Category: science journals behaving badly

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!

British reaction to the sex binary kerfuffle: The Daily Mail and Steven Knight

May 5, 2023 • 10:15 am

I continue to be amazed at how much dust is stirred up by simply asserting the biological observation that, in animals and vacular plants, there are but two sexes, and those sexes are defined by the reproductive equipment they have. Males are “designed” (I’m speaking teleologically: “evolved” is what I mean) to make small, mobile gametes, and females to make big immobile ones.  For decades this has been uncontroversial: A truth universally acknowledged, to paraphrase Jane Austen.

Now, however, for reasons known best to themselves, a small but vocal group of ideologues is denying the sex binary. In my coauthored paper coming out in late June, we hazard some guesses, but those of you following the controversy probably realize that it involves trying to impose one’s ideological views onto nature.

Here’s the kind of stuff that comes out of the woodwork (tweet found by reader Mike and noted in the comments below). It’s an object lesson about how to smear those who advance a scientific fact that you don’t like. (I’ve archived the tweet with a screenshot, but you can see the original by clicking on it).

This doesn’t work so easily with the sex binary, as even nonscientists can observe it with their own eyes. The result is that deniers of that binary, such as Agustín Fuentes and Laura Helmuth (editor of Scientific American who’s published several pieces denying a sex binary), face considerable pushback from both scientists—who work with male and female organisms—and “regular” people, who have eyes to see and neurons to analyze.

You might look at the comments (or “ratio-ing”) of these tweets by both Fuentes and Helmuthy (click to see original tweets and the thread of comments). You’ll see that the vast majority of comments on both tweets are critical. That’s not because of our own incisive analysis, but because Fuentes’s arguments (and Helmuth’s desperate attempts to defend them and stave off the decline of Scientific American) are so transparently weak—and ideologically motivated).

I enjoy a good dust-up once in a while, and this is one of them. Even the Daily Mail, which wrote an article about the controversy and about Sci Am, is pro-binary, though their article is not written at all well and seems to consist of fragments from interviews. Click below to read it.

They interviewed me, Fuentes, Helmuth, and Carole Hooven, and I won’t summarize the text, which, like the article itself, is a bit disjointed. (The writer was clearly not acquainted with evolutionary biology or the biology of sex.)  Let me just say three things.

First, I did not say THIS:

Dr Jerry Coyne, a biologist at the University of Chicago, told DailyMail.com that the magazine is ‘forcing a progressive lefty agenda’ onto readers just wanting to learn about science. [Dr Fuentes] is imposing his ideology on nature,’ Dr Coyne said.

I would have said “Leftist”, though I stand by my claim that yes, Sci Am does have a political agenda. “Lefty” is a term I reserve for left-handed baseball pitchers.  It’s probably a bad transcription from our recorded interview, and may be due to my voice, which was horse from a bad colt.

Second, there are pro-binary quotes from Carole Hooven and Colin Wright (whose writings were excerpted). Here’s how Carole responded to Fuentes’s (and Helmuth’s) claim that we biologist think that sex-related characters (beyond gametes and their developmental origin) and behaviors are also binary—an position that none of us have taken because we’re not stupid.

Dr Hooven, said Dr Fuentes is misrepresenting sex and the traits an animal has.

‘No serious scientist would argue that traits are binary; it is sex that is binary,’ she explained.

‘Sex differences in hormones, strength, size, etc. are not the same as sex, but are strongly associated with it, just as an interest in construction equipment or dolls are traits associated with, but not the same as being a boy or girl.

‘In mammals, there are two sexes and two only. One can change their sex-related characteristics like hormones, mode of dress, muscle mass, even voice, but one cannot change sex.

‘The point is, biologists and others understand that while male and female are binary sex categories based on gamete size, and bodies and behavior of boys and girls, men and women are extremely diverse, there are some circumstances in which sex matters.’

Fuentes has a lame reply:

Dr Fuentes disagrees with the assessment from the biologists.

‘There are sexes and differences between them matter. That is not in dispute. But the overlaps between sexes also matter and are sufficient that the frame of a “sex binary” is misleading and inhibits better research and analyses,’ he said.

How can he possibly disagree with what Hooven said, which happens to be true?

Third, I found this the most intriguing part of the article, and hilarious in its arrant fibbing in the part I’ve bolded.

