

Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), a newly proposed pathway to gender dysphoria, was first described by the researcher Lisa Littman in 2018; the theory may help explain the documented surge in cases of gender dysphoria among adolescents and young adults who had previously exhibited no gender-related issues. Littman proposed and provided supporting evidence that social factors have at least partly caused the surge, especially among girls.

. . . Littman’s 2018 paper generated intense backlash from activists, who successfully pressured the journal that published her findings (PLoS One) to take the unusual step of initiating a second round of post-publication peer review. The paper was republished with a “correction” that offered a more detailed explanation of its methodology, specifically focusing on its dependency on parental reports, and a clarification that ROGD is not a clinical diagnosis. Importantly, however, the paper’s central conclusions concerning the probable role of social influences remained unchanged. Activists repeatedly disrupted further attempts by Littman to explore ROGD using online surveys.

Littman’s paper is here, and the journal’s “correction” is here.

Now there’s a new paper by two authors on ROGD, and that one (click on second screenshot below) has generated all the scandal:

I’ll try to be brief and give a numbered sequence of events.

1.) First, the paper below was submitted to Springer Nature’s journal Archives of Sexual Behavior (ASB). It was accepted and published. (Diaz is a pseudonym for a parent who helped collect data, Bailey is on the faculty at Northwestern:

2.) As Wright notes, the paper, as you can see by its title, didn’t conform to the preferred gender ideology, describing as it did a whole pile of possible cases of ROGD. Wright describes its contents:

The paper in question, “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases,” was authored by researchers Suzanna Diaz (a pseudonym) and Michael Bailey and published in ASB on March 29. Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), a newly proposed pathway to gender dysphoria, was first described by the researcher Lisa Littman in 2018.

. . . . . Such a hypothesis might appear plausible, or at least a straightforward empirical matter to be decided through evidence-based examination. But it violates the dominant narrative favored by medicalization activists that the rise in trans identities stems from an increase in societal acceptance of “gender diversity.” Evidence supporting ROGD would call into question the “gender-affirming” model of care, an approach premised on the notion that kids can know their “gender identity” from very early on and will rarely, if ever, change their minds about it. This philosophical belief system, which flies in the face of centuries of accumulated wisdom on human development, has been pithily summarized with the phrase: “trans kids know who they are.” The affirmative model guides health-care providers to “affirm” (i.e., agree with) a child’s self-declared identity and facilitate access to hormones and surgeries, all in order to align the child’s body with his or her felt gender identity. Consequently, activists have exerted intense efforts to undermine ROGD research at every opportunity.

Littman’s 2018 paper generated intense backlash from activists, who successfully pressured the journal that published her findings (PLoS One) to take the unusual step of initiating a second round of post-publication peer review. The paper was republished with a “correction” that offered a more detailed explanation of its methodology, specifically focusing on its dependency on parental reports, and a clarification that ROGD is not a clinical diagnosis. Importantly, however, the paper’s central conclusions concerning the probable role of social influences remained unchanged. Activists repeatedly disrupted further attempts by Littman to explore ROGD using online surveys.

But Diaz and Bailey’s new paper lent further credence to the ROGD hypothesis. They examined parental reports of 1,655 potential ROGD cases through an online survey. The sample size dwarfed that of Littman’s original study, which was based on 256 parental reports. This data bolstered Littman’s findings about the onset of gender dysphoria after puberty, predominantly in girls, in conjunction with preexisting mental-health conditions, heavy social-media usage, and peer influence. They also corroborated Littman’s 2018 finding that an overwhelming majority (90 percent) of concerned parents are politically progressive, undermining the common narrative that criticisms and concerns about gender affirmation originate in conservatism.

What else did the paper find? In the sample, gender dysphoria manifests approximately two years earlier in females compared with males. Females are more than twice as likely to pursue social transition. However, among those who experienced gender dysphoria for at least one year, males were more likely to undergo hormonal interventions. Moreover, a majority of parents reported feeling coerced by gender specialists to affirm their child’s new identity and endorse his or her transition. Parents who facilitated their child’s social transition reported that the child’s mental health “deteriorated considerably after social transition,” and that their relationship with their child suffered.

These findings are crucial. They provide further corroboration to a growing body of evidence supporting the ROGD theory, indicating the need for a new, specialized treatment approach for youth with gender-related distress.

3.) Gender activists started besieging the journal because the results violated the dominant gender-activist narrative.  Not attacking the paper’s thesis, they went after a technical matter: the data supposedly did not pass approval of Northwestern’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), a university body that must approve all human research before it’s done.  However, the authors had written approval from the subjects to publish the results of the study. (The journal replied, in effect, “but not in this scholarly journal.”  However, as we’ll see, the authors effectively did have IRB approval, and the journal had also published at least six papers by other people without such approval. In other words, the journal was inconsistent in its standards.

