Category: science journals behaving badly

In an abysmal article, Nautilus dismisses the importance of genes

March 26, 2024 • 11:30 am

This is one of the worst papers on genetics I’ve seen in the last 15 years, and although it’s from 2019, this same kind of palaver keeps coming around again and again, and in exactly the same form. And so when a reader sent me the link, I reacted instinctively. The laws of physics mandated that, like a starving leopard encountering an antelope, I must fall on it and rip it to pieces.  So here goes. (Yes, Carole Hooven is right: males tend to have the killer instinct more than do females!)

The piece is intended not for professionals but for laypeople, and appeared in Nautilus, a quarterly magazine on science and its relationship to and implications for society. Founded by a big grant from the John Templeton Foundation, it does publish solid science articles, but sometimes the Foundation’s purpose (to find evidence of God in science) shines through. This occurs through promoting bizarre science, like panpsychism, or touting dubious reconciliations between religion and science. This paper falls into a third class: doing down “modern” genetics to imply that there’s something terribly wrong with our modern paradigm. (Evolution is a related and favorite target.)

The author, Ken Richardson, seems to have derived most of his genetics from fringe figures like Denis Noble and James Shapiro, with the result that the casual, non-geneticist reader will buy what these people are selling: genes are of only minor significance in both development and evolution.

Richardson is listed in the article as “formerly Senior Lecturer in Human Development at the Open University (U.K.). He is the author of Genes, Brains and Human Potential: The Science and Ideology of Intelligence.”

Read it by clicking below, or find the article archived here.

I was torn between ignoring this paper—for the author deserves no attention—or taking it apart. I decided on a compromise: to show some of the statements it makes that are either flat wrong or deeply misguided. Richardson’s quotes are indented, and my take is flush left. Here’s how he starts:

The preferred dogma started to appear in different versions in the 1920s. It was aptly summarized by renowned physicist Erwin Schrödinger in a famous lecture in Dublin in 1943. He told his audience that chromosomes “contain, in some kind of code-script, the entire pattern of the individual’s future development and of its functioning in the mature state.”

Around that image of the code a whole world order of rank and privilege soon became reinforced. These genes, we were told, come in different “strengths,” different permutations forming ranks that determine the worth of different “races” and of different classes in a class-structured society. A whole intelligence testing movement was built around that preconception, with the tests constructed accordingly.

The image fostered the eugenics and Nazi movements of the 1930s, with tragic consequences. Governments followed a famous 1938 United Kingdom education commission in decreeing that, “The facts of genetic inequality are something that we cannot escape,” and that, “different children … require types of education varying in certain important respects.”

The “strengths” and “permutations of genes” was not widely viewed as the underpinnings of different races. Yes, racial hierarchies were constructed based on supposed genetic constitution, but not the image of the “code script”.  It was the claim that racial differences were inherited, regardless how inheritance worked—much less the unproved notion of “code script”—that buttressed the Nazis’ eugenics program.  But somehow Richardson manages to connect the Nazis with the genetic code at the very beginning of his paper. But this is a minor quibble compared to what follows.

Richardson then uses what he sees as the disappointing performance of the GWAS (Genome-wide Association Studies) method (used to locate, from population surveys, regions of the genome responsible for various traits, which helps narrow down the location of “candidate genes”):

Now, in low-cost, highly mechanized procedures, the search has become even easier. The DNA components—the letters in the words—that can vary from person to person are called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. The genetic search for our human definition boiled down to looking for statistical associations between such variations and differences in IQ, education, disease, or whatever.

For years, disappointment followed: Only a few extremely weak associations between SNPs and observable human characteristics could be found. Then another stroke of imagination. Why not just add the strongest weak associations together until a statistically significant association with individual differences is obtained? It is such “polygenic scores,” combining hundreds or thousands of SNPs, varying from person to person, and correlating (albeit weakly) with trait scores such as IQ or educational scores, that form the grounds for the vaulting claims we now witness.

Today, 1930s-style policy implications are being drawn once again. Proposals include gene-testing at birth for educational intervention, embryo selection for desired traits, identifying which classes or “races” are fitter than others, and so on. And clever marketizing now sees millions of people scampering to learn their genetic horoscopes in DNA self-testing kits.

So the hype now pouring out of the mass media is popularizing what has been lurking in the science all along: a gene-god as an entity with almost supernatural powers. Today it’s the gene that, in the words of the Anglican hymn, “makes us high and lowly and orders our estate.”

Although GWAS studies are hard and require big samples, and give genomic regions rather than genes there have been some notable successes in both medical genetics and agriculture, as one would expect in the past five years (see this Twitter thread for some examples).  The implication throughout the paper is that the failure of GWAS to locate individual genes responsible for traits shows that the variation of genes themselves aren’t responsible for the variation in traits. There must be something else!