‘Scientific American publishes fascinating articles about the latest scientific research, and often this work is relevant to important and timely issues,’ Laura Helmuth, editor-and-chief of the journal, told DailyMail.com in response.

‘We hope the articles we share, many of which are written by leading experts, help readers understand our world. That is my only agenda.’

Seriously? That is her only agenda? That’s simply not true: a major part of the magazine’s effort is devoted to propping up, using scientific articles and op-eds, Helmuth’s progressive authoritarianism (see my collection of posts about this bias here). If she were interested in truth, why would she flatly reject my offer to write an op-ed about the bad effects of ideology on science? (Well, that op-ed has morphed into a long article that will appear in about 6 weeks.)

Finally, to return to a sensible outlook, have a look at this piece by Stephen Knight (also known as “Godless Spellchecker”) at Spiked (click to read):

Just two excerpts here:

A dangerous strain of utopian thinking has taken hold of the ‘progressive’ left. Many now share the delusion that if we pretend certain falsehoods are true, then various forms of oppression and bigotry will magically disappear. Worse still, the proponents of these falsehoods demand their unequivocal affirmation from the rest of us.

Today’s leftists rightly insist on the importance of scientific truth when it comes to questions like climate change, vaccine safety and evolution. But they will discard scientific facts the moment they become inconvenient to their own worldview. Nowhere is this hypocrisy more pronounced than on the issue of gender, where transgender ideology has almost entirely supplanted scientific truth among the left. More alarming still is the fact that many scientists and scientific institutions, which really should know better, are colluding in this deception.

The latest scientific institution to promote gender pseudoscience is the once-venerable Scientific American magazine, which this week published an article headlined ‘Here’s why human sex is not binary’.

Make no mistake, sex in human beings really is binary and immutable. There are few things more emphatically true in our scientific understanding of the world than the human sex binary.

. . .After some silly and irrelevant trivia about the biology of lizards and fish (humans are neither fish nor lizards), the Scientific American article concludes by claiming that anyone who upholds the human sex binary is ‘trying to restrict who counts as a full human in society’. This single claim inadvertently reveals a great deal about what is wrong with the trans movement. Unable to refute the truth of the human sex binary, gender ideologues resort to demonising those who notice it as having ulterior, sinister motives.

This isn’t the first time Scientific American has lent its (now waning) credibility to gender nonsense. Back in 2018, it published an article titled ‘Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is overly simplistic’. To this day, this piece is gleefully shared around by gender activists, emboldened by this apparent vindication of their ideology from a credible, scientific publication. However, the author of the piece has since clarified that reality actually is as simplistic as humans having only ‘two sexes’.

Here’s that clarification by Claire Ainsworth:

And yes, Ainsworth is right, but I add the caveat that for many traits, like height and weight, males and females may lie on a continuous distribution, but the distribution is also bimodal because of sexual dimorphism. Sadly, Alice Dreger, whose book Galileo’s Middle Finger was great, rejects even the concept of sexual dimorphism in humans (see bottom of tweet; nothing is “potentially sensitive” there.

And, to end, Knight quotes the wise and ever-snarky Emma Hilton:

Dr Emma Hilton is a developmental biologist at the University of Manchester and a co-founder of the women’s rights organisation, Sex Matters. When I asked her what compels otherwise sensible people to make anti-scientific claims about human sex, she said: ‘Charitably, if you remove the ability to classify (by arguing classifications are arbitrary, meaningless, etc), you remove the ability to discriminate (or at least stigmatise). So, for some, “sex blindness” is a genuine strategy for social change. But it is a stupid one.’

That last five-word sentence made me laugh out loud. Big fun!

Science magazine touts the existence of strong and ubiquitous “implicit bias”, as well as the need to measure it and develop ways to eliminate it

March 5, 2023 • 10:45 am

This long new article in Science, one of the world’s premier science journals (or should I call it a “magazine”?), not only assumes that implicit (unconscious bias) is a real and pervasive thing, that it’s ubiquitous and has led to “structural racism” within institutions, that it can be assessed with a test (IAT: the “implicit association test”) that it diagnoses the severity of your bias correctly, and that making people aware of their hidden bigotry through “implicit bias training” will make them stop being bigots.

Every one of these assertions (particularly the last three) has been contested by psychologists, but you wouldn’t know that from reading the piece, which you can do by clicking below. Note that the point of this post is not to say that bias and bigotry don’t exist—you’d be a fool to claim that—but that there are grounds for questioning whether these biases are unconscious, can be diagnosed correctly with tests, and can be eliminated through training.