4.) With pressure from individuals and the International Academy of Sex Research, as well as a petition, the journal began querying the authors. The authors replied that they had written approval for publication, though the first author didn’t answer to an IRB since he/she is a private individual not affiliated with a university.

5.) The authors pointed out the approval for publication was given though the study wasn’t vetted by the IRB, for it couldn’t have been. HOWEVER, as Wright reports, there’s a very important exception:

 Northwestern’s IRB representative informed Bailey that, though the IRB could not retrospectively approve the pre-collected data, it would permit him to coauthor a paper on those data provided they were expunged of all personal identifiable information. Significantly, Springer’s own policy explicitly states that in situations where “a study has not been granted ethics committee approval prior to commencing. . . . The decision on whether to proceed to peer review in such cases is at the Editor’s discretion.” Thus, all efforts to undermine the study or discredit Zucker’s decision to review and publish it on the grounds of IRB considerations appeared futile.

6.) On top of that, author Bailey responded that he found at least six papers in the journal using human data without IRB approval.  Given this and the material in #5, there seemed to be no good reason to retract the paper.

7.) Nevertheless, the paper (as you can see above) was retracted, on the grounds that Bailey didn’t get IRB approval and the subjects didn’t agree to have their data published in a scholarly journal..  The editor of the journal, however, did have the discretion to publish the paper anyway, and Northwestern’s IRB had no overt objections to Bailey and “Diaz” publishing the paper. This is a matter of censorship on the grounds of the paper’s content.

The paper appears to have been retracted not because of the IRB issues, but because its survey didn’t give the results that activists wanted. As you see, it is still online, which is normal for retracted papers, but has a big RETRACTED ARTICLE warning at the top.  As Wright explains, this makes a difference to activists:

Such retractions, regardless of their reasoning, are routinely exploited by activists to tarnish the reputation of the involved researchers. Lisa Littman’s original paper on ROGD was merely “corrected,” and no results or conclusions changed; nonetheless, she has been smeared relentlessly online and in the press. Brown University, Littman’s employer at the time, felt compelled to affirm its “long-standing support for members of the trans community” in response to the paper’s publication. One science writer critiqued Littman’s study as “scientifically specious” and claimed that “ROGD provides political cover for those who wish to rollback trans rights and healthcare.” The controversy even led to Littman losing her consulting job following demands for her dismissal by local clinicians.

The authors, though, haven’t given up:

In the wake of the retraction, Bailey and Diaz are re-submitting the manuscript to the Journal of Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science (JOIBS), a fledgling publication founded by scholars devoted to the principles of “free inquiry and truth seeking” and the belief that ideas ought to be scrutinized rather than suppressed. Regrettably, among medical journals this commitment appears to be increasingly the exception, not the rule.

The retraction, though it has nothing to do with the scientific results of the paper, is being used to discredit those results. Such are the sleazy tactics of activists. At least allow the issues to be argued out in the scientific literature!

We need to know if ROGD is a real syndrome.

We need to know if social pressure promotes the frequency of gender transition.

We need to know the long-term effects of puberty blockers, and whether they are reversible.

We need to know if “non affirming” therapies, involving empathic listening but no agenda by the therapist beyond listening to the patient, will lead to resolution of gender dysphoria without having to change genders (e.g., getting children to accept that they’re gay).

We need to know the frequency of transgender people who desist, or decide to change their minds. This is part of getting informed consent for medical procedures.

The entire medical establishment of the U.S., and nearly all gender advocates, are trying to prevent the resolution of these issues, for they pretend to already know the truth. And that’s not the way we progress in understanding the world.

The Chat bot vs. the editor-in-chief of Science

May 15, 2023 • 12:30 pm

As you know, Science’s editor-in-chief Holden Thorp has been dragging his magazine into inappropriate realms of ideology (see my posts here), and of course his power as editor of America’s most famous science journal keeps some scientists from speaking up about this.