But that’s completely wrong. We already have a way to judge the influence of genetic variation on trait variation, and that is heritability analysis. Heritabilities (symbolized as h²) range between 0 and 1, and are a measure of the proportion of variation for a trait in a given population caused by the variation among the genes in that population (the rest is due to environmental variation, interactions between genes and environments, and other arcane factors). But the point is that heritabilities calculated from our earlier crude methods are nearly always higher than heritabilities estimated from GWAS analysis, simply because GWAS (but not h²) misses a lot of variable gene sites that have small effects, and isn’t good at detecting effects of rare alleles. But the more we use GWAS, the more variation we find, and, for well studied traits like height, heritabilities estimated from traditional methods are now converging with heritabilities estimated from GWAS.

And heritabilities of most traits, which are most extensively studied in humans, are often quite high. Have a look at this list, for example, which includes cognitive traits, behavioral traits, and physical traits. Most heritabilities range between 0.2 and 0.8, which means that for a typical trait, between 20% and 80% of the inter-individual variation in a population is due to variation of genes. When asked to guess the heritability of an unknown trait, I’d usually say, “well, probably about 50%”.  That seems, for example, to be close to the heritability of IQ in a population.

This shows that genes are highly important in explaining human variation, just as they are variation in animals and plants. This phenomenon was well known ages ago. If genes weren’t important in variation, selective breeding of dogs, plants, pigeons, and so on would be almost useless. Here’s a famous quote from Darwin’s in The Origin:

“Breeders habitually speak of an animal’s organization as something quite plastic, which they can model almost as they please.”

If genes weren’t important in variation, animals (and plants, which of course have been bred out the wazoo) wouldn’t be so plastic. Ergo genetic variation is important in explaining the variation of organisms.

Despite this, Richardson makes the following statement, which would astound most geneticists:

. . . . it is now well known that a group of genetically identical individuals, reared in identical environments—as in pure-bred laboratory animals—do not become identical adults. Rather, they develop to exhibit the full range of bodily and functional variations found in normal, genetically-variable, groups. In a report in Science in 2013, Julia Fruend and colleagues observed this effect in differences in developing brain structures.

Full range? Really? Yes, there is still variation among clonal individuals raised in identical environments, but not nearly as much as among genetically variable individuals raised in different environments! Clonal populations show a heritability of zero (they have no genetic variation among them), so there is less phenotypic variation among the individuals.  As for the Fruend paper, it shows plasticity of brain development, because of course learning is a form of adaptive plasticity that can change the brain. But that by no means says that genes aren’t an important source of variation.

I could go on and on about how Richardson claims that genes aren’t important, all the while showing that they are. Here’s a good example:

First, laboratory experiments have shown how living forms probably flourished as “molecular soups” long before genes existed. They self-organized, synthesized polymers (like RNA and DNA), adapted, and reproduced through interactions among hundreds of components. That means they followed “instructions” arising from relations between components, according to current conditions, with no overall controller: compositional information, as the geneticist Doron Lancet calls it.

In this perspective, the genes evolved later, as products of prior systems, not as the original designers and controllers of them. More likely as templates for components as and when needed: a kind of facility for “just in time” supply of parts needed on a recurring basis.

So what? There were primitive replicators first, which might as well be called genes, but the modern system of sophisticated gene action, often involving introns, splicing, transcription factors, and so on, is what we know about now, and what Richardson says about early organisms is irrelevant.  But wait! There’s more!

Then it was slowly appreciated that we inherit just such dynamical systems from our parents, not only our genes. Eggs and sperm contain a vast variety of factors: enzymes and other proteins; amino acids; vitamins, minerals; fats; RNAs (nucleic acids other than DNA); hundreds of cell signalling factors; and other products of the parents’ genes, other than genes themselves.

Where does Richardson think that those enzymes and proteins come from, which are often used to manufacture vitamins and amino acids? Where do the cell signalling factors come from? They all come from genes! The “dynamical systems” that he touts so highly come largely from genes, and without genes we would have no organisms and no evolution. Yes, environmental factors are important in controlling the timing and action of genes, but often those “environmental factors”, like signals in different organs that lead to differential development, are themselves derived from genes. And the sequestration and use of externally derived chemicals, like some amino acids and vitamins, are also controlled by genes.

I can barely go on, and if I continue this would last forever. Just one or two more pieces of stupidity:

Accordingly, even single cells change their metabolic pathways, and the way they use their genes to suit those patterns. That is, they “learn,” and create instructions on the hoof. Genes are used as templates for making vital resources, of course. But directions and outcomes of the system are not controlled by genes. Like colonies of ants or bees, there are deeper dynamical laws at work in the development of forms and variations.