I’m not an expert on this topic, but I am aware that the notion of testing for and effacing unconscious bias has largely been dropped by experts—but not by “progressives”. For a documentation of the problems, with plenty of references, read this 2022 piece by Lee Jussim in Psychology Today (click on the screenshot). I’ll give his list of issues below, but note that even Scientific American has been allowed by an editor to publish a 2020 piece called “The problem with implicit bias training“, which contends that yes, implicit bias exists, but training doesn’t seem to get rid of it.

Here are Jussim’s reasons, each documented with references in the original article. The indented words and bolding are his (my comments flush left).

1. The peer-reviewed scientific literature has witnessed a great walking back of many of the most dramatic claims made on the basis of the IAT and about implicit social cognition more generally.

2. There is no consensually-accepted scientific definition of implicit bias.

3. The IAT measures reaction times, not things that most people think of as bias.

If you want to see what the IAT is all about, you can take a test here.

4. At best, the IAT measures the strength of association of concepts in memory.

5. The IAT may capture prejudice, stereotypes, or attitudes to some degree, but, if so, it is not a clean measure.

6. The IAT, as used and reported, has a potpourri of additional methodological and statistical oddities.

7. Many of the studies that use IAT scores to predict behavior find little or no anti-Black discrimination specifically.

8. Whether IAT scores predict behavioral manifestations of bias beyond self-report prejudice scales is unclear, with some studies finding they do and others finding they do not.

9. Procedures that change IAT scores have failed to produce changes in discriminatory behavior.

10. There is currently no clear evidence that implicit bias trainings accomplish anything other than teaching people about the research on implicit bias.

11. There is no evidence that IAT scores are “unconscious.”

This last one, which claims that people are very good at predicting their IAT scores, suggests that while people may be biased, it’s not unconscious (this is the main point of the “implicit” trope: that people may think they’re unbiased but they’re not, and therefore act out their racism constantly).

12. Critiques and discussions of its limitations or weaknesses are often not presented when the IAT is taught to introductory psychology students.

This is the main flaw with the Science article above. The only caveats it offers are that people’s scores aren’t often replicable, and that “simple interventions can dampen biases. . . but the changes are usually modest and don’t persist.” Well, that’s an admission of sorts, but the rest of the article is predicated on the existence of these biases and on the need for new ways to find them and eliminate them.

Jussim’s conclusion:

Here is my advice to you: Take an IAT or two (which you can here) if you have not already, just to see what the buzz is about. But now you are armed with enough information to reject any simple-minded proclamations about unconscious racism or the supposed power of implicit biases.

Again, Jussim gives copious references for his claims.

Now the one thing I’m not sure about is whether there really is a psychological trait of “implicit” bias that people aren’t aware of. It may be possible to have prejudices that linger in your unconscious (as opposed to prejudices you’re aware of but won’t admit).  When I saw the first claim below in the Science piece, for example—a study that’s gotten tons of press—I wondered if there really might be some unconscious bias leading to the effect, for the white doctors would surely assert that they don’t treat patients differently because of their race:

A 2020 study by Rachel Hardeman, a reproductive health equity researcher at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity, and colleagues showed Black newborns are twice as likely to die in the care of a white physician than a Black doctor, for instance. Another study from 2022 found women and people of color with chest pain wait longer to be treated in the emergency room compared with white men.

Of course there are competing explanations: the chest pain difference could be due to triaging of symptoms not based on race (I haven’t read the article). But I have read the other article, and the difference in death rate of black babies cared for by white versus black doctors really is a cause of deep concern: it’s a huge difference! Is it possible that it’s due to unconscious racism affecting treatment of infants? But before we go accusing white pediatricians of wholesale and strong racism that kills babies, however, we should immediately begin to pose questions about controls and the like. It turns out, though these results haven’t yet been published, that there apparently were no proper controls in this study, and there were several unassessed non-bias factors that could explain the results. We should withhold judgment about the infant-death study—and not tout it as an example of egregious racism—until other statisticians and physicians have weighted in in the literature.