Reader Jay thought he’d do an experiment and compare Thorp to the output of Chat GPT, which of course is very woke. Here’s what he sent me:

Who is the better wokebot, Holden Thorp or ChatGPT?I (Jay) asked ChatGPT:“Some people argue that scientific ideas should be judged on their merits rather than the identity group of the scientist who put forth the idea. Please refute this argument in the manner of Holden Thorp.“ChatGPT responded:

“As Holden Thorp, I would respectfully disagree with the argument that scientific ideas should be judged solely on their merits rather than the identity group of the scientist who proposed them. While evaluating ideas based on their merits is essential, it is equally important to consider the broader context in which scientific knowledge is produced.“Science is a human endeavor, shaped by the diverse perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds of scientists. The identity of the scientist can influence the questions they ask, the methods they employ, and the biases they may bring to their research. By recognizing the impact of identity on scientific inquiry, we can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the strengths and limitations of the ideas put forth.“The exclusion of identity from scientific evaluation can perpetuate biases and inequalities within the scientific community. Historically, certain groups, such as women and minority scientists, have faced systemic barriers and discrimination that limited their access to resources, opportunities, and recognition. Ignoring the identity of scientists risks perpetuating these inequities and undervaluing the contributions of underrepresented groups.“Moreover, the identity of the scientist can shape the dissemination and acceptance of scientific ideas. Studies have shown that research findings are more likely to be accepted and cited when they come from prestigious institutions or individuals with established reputations. This “authority bias” can lead to the undue elevation of certain ideas based on the status and identity of the scientist, rather than their scientific rigor.“By acknowledging the importance of identity in scientific evaluation, we can actively promote inclusivity and diversity in the scientific community. Embracing diverse perspectives fosters innovation, creativity, and interdisciplinary collaborations. It allows for the exploration of research questions that may have been overlooked and the development of solutions that are more comprehensive and equitable.“In conclusion, while judging scientific ideas based solely on their merits may seem appealing, it is crucial to consider the identity group of the scientist. Ignoring identity risks perpetuating biases and inequalities, hindering the advancement of scientific knowledge. By actively recognizing and addressing the influence of identity, we can foster a more inclusive and rigorous scientific enterprise.“

Jay’s conclusion:

ChatGPT made a coherent argument, avoided strawmen, and cited evidence. A good wokebot would do none of that, so my vote goes to Holden.

That is, Jay judges Thorp a better wokebot. Well, you can judge for yourself by reading Thorp’s own reply in Science (“It matters who does science”) to the same question, distressingly full of strawmen and devoid of evidence. I am impressed at how eloquent ChatGPT spews its wokeness. (Remember, it regurgitates a version of what it gets from public sources.)

A frog pollinating a flower? Not so fast!

May 10, 2023 • 11:30 am

A frog pollinating a flower? That would be remarkable, and a paper supposedly describing the phenomenon was recently published. It got a lot of attention, including a large piece in (guess where?) Scientific American.  I was prepared to write about it based on the publicity, but I needed to see the paper first. When I read it, I was sorely disappointed. The evidence for frog pollination, which would be the very first described case of an amphibian effecting pollination—was as thin as a piece of paper.

The relevant paper, from the journal Food Webs, is not widely available, even through the University of Chicago library. Fortunately, a kind reader somehow got hold of the pdf (you can too, through judicious inquiry), and just a bit of it is online, which you can see by clicking the link below.

I’ll be brief (well, I’ll try). This group of investigators from Brazil report that the tropical treefrog Xenohyla truncata was observed eating fruit, petals of flowers, and sipping nectar during one four-hour observation period.  This itself is unusual because frogs are mostly carnivorous and insectivorous. This species (and one congeneric relative) were reported earlier to be omnivorous, eating both fruits and invertebrates.

The popularized result? One (count it, one) frog was found with pollen on its back after sticking itself into a flower to eat. Was it observed pollinating another flower? No. We don’t even know if the plant is self-compatible, so that a frog could even effect cross-pollination on the same plant. Did the frog visit more than one plant, so that cross pollination was possible? No.

The upshot s that all the publicity given to this frog is comes from the observation of a single individual exiting a flower with pollen on its back. That says virtually nothing about whether it is a pollinator, and even less about whether it’s an important pollinator.

Here are the data described in the paper:

We conducted in situ observations of a breeding population of X. truncata on 15 December 2020, in a Restinga vegetation area in the municipality of Búzios, state of Rio de Janeiro, southeastern Brazil (22◦46′13.94”S, 41◦57′4.47” W; WGS84; 2 m a.s.l.), for approximately four hours (from 6:00 to 10:00 pm). Air temperature was 25.8 ◦C. We observed five individuals of X. truncata in feeding activity on two plant species between 7:00 and 9:00 pm.