Some have likened the process to an orchestra without a conductor. Physiologist Denis Noble has described it as Dancing to the Tune of Life (the title of his recent book). It is most stunningly displayed in early development. Within hours, the fertilized egg becomes a ball of identical cells—all with the same genome, of course. But the cells are already talking to each other with storms of chemical signals. Through the statistical patterns within the storms, instructions are, again, created de novo. The cells, all with the same genes, multiply into hundreds of starkly different types, moving in a glorious ballet to find just the right places at the right times. That could not have been specified in the fixed linear strings of DNA.

My answer is “yes it could have, and it is”. Those “chemical systems” that cause an organism to develop come from genes, which have changed over evolutionary time in a way that leads to adaptations, including proper development. By and large, genes control development, particularly early development.  Organisms with pretty much the same genes (members of the same species, for example) always turn out pretty much alike, with similar behaviors and appearances. Further, the more closely related species are, the more similar they tend to be. This reflects genetic similiarity, not some nebulous similarity in “dynamical systems,” whatever those are.

One more:

But it’s not so simple. Consider Mendel’s sweet peas. Some flowers were either purple or white, and patterns of inheritance seemed to reflect variation in a single “hereditary unit,” as mentioned above. It is not dependent on a single gene, however. The statistical relation obscures several streams of chemical synthesis of the dye (anthocyanin), controlled and regulated by the cell as a whole, including the products of many genes. A tiny alteration in one component (a “transcription factor”) disrupts this orchestration. In its absence the flower is white.

This is a good illustration of what Noble calls “passive causation.” A similar perspective applies to many “genetic diseases,” as well as what runs in families. But more evolved functions—and associated diseases—depend upon the vast regulatory networks mentioned above, and thousands of genes. Far from acting as single-minded executives, genes are typically flanked, on the DNA sequence, by a dozen or more “regulatory” sequences used by wider cell signals and their dynamics to control genetic transcription.

“Statistical relation”? What is described in peas is a direct causal relation: a mutation, acting through pathways, is responsible for changing flower color. If you flip a light switch, the light goes on. If you have the right mutation, the flower is white. What’s the big deal? Further, “transcription factors” are coded in the DNA; they are proteins that regulate the transcripotion of other genes: how those genes make messenger RNA.

And the ultimate dissing of genes:

We have reached peak gene, and passed it.

Finally, because GWAS studies aren’t yet developed to the point where they always can pick out important genes (remember, variation in most traits is due to variation in many genes, with the variants having small effects, and GWAS misses rare genes), Richardson says this:

The startling implication is that the gene as popularly conceived—a blueprint on a strand of DNA, determining development and its variations—does not really exist.

Well, as Dawkins has pointed out, genes are more like “recipes” than blueprints, but this isn’t what Richardson is saying here. What he is saying is that genes play at best only a small role in development.  He is both wrong and muddled.

It is this kind of popular science that I most despise, because it dissimulates, misleads, and even fibs about the state of modern science. By misleading the public about genetics, it affects not only their understanding of science, but, when shown up to be nonsense, as I and other have done, erodes public trust in science.

If you want to read this piece, be my guest, but if you know anything about genetics, keep a big glass of Pepto-Bismol at hand.

 

h/t: the always helpful Luana

Positionality statements in science: the NSF doesn’t want them, but journals do

March 25, 2024 • 9:35 am

We’ve talked before about “positionality statements” (see here and here; also Sally Satel’s article here). These are statements, usually put at the end of an academic paper, in which the authors give all kinds of information about their upbringing, ethnicity, race, sexual identity, sexual inclination, upbringing, and so on. It’s the kind of information that the Woke use when making a statement, putting it in the blank space here:  “As a _____________, I feel that. . . . ”

Here’s a typical statement, one that I’ve posted before:

I (first author) was raised as a Muslim immigrant-origin girl in a small Iowa town and constantly aware that my family was “different.” Having been an educator in PK-12 contexts, my goal in studying developmental psychology was to make the process easier for other youth who, like myself, were intersectionally minoritized and privileged because of religious, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and/or other identities or experiences. I was unprepared for the microaggressions embedded in developmental scholarship rooted in non-inclusive modes of knowledge production that resisted the nuances of the diverse individuals and groups I sought to better understand. . . . I seek to place myself in relationships and contexts to learn and engage in a co-conspiring, co-liberatory inquiry stance.

These are cringe-worthy of course, but their proponents say they’re useful.  I say they’re not, as did Sally Satel. In this matter Dorian Abbot, my heterodox colleague at the University of Chicago, also agrees. You can see his short HeterodoxSTEM article (it’s worth subscribing if you’re in STEM) by clicking the headline below.