The Science paper documents other inequities (disproportional representation) in science and medicine, but, as always, we have to ask whether there are other explanations for them and not just bias, much less implicit bias. At times, as in the paragraph below documenting new ways to find implicit bias, there’s a telling assumption that it’s always there but sometimes hard to sniff out. This is, after all, science journalism (bolding is mine):

Others using computer software to research implicit bias in medicine are also struggling to give physicians meaningful feedback. Nao Hagiwara, a social and health psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, and her team are analyzing dozens of nonverbal and verbal communication behaviors, such as facial expressions and voice changes, in recordings of primary care physicians’ interactions with people who have type 2 diabetes. Their software hasn’t yet identified behaviors that could clearly be linked to bias or had an adverse effect in the patient’s outcome. One reason for this murkiness, Hagiwara suggests, is that multiple different cues likely interact to influence patient outcomes whereas studies so far tend to analyze the impact of only one behavior at a time.

Note that the failure of the test to detect “implicitly biased behaviors” doesn’t even mention that such behavior might not exist, but assumes that the researchers haven’t yet hit on the right metric or combination of behaviors (of course, that could lead to p-hacking). That paragraph itself is biased towards the existence of biased behaviors.

Finally, here’s Science‘s pronouncement (through  at the end that implicit bias exists, that it’s strong and pervasive, has resulted from “centuries of white supremacy”, and it’s structural.

Sustained implicit bias training for physicians should instead be the norm, some emphasize. Hospitals also need to monitor and collect data on health care outcomes for different groups in order to monitor equity, Sabin says. “You have to know where the disparities lie and then begin to work backwards from that.”

It won’t be easy, Hardeman says, noting that, at least in the United States, centuries of white supremacy and other forms of bigotry have resulted in deep-rooted stereotypes and other implicit biases. “Every single person should be thinking about doing this work,” she says. “But if they’re doing it within a system that hasn’t addressed its own biases and racism, then it’s not going to be fully effective.”

Among the many things to worry about in this article, including some of its disturbing assertions about racism that do bear investigating (e.g., the infant-death research), is the lack of balanced coverage of this topic and an almost complete neglect of the points Jussim notes above (his name isn’t mentioned in the piece). Such science journalism is, well, unscientific.

Here’s Jussim giving a remote Merton Seminar on the problems with implicit bias.

As always, read the article, Jussim’s piece and the literature he cites, dig further into the topic, and draw your own conclusions.

Nature flagellates itself for creating “harms” and being “damaging” in its past publications

September 29, 2022 • 12:00 pm

It seems that science journals are in a race to see which can be the most penitential for apologizing for past publications that don’t comport with modern morality.  To use my Cultural Revolution analogy, they are competing to see who can hang the biggest “I was a bad and hurtful journal” sign around their necks.  Nature just entered the competition with the article below, which you can read for free.

It seems that the journal’s biggest no-no, and cause for apology, was publishing the work of Francis Galton (1822-1911), a Victorian polymath who made big contributions in statistics, anthropology, forensics (he invented a way of classifying fingerprints), and other areas. But he was also an advocate of eugenics, and his name has been removed from buildings and other venues in the last couple of years.  Although Galton’s views are abhorrent to modern sensibility, none of them, so far as I know, actually led to any eugenic actions that wouldn’t have been carried out without his writings (Hitler didn’t need Galton, and eugenics wasn’t practiced in England).

Though the word “damaging”, referring to Nature’s publications, is used 9 times, and they evoke the “harm” of their journal 6 times, it all seems to me a bit hyperbolic. Of course Galton was a racist, but is this an accurate statement?:

Galton’s scientifically inaccurate ideas about eugenics had a huge, damaging influence that the world is still grappling with. The idea that some groups — people of colour or poor people, for example — were inferior has fuelled irreparable discrimination and racism. Nature published several papers by Galton and other eugenicists, thus giving a platform to these views.

Irreparable discrimination and racism? I hope not! But let’s accept that Galton was a eugenicist, which he was, and that his views may have influenced other eugenicists, and move on to other mea culpas:

This is not just a problem in Nature’s deeper history. In more recent years, we have also, to our shame, published some articles that were offensive or destructive, or attracted criticism for being overly elitist. “The scientific journal, back in the day, was the mouthpiece to a very privileged and highly exclusive sector of society, and it is actually continuing to do the same thing today,” says Subhadra Das, a science historian and writer in London who has researched scientific racism and eugenics.