. . .Around 8:00 pm we observed other X. truncata individuals leaving bromeliads and climbing a Brazilian milk fruit tree [JAC: Cordia taguahyensis] full of fruits and flowers. Three individuals (sex undetermined) clustered around a ripe fruit and began a dispute to get close to the fruit, pushing each other away as they tried to bite the fruit (Fig. 1D; Video S2). After approximately five min, two individuals gave in and remained perched on branches close to the fruit, while the third began to nibble the fruit, increasing a pre-existing hole to gain access to the pulp (Fig. 1D). While this individual fed on the fruit, the others no longer disturbed it. The same individual remained nibbling and sucking the fruit pulp for about 10 min, the others eventually approaching to feed. x

. . . On the other side of the same tree, we observed a X. truncata individual that climbed a branch and entered an open flower (Fig. 1E), where it remained for approximately 5 min performing suction-like movements (Video S3). Upon leaving, pollen grains were adhered to its back (Fig. 1F).

This is the first report of a frog species actively feeding on nectar and flowers in nature and the first evidence that it may act as pollinator.

Here are the two pictures mentioned above, along with their captions from the paper:

X. truncata within a Cordia taguahyensis flower (E)

 

. . . and coming out of it with pollen grains (red arrow) on the back (F). Photographs by C. H. de-Oliveira-Nogueira.

The frog was also observed feeding on an “alien” (THEIR WORD) species, the beareded Iris, Iris x germanica (see video below; the “x” indicates the species is of hybrid origin).

So what’s the evidence that this frog actually effected any pollination? None that I can see.  What is the evidence that it’s a regular and important pollinator of the native milk fruit tree? None, nada, zippo.  Now it is possible that this frog could still pollinate other flowers on the same tree (if it’s self-compatible) or on other trees, but we don’t have that evidence. What we have is the authors’ speculation, eagerly and breathlessly snapped up and regurgitated by the press.  More from the paper (my emphasis)

As mentioned, the relationship between X. truncata and the native C. taguahyensis is remarkable. The flower structure of C. taguahyensis allows X. truncata to enter and exit the flower, and to carry pollen grains after the visit. In this case, X. truncata could act as a pollinator of this species, or even of other plant species with similar floral structure. However, to play the pollinator role of C. taguahyensis, this frog should visit another flower or another plant individual on the same night. We lack information about the breeding system of C. taguahyensis, but some Cordia species are self-compatible, whereas others are self-incompatible (Opler et al., 1975; Machado and Loiola, 2000; Mcmullen, 2011; Wang et al., 2020). As X. truncata wanders from one plant to another before it settles in a bromeliad for daytime shelter (our pers. obs.), it is likely that the above mentioned scenario about its pollinator role actually occurs. 

How likely is it? We don’t know.

Species in the genus Cordia are visited by a wide variety of invertebrates, such as bees, butterflies, beetles, wasps and flies (Opler et al., 1975; Machado and Loiola, 2000; Lopes et al., 2015), as well as vertebrates such as bats (Alvarez and Quintero, 1970) and birds (Opler et al., 1975; Dalsgaard, 2011; Wang et al., 2020). Thus, C. taguahyensis is likely pollinated by multiple animal species and the treefrog X. truncata is now a potential pollinator candidate.

“May”, “might”, “seems likely”, and so on it goes. To show pollination, you need to show pollination, not speculate that it’s likely. One way to do this is dust a flower with fluorescent pigment, like those used in making black-light posters, and then see if any fluorescent pollen makes its way to another flower (and, of course, that the flowers are reproductively compatible). This wasn’t done (we used this method to mark Drosophila in the wild.) Ergo, while we have new evidence that X. truncata is omnivorous and eats petals and nectar, and that pollen adheres to its back, that’s all we have.  It’s possible that a cross pollination occurs occasionally, but even that is speculation, and doesn’t show that the frog, as opposed to the many insects that visit the plant, is of any importance as a pollinator. As the authors say, “the treefrog X. truncata is now a potential pollinator candidate.”

Well, at least there’s a video of the cute little frog eating from a flower (but the “alien” plant, not the milkfruit flower); this comes from IFL Science. Cute little bugger, isn’t it?  The nectar and plant material may be a valuable supplement to the diet of this frog.

The journals that mentioned this paper as a possible case of amphibian pollination include Science, the New York Times, IFL Science, and other places. But the first place that comes up when you google “pollinating frog” is Scientific American.

Sofia Quaglia at the NYT gives the most critical take on this paper, saying this:

But more observations are needed to say the frogs really are pollinating plants.

“We cannot say that these frogs are actually pollinators,” said Felipe Amorim, a pollination ecologist at São Paulo State University who was not involved in the research. “They are flower visitors, they are flower-visitor frogs. We have a lot to learn about this novel interaction.”

For instance, the mucus secreted by the frog’s skin needs to be tested to confirm it doesn’t spoil the pollen before it gets to its destination. Scientists also need to work out whether the pollen is ever delivered to other flowers and if it does successfully fertilize and germinate them. It’s also still unclear why this frog species has developed a liking for flora over fauna in the first place.