 

The reason usually asserted for people making statements like this is that, by giving the authors’ backgrounds and beliefs, it enables the reader to better judge the paper scientifically, possibly being aware of biases that might affect a paper’s results or conclusions. But the authors should have been aware of this themselves and expunged any bias in their data collection or analysis, or at least gotten another pair of eyes to look over the paper before submitting it. And, of course, looking at the science in a paper, and seeing if it’s solid, is the job of the reviewers who decide whether it’s meritorious enough to be worth publishing. If authors can’t vet their own papers for accuracy before they submit them, they shouldn’t be doing science. As Sally Satel said:

Rather than confess the blind spots and biases they think they have, scientists should make their data transparent; pre-register research hypotheses; engage in rigorous, blind peer review; and publish detailed letters to the editor. It is the research that should come under scrutiny, not the researcher.

It seems likely to me that these statements have other purposes beyond vetting a paper. They are often used to flaunt virtue or even confess the author’s whiteness or other failings; in other words, they consitute = contrition, braggadocio, or both. The statements’ purpose is as much (or more) ideological than it is scientific. It also verges on solipsism.

As Dorian notes, the NSF prohibits such statements in proposals for getting grants:

the NSF has banned any personal information on official biosketches, for good reason (bolding is mine):

Individuals are reminded not to submit any personal information in the biographical sketch. This includes items such as: home address; home telephone, fax, or cell phone numbers; home e-mail address; driver’s license number; marital status; personal hobbies; and the like. Such personal information is not appropriate for the biographical sketch and is not relevant to the merits of the proposal.

So the NSF, for good reasons (irrelevance to the merit of a paper), prohibits these statements, but authors merrily include them when allowed, and one journal (according to Satel, it’s the Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering) even requires them!

Dorian gives an over-the-top example of such a statement that he found here. It’s in the Journal of Paleobiology, part of a three-authored article on the underrepresentation of women in that field:

Nan Crystal Arens (she/her) is a White, cisgender, heteroromantic woman and professor in the Department of Geoscience at Hobart & William Smith Colleges (HWS). She was a first-generation college student with a learning disability that significantly slows her parsing and processing written language. HWS is a predominantly White, private undergraduate institution where faculty are encouraged to engage actively in scholarship, although both time and resources for this component of faculty work are extremely limited. HWS faculty in the natural sciences boast a strong tradition of including undergraduate students in their research, as reflected here. Arens’s advocacy for greater inclusion of historically marginalized people in STEMM arises both from her experience as a woman in geology and paleontology and as the mother of two cisgender women who are just beginning to confront the inequities of the world.

“Levi Holguin (he/they) is a person assigned female at birth, neurodivergent, queer, first-generation college student, and part of an immigrant family. They come from a low-income background and are a devotee of folk Catholicism. Many of his identity markers challenge normative standards in the several communities of which he is a part. This draws them into conversations regarding gender and intersectionality. He was motivated in this work by the desire to make change that will open opportunities for marginalized people.

“Natalie Sandoval (she/her) is an undergraduate Latina attending a predominantly White, private institution as a first-generation student. She is cisgender and queer, does not live with a disability, and from a low-income immigrant family. Growing up in an immigrant Latino family, she is no stranger to forced gender roles and machismo, which draws her to gender studies and equity issues. She has done previous research on gender representation in STEMM careers and feelings of belonging on campus. Her previous research also includes family planning and contraceptive use. She is a community advocate through the National Diversity Coalition and seeks opportunities to improve gender equity, accessibility, and human rights through community advocacy and policy change.”

Heteroromantic? Queer? Not disabiled?  What are the sweating author trying to convey with that information? I can’t see anything in these statements that would make me evaluate the paper differently from how I’d do it if I lacked this information. (Do note the virtue-flaunting!).

I don’t have much to add to what I’ve said before—save that this is just one more attempt of the Ideological Camel to insinuate its carcass into the Tent of Science.  In effect, it devalues what science is presented by implying that it might be biased (and offers no help in fixing any such bias!).  Dorian has a few words at the end that echo my own sentiments:

Positionality statements are a flagrant violation of one of the key Mertonian Norms of science, universalism, which states that “scientific validity is independent of the sociopolitical status/personal attributes of its participants.” They are not just political grandstanding, which is bad enough, but actually act to undermine the ideal of the disinterested collection of evidence and development of explanatory theories by the scientific method, and therefore decrease confidence in scientific results. In science, it doesn’t matter if your father was a prince or pauper, what you look like, where you came from, or what naughty stuff you do with whom. Science is science, data are data, and bullshit is bullshit. In order to preserve the integrity of the scientific process, journals should ban positionality statements, and we, as reviewers, should automatically reject any paper that includes them.

Amen!

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.)