Since they cite none of these articles (“elitism”, really?), I can’t judge this statement.  Yes, Nature is considered one of the two most prestigious scientific journals in the world (Science is the other), but is that the kind of “privilege” and “exclusivity” they’re talking about? I don’t know, because they give no examples. (Save for Galton’s papers, citations of transgressing articles are scant—a common problem with this form of apology.)

There will be some redacting of the past, too:

We know that Nature’s archives contain numerous items that are harmful and can be upsetting. But, like other scholarly publishers, we think it is important to keep all of our content accessible, because it is part of the scientific and historical record. It is important for researchers today and in the future to study and learn from what happened in the past. That said, we are developing a way to alert readers that our archive contains articles that do not represent our current values and would be unacceptable to publish today.

What are “our current values”, and what if they change? Can’t we count on the readers to know whether an article is acceptable or unacceptable to publish today? Does Nature really need a Pecksniff to trawl through its archives to single out offensive articles and highlight them? And who will be the Pecksniff, the person who enforces “our current values”?

They don’t neglect colonialism, either, though again no examples are given:

The journal matured as Britain became the biggest colonial power in history — by 1919, the British Empire spanned roughly one-quarter of the world’s land and population. In their contributions, many scientists editing and writing for Nature endorsed the views of white, European superiority that drove this empire building. An air of imperiousness, imperialism, sexism and racism permeates many articles in Nature’s historical archive.

As it does all of British literature from that era! Who will apologize for that? And is there a need to?

. . . Nature’s archives also include harmful contributions from the fields of ecology, evolution, anthropology and ethnography, which were inextricably linked with colonial expansion. Another 1921 editorial reflected imperialist and racist views, reporting on a session at a meeting of what was then the British Association for the Advancement of Science “devoted to the discussion of the ways and means by which the science of anthropology might be made of greater practical utility in the administration of the Empire, particularly in relation to the government of our subject and backward races”. There are numerous other examples in which Nature published offensive, injurious and destructive views, cloaked in the veil of science.

They do mention one book review that was pretty sexist, written by editor Richard Gregory (1919-1939), and two antisemitic articles by Johannes Stark, but eve back then Nature criticized the anti-Semitism:

In the 1930s, the journal printed two antisemitic articles by Johannes Stark, a physicist, who wrote of the “damaging influence of Jews in German science”. At the time, Nature had taken a strong position in opposition to the rise of Nazis in Germany, which eventually led to the journal being banned there. Nature implied in an accompanying article that it had invited one of Stark’s contributions to show readers how shocking his words were, but it nevertheless exposed a wider audience to antisemitic views.

So is that a net bad or a net good? Nature opposed the Nazis and highlighted one article that denigrated Jews, but only to show that it was “shocking”.  Is this something the journal needs to apologize for?

One more example, but the articles aren’t cited or linked, so we can’t judge for ourselves:

Nature has published hurtful articles even in the past few years. One was an inaccurate, naive editorial about memorials to historical figures who committed abhorrent acts in the name of science. The editorial was damaging to people of colour and minority groups, and the journal apologized for the article’s many faults. That experience exposed systemic problems at Nature that we are working to correct, including the lack of diversity among our editors and a failure to acknowledge the journal’s role in racism. The editorial you are reading is part of our attempt to acknowledge and learn from our troubled deep and recent past, understand the roots of injustice and work to address them as we aim to make the scientific enterprise open and welcoming to all.

So Nature has hung this big editorial sign around its neck, and promises to do better. But it’s already doing better, as are all science journals and science departments.  The question I am asking, I guess, is given that morality is improving over time, and has come a long way in the last hundred years, to what extent do we need to apologize for what was said by our predecessors? Yes, it’s fair to point out that bad things were done in the past, but how instructive is that since everyone now knows that racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry are wrong? And if they don’t, Nature’s apology won’t fix them

In the end, I see the Nature piece not as wholly performative, but nearly performative, since they are already policing themselves.

Matthew has a different take, as given in these tweets. He’s concerned with the fact that Nature, in going to an open-access policy, is now charging authors huge amounts of money merely to publish their articles. In other words, the journal may not be sexist or racist, but they are still money-gouging capitalists who impoverish scientific investigators.

This is from Nature’s 2020 announcement that it was going “open access”:

Publisher Springer Nature has announced how scientists can make their papers in its most selective titles free to read as soon as they are published — part of a long-awaited move to offer open-access publishing in the Nature family of journals.