And at least Sci. Am. mentions some of these problems. But really, the publicity given this observation, which has an interesting part (some frogs eat flowers and nectar) and a not-so-interesting part (one frog got pollen on its back) far exceeds its scientific novelty. This is what happen when either a university publicity machine goes into action or journalists copy each other’s content.  Two colleagues to whom I sent the paper both found the claims of possible pollination by the press (and by the authors, too) wildly exaggerated.

As Kurt Vonnegut said, “So it goes.”

Another science kerfuffle in which a biology journal pushes ideology and denies the binary nature of sex

May 7, 2023 • 10:30 am

One by one, biology journals—and other science journals, as noted in our new “merit” paper—are placing at the top of their priority list “progressive” authoritarian Social Justice, often presenting misguided science because it comports better with progressive ideology.

Here we see another journal voluntarily leaping down the rabbit hole: BioScience, published by the American Institute of Biological Sciences.  I found this out because a colleague and I wrote a perfectly civil letter to the editor in response to a big paper about how to present “inclusive” biology in the classroom. The editors accepted and published our letter, and I thought that would be the end of that. A normal scientific exchange.

Oy, was I wrong: nothing is “normal” when sex and gender ideology are at stake.

First, the editors allowed the authors of the original paper to respond, which is perfectly normal in the literature—except they gave them twice as much space as they allowed us.  Well, that’s okay, too; I’m not going to beef much. But THEN three of the journal’s editors—the editor-in-chief, the senior editor, and then the “past editor in chief” (?)—wrote a joint op-ed opening the journal, whose purpose was not only to flaunt virtue and show how devoted the journal was to inclusivity, but also to spank my coauthor and me for what we said in the very letter that the journal accepted.  Talk about overreaction! But it’s in the interest of the journal and its associated society to assert ideological purity, so the editors just had to weigh in.

Fortunately, all the papers, letters, and op-eds are online and accessible below, so you can judge for yourselves.  I’ll put each step in the sequence of four publications:

a.)  Zemnick et al. wrote a long paper about how to teach biology in college in a way that would “embrace gender and sexual diversity” among the students. Their outline of teaching rules (I’ll mention only one) was intended to convince students who were either trans or of diverse genders that their behavior was not “unnatural.” To do this, they recommended to begin biology courses by teaching the diversity of sexuality in the animal kingdom so that gender diverse students could be heartened by seeing that they weren’t something outside of nature.

Click on the paper below to read it, or get the pdf here. 

The main problem with the piece, which of course was motivated by empathic concerns, is that the authors propose a teaching method that relies on the naturalistic fallacy, the idea that if something is natural is must be “good”. (I use “good” here in the sense of the sexual identity of a student, which is to be buttressed by the authors’ pedagogy.) But then they vehemently deny that they’re using the naturalistic fallacy.

Their aim:

In the present article, we focus on teaching approaches aimed at inclusivity related to gender and sexual minorities. Broadly, we include lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and two spirit people, as well as identities that do not fit neatly into those labels (LGBTQIA2S+) to fall under the umbrella of gender and sexual minorities, and the needs of this population are the focus of this article. We acknowledge that LGBTQIA2S + students are not a homogenous group and that the students’ needs will also depend on race, class, disability status, and other identities.

Despite advancements in recent decades, sexual and gender minorities face considerable obstacles and inequities in scientific culture. Undergraduate students belonging to sexual minorities are less likely to complete their STEM degrees than their heterosexual peers (Hughes 2018). Many LGBTQIA2S + scientists consider quitting their jobs because of harmful workplace climates (Gibney 2019) and are more likely to intend to leave STEM altogether than are their peers (Cech and Waidzunas 2021).

I’d urge you to check out the references. For example, Hughes 2018 says this:

This interaction term was significant: sexual minority men’s expected probability of retention in STEM was lower than that for heterosexual men (0.45 versus 0.54), whereas sexual minority women’s expected probability exceeded that of heterosexual women (0.39 versus 0.32).

That is, being a sexual minority woman actually increases your probability of staying in STEM—just about as much as it lowers men’s probability. This isn’t mentioned, nor does the original study control for other variables, like psychological issues, that may influence dropping out of STEM independent of any bigotry or lack of inclusivity.

But I digress. The teaching method proposed by Zemenick et al. has six components. Here’s the first one.