From 2021, the publisher will charge €9,500, US$11,390 or £8,290 to make a paper open access (OA) in Nature and 32 other journals that currently keep most of their articles behind paywalls and are financed by subscriptions. It is also trialling a scheme that would halve that price for some journals, under a common-review system that might guide papers to a number of titles.

Soon you won’t have the option of paying: you will have to pay to have your articles published. This money will soon be coming out of the pockets of investigators—either out of their grants (funded by taxpayers) or out of their own pockets. And, as Matthew said, this policy is against the policy of diversity and openness favored by the journal, as it penalizes scientists with the least funding, more likely to be people of color or peoople from lower socioeconomic classes that could use their grants to do research instead of pay a journal exorbitant fees to publish their work.

In comment #3 below, Lysander calls our attention to the financial results of open-access publishing, embodied in this video:

New Scientist calls for curbs on “free speech” in America

September 19, 2022 • 9:30 am

One would think from the tenor of this piece in New Scientist that author Annalee Newitz was not an American and didn’t understand how free speech works in the U.S. But she is an American—born in California—and writes science fiction as well as science and tech journalism, including a regular column in New Scientist.  Now this isn’t my favorite publication—not since its famous and misguided “Darwin Was Wrong” cover and article—and this comment, which has nothing to do with science, is equally misguided. (See here and here on that execrable cover.)

You can read it for free, though you may have to sign up with your email and a password. Click on the screenshot:

Newitz does understand one thing: that the “freedom of speech” guaranteed by the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights guarantees only that the government can neither censor nor compel speech. This applies to all arms of the government, including public schools and universities—but not to corporations or private groups.  Further, that speech isn’t “free” in the sense of being “unlimited”: the courts have, over the years, carved out exceptions in which the government can censor speech. These include (you should know these by now), false advertising, defamation, speech that is likely to and intended to instigate immediate violence, speech that creates harassment in the workplace, child pornography, threats, and so on.

Nevertheless, I and many others favor extending the First-Amendment type of speech (excepting the already-mentioned exceptions) to nearly all venues, including social media.  The rationale for this was, of course, most famously set out in Chapter 2 John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, an essay that you should read (it’s free here).  Mill’s most famous reason was the notion that from the clash of competing ideas would emerge the truth, and that free speech was the only principle that could offer that promise. A quote:

It still remains to speak of one of the principal causes which make diversity of opinion advantageous, and will continue to do so until mankind shall have entered a stage of intellectual advancement which at present seems at an incalculable distance. We have hitherto considered only two possibilities: that the received opinion may be false, and some other opinion, consequently, true; or that, the received opinion being true, a conflict with the opposite error is essential to a clear apprehension and deep feeling of its truth. But there is a commoner case than either of these; when the conflicting doctrines, instead of being one true and the other false, share the truth between them; and the nonconforming opinion is needed to supply the remainder of the truth, of which the received doctrine embodies only a part.

Of course free speech doesn’t always lead to the truth, but show me a better system! It surely works in science, where the clash of competing ideas, without much restriction (you can’t call other scientists names in published papers), has led to the understanding of the Universe called “scientific truth”. That truth is not absolute, of course, but what we call the “scientific method” is the best way to approach it.

But there are other reasons for free speech.  It outs those who have odious ideas; enables you, even if you disagree, to sharpen your own arguments and examine your views; confers a certain freedom of thought as well, and so on. That is why, I think, social media should observe as far as it can the First Amendment’s freeoms and restrictions.  So should all universities, whose goal is (supposedly) seeking and promulgating the truth. That’s why 87 American colleges and universities, many of them private, have signed on to the Chicago Principles of Free Expression, our own speech “code” that is basically the First Amendment promulgated t a private university.

But I digress. What Newitz argues for in her piece is restrictions on the kind of speech can cause “chaos”, offense, and harm to society. American free speech is, she argues, the very antithesis of a way to arrive at the truth.

She begins by mocking Elon Musk’s attempt to buy Twitter on the grounds that it would promote free speech. Now I don’t know if this was Musk’s real reason, and have no dog in the fight about his taking over the company, which in the end probably won’t happen. But she argues that the kind of free speech Musk calls for is a “myth”. It isn’t: it’s just that Newitz doesn’t like the consequences. And so she argues for “controlled” free speech (emphasis at the end of her quote below is mine):

When Musk and other Silicon Valley media entrepreneurs talk about free speech, then, they aren’t talking about the reality of US laws. They are talking about a myth – the myth that everyone in the US is a rugged individual, dependent on no one, and we should be allowed to say whatever we want to whomever we want.

Politicians should be allowed to say that fair elections were “rigged”. Racists should be allowed to blame Jewish people for chemtrails. If people in the US say something bad or hurtful, the myth goes, the solution is more speech, not moderation in what we say.

Ironically, this mythical form of “free speech” actually functions as a new form of social control. As media researcher and journalist Peter Pomerantsev points out in his book This Is Not Propaganda, the cold war generation fought for unfettered expression as a solution to censorship. More information was supposed to mean more freedom.

But then, in the 21st century, a new crop of anti-democratic politicians figured out that more information can actually work as a form of “mass persuasion run amok” on social media. Speech begets more speech, until the whole internet is an infinite doomscroll.

Instead of being set free, our minds are being contained by a flood of meaninglessly cruel poop emojis.

Ordinary citizens trying to understand the world on social media are overwhelmed with negative messages. We witness vicious, polarised debates and we watch helplessly as mobs of trolls descend on anyone who is deemed unsavoury.

When free speech metastasises into chaos speech, we no longer know what is true or false. We don’t trust each other. And productive debates in the public sphere become impossible.

It turns out that information overload is just as toxic to democracy as censorship is. We need to chuck out the US myth that bad speech can be “cured” with more speech. Without moderation, ground rules for debate and thoughtful regulation in our digital public squares, it is impossible for us to reach agreement on anything.

There is a vast and pleasant country between total censorship and total information chaos, and that is where I hope to live one day. I’ll save you a seat.

Here she argues that First-Amendment style speech (and not just on social media) can cause chaos, harm, racism, “social control”, cruelty and “offense”. What she want is in bold above— moderators, also known as censors.

And there, of course, is the rub.  Newitz wants “moderation”, but who is to be the moderator? (This trenchant question is the subject of Hitchens’s famous debate argument for free speech.) Note that Newitz doesn’t single out social media, but indicts “anti-democratic politicians” (i.e., Trump and his like), and non-politicians who spread “negative messages”, as well as “trolls.”

And as for “free speech” being a “new form of social control”, I have no idea what she’s talking about. Control by Twitter? But think of all the people, previously silent, who are now speaking up. Control, my tuchas! People previously without a voice in America now have one—and it’s largely the result of social media. I don’t agree with a lot of what they say, of course, but that’s just the point.

So I ask this obvious question to Ms. Newitz:

“Who, do you propose, should censor the speech of “anti-democratic politicians,” trolls, promoters of offense and hate, confusing messages (presumably false information about Covid and the like), and others. Do you nominate yourself? Or would you prefer a Department of Censorship.  And how will you silence the likes of Trump?”

I’m looking forward to Newitz, in a future column, describing how she would arrange things to turn America into the “vast and pleasant country” she craves.  How, exactly, will she arrange the suppression of speech that she finds cruel, vicious, chaotic, and trollish?

Free speech isn’t a myth, but if censorious folk like Newitz get their way, it will become one.

 

h/t: Mark

Scientific American dedicates itself to politics, not science; refuses to publish rebuttals of their false or misleading claims

August 21, 2022 • 10:30 am

On August 14, I received a conciliatory email from Laura Helmuth, editor of Scientific American. As you know if you’re a regular here, I’ve spent a lot of time criticizing their woke coverage and editorials, which make all kinds of accusations that don’t hold water (see emails below for some examples, or you can access all my posts here).

My critiques of the magazine have been similar to those of Michael Shermer, who wrote a regular column for Scientific American for eighteen years. After he turned out a couple of columns that weren’t woke enough for the journal, and were rejected, he was given his walking papers. Michael documented the decline and fall of the journal in two Substack pieces, “Scientific American goes woke” and “What is woke, anyway? A coda to my column on ‘Scientific American goes woke’.” His columns, particularly the first, cite and link to a number of ludicrous pieces published in the journal. I’ll give some of those links below.

At any rate, since I told Laura in my response that I’d keep her initial email confidential. I’ll just characterize what she said in a few words. She was kind enough to be conciliatory, though she noted that I was unhappy with some of her coverage. She praised my criticisms of theocracy and emphasized that, politically, she and I were on the same side with respect to matters of reason and social justice. Finally she urged me to contact her to discuss any ideas I had for stories or my own pieces for the magazine.