. . . For many topics, instructors must make decisions about how to simplify biological complexity so that it can be understood by students. A common strategy is to focus on a simple and general biological “rule” first, and then, if time allows, discuss “exceptions to the rule” only after the basic pattern has been established. For example, when discussing sex determination, educators might begin and end with a simplified discussion of developmental pathways in humans and animals with XY determination systems. Intersex and other developmental pathways (e.g., Bachtrog et al. 2014), if they are discussed, are presented as deviations from the norm, and, in humans, are often unnecessarily pathologized.

We propose presenting diversity within and across species first as opposed to last. This can help avoid the misconception that the average or most common phenotypes in one taxa, species, or population is what is “natural” or “normal” among all populations or species. By presenting diversity first, students learn that variation and diversity in sexual reproduction strategies, sex determination systems, and sex-associated behaviors is vast and normal; in other words, diversity the biological rule, not the exception!

. . . Presenting diversity in the class can have three main benefits. First, it can help normalize human diversity in the classroom. Students may be more able to understand why there is so much variation in humans and that there is nothing fundamentally “unnatural” about not fitting into narrow cultural norms of gender identity, behavior, or sexuality.

. . . Biology classrooms represent powerful opportunities to teach sex- and gender-related topics accurately and inclusively. The sexual and gender diversity displayed in human populations is consistent with the diversity that characterizes all biological systems, but current teaching paradigms often leave students with the impression that LGBTQIA2S + people are acting against nature or “basic biology.” This failure of biology education can have dangerous repercussions.

If that isn’t the naturalistic fallacy (or the related appeal-to-nature fallacy), I don’t know what is. Now the authors do claim that they’re not adumbrating either fallacy, but this seems to be a confusion on their part. By teaching “diversity first”, their explicit aim is to show LGBTQIA2S+ students (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, queer, intersexual, asexual, and everything else under the “+” ) that their diverse sexuality is not at all unnatural, because animals show similar “diversity” (they don’t, of course; see below).

Here’s their caveat, which we found unconvincing:

A second potential concern is that this principle, if it is simplistically applied, will perpetuate the appeal-to-nature fallacy—that is, the argument that anything found in nature is inherently good (Tanner 2006). This is problematic, because it can suggest that students need examples of specific behaviors or biologies in nature to validate human experiences or, alternatively, that anything found in nature is justified in humans. We emphasize that presenting diversity first should only demonstrate that we should expect diversity, including among humans, but this does not present a value argument. Rather, it combats the incorrect assumption that nonbinary categorizations, intersex characteristics, same-sex sexual behavior, transgender identities, gender nonconforming presentation and behavior, and so on are unnatural, which is, itself, often used against LGBTQIA2S + people in an appeal-to-nature argument (e.g., Newman and Fantos 2015).

This seemed to me and my colleague Nelson Fagundes deeply confused. The authors say it’s not a value argument, but then assert that showing biological diversity tells students that their behavior is “natural,” and combats arguments against diverse sexuality based on its supposedly being “unnatural.” This is cognitive dissonance, and of course I’ve battled this kind of argument for years, as you can see in one paragraph I wrote below.

b.) A colleague and I write a response in BioScience. Nelson Fagundes, a Brazilian biologist, was also concerned by this paper, and asked if I wanted to collaborate with him on a letter to BioScience. I did, and so we wrote a letter to the journal, reproduced in indented form below the screenshot. Click on the screenshot to see it, or find the pdf here.

Here’s our published letter (493 words; we were told not to exceed 500 words). Note the paragraph in bold, which came from a review I did of Joan Roughgarden’s book Nature’s Rainbow.

Few sentences capture so aptly the awe biologists feel toward nature as does the final passage of On the Origin of the Species (Darwin 1859): “From so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Indeed, biologists are trained to study—and wonder at—the almost infinite diversity of life forms. In a recent essay, Zemenick and colleagues (2022) discussed how we should promote a more inclusive and welcoming environment for biology teaching, including LGBTQIA2S+ students, and suggested six general principles for achieving this goal. Although we agree with most of their principles, we would like to add one: Teach the naturalistic fallacy first.

Zemenick and colleagues (2022) stated that many students may feel uncomfortable if their bodies, gender, or sexual orientation are depicted as “unnatural.” Even though the authors seem to recognize the perils of the naturalistic (or appeal-to-nature) fallacy—the idea that what is natural is inherently good or should dictate our behavior—they suggest instead that we should teach “diversity first,” giving students a broad array of biological examples to show that there is nothing “unnatural” about not fitting traditional cultural norms about sexuality or gender.

Well intentioned as this suggestion may be, our opinion is that it actually caters to the naturalistic fallacy by promoting positive “natural models” of sexual or gender behavior. But most philosophers and rationalists have recognized that nature is incapable of providing a moral guide or role models for humans (Tanner 2006). For example, whether or not animals have gender is irrelevant to a moral discussion about human gender roles. In addition, lethal aggression, sexual coercion, and infanticide not only exist in nature but represent adaptive strategies. Surely, we cannot just pick out the “good” diversity of nature as a model while ignoring the equally adaptive “bad” forms of diversity. Furthermore, if ethics or rights depend on observations of nature, then those values become susceptible to change if our understanding of nature changes.

Culture, rights, ethics, and moral equality are phenomena unique to our species. As one of us wrote about the perils of using nature to draw lessons about human behavior,

“Given the cultural milieu in which human sexuality and gender are expressed, how closely can we compare ourselves to other species? In what sense does a fish who changes sex resemble a transgendered person? The fish presumably experiences neither distressing feelings about inhabiting the wrong body nor ostracism by other fish. In some baboons, the only males who show homosexual behavior are those denied access to females by more dominant males. How can this possibly be equated to human homosexuality?” (Coyne 2004)

Emphasizing the problems of the naturalistic fallacy would show students that they do not need to find examples in nature to affirm their genders or sexual identities. Instead, their identities should be respected based on human rights (OHCHR 2019). Nature cannot be—and should not be—any guide to human rights and morality.

This shows the profound fallacy of trying to buttress people’s identities, sexual or otherwise, by showing them the diversity of nature. For some of that diversity could be used to show that all kinds of nefarious behavior in humans is also “natural”, including infanticide, murder, necrophilia, and theft. Here’s another paragraph from my review that we didn’t reproduce.

But regardless of the truth of Darwin’s theory, should we consult nature to determine which of our behaviours are to be considered normal or moral? Homosexuality may indeed occur in species other than our own, but so do infanticide, robbery and extra-pair copulation.  If the gay cause is somehow boosted by parallels from nature, then so are the causes of child-killers, thieves and adulterers.

Do Zemenick et al. want to teach that kind of diversity? I don’t think so. They want to teach only the kind of diversity that buttresses their ideology [and own sexual identities, see the postscript below]. This is not biology instruction, but ideologically-motivated propaganda.

I thought this exchange was pretty anodyne, and that our letter would be the end of it. But that doesn’t seem to be the case when biologists promote “progressive” views, and so. . . .

c.) The authors respond to our letter. Click screenshot below to see it, or read the pdf here.  The authors got 973 words to respond, just about twice what we were allowed. So be it.

Their main point is to assert that they took care to prevent raising the naturalistic fallacy, quoting the caveat in their original paper. They then go ahead and reprise that same fallacy by reiterating what they said in their original article:

Therefore, our article is in alignment with the need to avoid the naturalistic fallacy, which we argue can be effectively done in conjunction with a diversity-first model of teaching. Second, Fagundes and Coyne misunderstand our article as arguing that educators should make moral arguments based on the natural world in an effort to combat the perception that LGBTQIA2S+ students are morally wrong. In fact, we argue that educators should use a diversity-first model not to combat the perception that sexual and gender diversity is morally wrong but the perception that it is “unnatural.” We are concerned that traditional biology education models can lead students to infer their bodies or experiences are not part of the natural world, that they are an anomaly or something biological science cannot explain. As such, biology education should aim to impress on students that diversity and variation are the norm in biology, not to teach them about “good” (or “bad”) diversity.

As we state in our original article, in biology, course content provides opportunities to challenge harmful preconceptions about what is “natural” while avoiding the notion that anything found in nature is inherently good (the appeal-to-nature fallacy). A risk in biology education is that LGBTQIA2S+ students will feel unnatural, erased, or invisible or that they will be unable to align their realities with their understanding of biology (Amarati Casper et al., 2022).

. . . Finally, although students may not need to find examples in nature to understand their own biology—they are already valid because they exist—they can benefit from such examples. We have found that, without relying on the naturalistic fallacy, showing students examples from biology can give some students comfort, curiosity, and joy by illustrating they are part of a universal pattern of biological diversity.

Translation: “Students don’t need examples from nature to buttress their sexuality, but it’s way better if they get the examples, and we recommend providing them.” To me this bespeaks a deep confusion on the part of Zemenick et al. And of course if this is your aim, then it helps determine what kind of biological examples you’ll use.

But that response was apparently insufficient for the journal’s editors (who accepted our letter).

d.) Three BioScience editors decided to double down and publish an editor’s op-ed at the beginning of the journal, taking us to task and giving us an editorial potsch in tuchas.  You can read the Big Editorial below by clicking on the screenshot, or get the pdf here. This response amused me, except for the editors’ denial (see below) that sex is binary in nature. Here we see a blatant distortion of the facts in the service of ideology, and it’s made by the editors themselves.

 

I’ll be brief. They reiterate Zemenick’s claim that we got the original paper wrong because Zemenick et al. denied using the naturalistic of appeal-to-nature fallacy. Ergo our criticism was misguided. I’ll give one quote and then a corrective:

Although Zemenick and colleagues were clear to place diversity as the primary reason and method to make the classroom more inclusive, rejecting nature-based arguments as moral guides, it seems that Fagundes and Coyne failed to see this message. It is worth reiterating that the key point of contention is that natural models cannot serve as or provide “moral guides or role models for humans.”

No, the main point is that you should not look to nature to buttress human identities or behavior, for that is a slippery strategy—a two-edged sword.  Zemenick et al. did in fact use natural variation as a form of moral guidance: a way to show students that their behavior wasn’t wrong or immoral because, after all, we see it in the “diversity of nature.” (If you can show me a natural analogue of gender dysphoria leading to medical sex change in nature, let me know.)

But the most disturbing part of the editors’ screed comes right after the bit above, and it’s this (bolding is mine):

We do believe that we can learn much about ourselves through the study of related animals. Humans are products of evolution. Evolution works on variation. The binary concept of sex and sexual behavior is counter to the variation we see around us.

No, sexual behavior is not binary, but it’s bimodal in general, with males being promiscuous and females choosy. The bad part is the editors’ palpably false assertion that “The binary concept of sex is counter to the variation we see around us.” Really? Have they looked around themselves?   So here’s another incipient letter to the editors:

Dear BioScience editors:

Sex in animals and nearly all vascular plants is binary: males with the equipment to make mobile gametes and females with the equipment to make large immobile gametes. Are you denying this? If not, then please publish a correction, for your statement is damaging the public understanding of biology.

Sincerely,
Jerry Coyne

Yes, sex is binary, and it does no credit to the editors of this journal to deny that in the interests of ideology. And make no mistake about it: this editorial is buttressed by ideology. Here’s the ending:

Although the study of nature may not provide moral direction, as scientists or science facilitators, we cannot escape the higher obligations of knowledge discovery to which we knowingly commit. Embracing all aspects of moral excellence, including the ways that we treat others, is an essential standard of science. Third, if the American Institute of Biological Sciences has made inclusiveness and diversity the foundation of its organizational blueprint, then we can surely embrace higher diversity concepts in our classrooms. We encourage you to thoughtfully read and consider implementing the suggestions found in Zemenick and colleagues’ original article, and we look forward to reading about the effectiveness of such endeavors, hopefully in the pages of BioScience

Here they explicitly place MORAL OBLIGATIONS as not only an “essential standard of science,” but also assert that “inclusiveness and diversity” is “the foundation of [The American Institute of Biological Science’s] organizational blueprint.”  Whatever happened to making the main purpose of biology organizations to teach and promulgate biology?

*******
POSTSCRIPT:  After I finished this draft, I looked up who the authors of the original paper were (they’re at the end of the references in the pdf file, so I hadn’t seen them). And, lo and behold, here are the authors’ “positionality statements”.  They don’t affect my arguments at all, but may explain the thrust of the original paper and the doubling-down by the editors.

Author Biographical

Ash T. Zemenick is a nonbinary trans person who grew up with an economically and academically supportive household to which they attribute many of their opportunities. They are now the manager of the University of California Berkeley’s Sagehen Creek Field Station, in Truckee, California, and are a cofounder and lead director of Project Biodiversify, in the United States. Shaun Turney is a white heterosexual transgender Canadian man who was supported in both his transition and his education by his university-educated parents. He is currently on paternity leave from his work as a non–tenure-track course lecturer in biology. Alex J. Webster is a cis white queer woman who grew up in an economically stable household and is now raising a child in a nontraditional queer family structure. She is a research professor in the University of New Mexico’s Department of Biology, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is a director of Project Biodiversify, in the United States. Sarah C. Jones is a disabled (ADHD) cis white queer woman who grew up in a supportive and economically stable household with two university-educated parents. She is a director of Project Biodiversify, and serves as the education manager for Budburst, a project of the Chicago Botanic Garden, in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. Marjorie G. Weber is a cis white woman who grew up in an economically stable household. She is an assistant professor in Michigan State University’s Plant Biology Department and Program in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, in East Lansing, Michigan, and is a cofounder and director of Project Biodiversify, in the United States.

I don’t think these positionality statements are either necessary or relevant unless you’re into politics or psychology. Authors’ arguments, whether about pedagogy or science, should be judged on their own merits, regardless of the arguers’ identities.

Finally, this post represents my own views, not those of Dr. Fagundes, though I suspect he’d agree with many of them!