It was a polite email, but the last bit—the invitation—prompted me to respond in this way, by suggesting that I write my own op-ed:

From: Jerry Coyne To:Subject: Re: Greetings from Scientific American

Hi Laura,

Thanks for your conciliatory message, which I appreciate. I’m sorry that I have had to go after some of your stories sometimes, but I’m truly puzzled at the direction the magazine is taking. One blatant example was that editorial by McLemore that accused not only Darwin of racism, but also Mendel!  Seriously, how did that get through the editorial process? Is there no fact-checking? Likewise, nobody bothered to look up what SETI is really doing when it tries to find life on other planets. One look at the photos that Carl Sagan included on the Voyager record shows that he was emphasizing the diversity of life on earth, both human and nonhuman.  What bothers me, and you surely know this, is the magazine’s Pecksniffian tendency to call out racism in everything, most recently the SETI program.

Yes, we are indeed both liberals and against the theocratic strain that’s taking over American life.  But if you must be political (I don’t think science magazines should be, of course), why not commission pieces about the stuff you mention below and leave out the authoritarian progressivism and pervasive accusations of racism? In my view, that not only doesn’t do anything to ameliorate racism (how does falsely accusing Mendel of racism do anything for minorities?), but also dims the patina of class that the magazine had.

Of course I had to say this, but you know this already because I’ve written about this stuff a fair amount.

I do appreciate your reaching out, and of course will keep your email confidential, but would you consider an op-ed about how extreme Leftist progressivism is besmirching science itself by distorting the truth? (Example: arguments that sex is not bimodal in humans, but forms a continuum.) I could make a number of arguments like that about biology that, contra McLemore, have truth behind them.

If you’re really interested in presenting a diversity of views on science and politics in your op-eds, I’d be glad to write something like that (and no, it would not be shrill).

Thanks for writing.

Best,Jerry

The correspondence continued, with Laura emailing me to explain the political leanings of the journal, which in my view were not concerned in science but with social justice. And of course she rejected my offer to contribute an article to the magazine because it didn’t comport with those leanings. Such a letter would be “kicking down” (i.e., “punching down”).  I won’t reproduce her second letter even though, in my response, I didn’t say I would keep it confidential. But I will characterize her words in my response—and quote a few of them—in the email I wrote her this morning. Here it is. I’ve added links to the Sci. Am. articles that I mention or to my discussion of them (each of my posts links to the orginal Sci. Am. piece). I’ve corrected a few of my  errors of spelling and punctuation.

Sun 8/21/2022 6:14 AM

Dear Laura,

I of course expected that you would accept editorials only from the “progressive left” point of view, even though, as you noted, we’re both on the Left. That is your editorial call, but I disagree with it.  When “progressives” are engaged in attacking science with lies or distortions (i.e., claiming there’s a spectrum of sex, not gender, in humans, or that Mendel was a racist), I would think that Scientific American would publish, indeed, want, some kind of corrective. Seriously, you let one your writers accuse Mendel, Darwin, and E. O. Wilson of being racist, and SETI of being likewise and that denial of evolution is white supremacy; and yet you refuse to publish rebuttals of that calumny because to oppose those ridiculous accusations would “feel like kicking down.”  Do you really think that someone not as famous as Mendel is allowed to call him a racist because to deny that would be “kicking down.”

Frankly, I find that response disingenuous. Sticking up for correct science in the face of ideological distortion is not “kicking down”: that phrase—or its alternative “punching down”—is used by every ideologue to immunize their ideas from criticism. Science is supposed to be a debate in search of truth, with nobody barred from criticizing anyone, but yet you are placing much of that debate out of bounds because it’s “kicking down”!

The telling part of your email is at the end when you assert that science isn’t really a target of your editorials, but politics is, and the “targets” you say the magazine has chosen include “the Supreme Court endorsed forced pregnancy, Florida is denying care to trans people, white nationalists are infiltrating every branch of government, and anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists are causing people to die. . . . . But with limited resources, those are the sorts of issues we’re focused on in our opinion coverage.” But when is it the editorial policy of Scientific American to address those issues at all? Given its title, I thought your magazine was about science, even in its opinions, and not a program for enacting a brand of social justice that has either little or nothing to do with science. There are literally hundreds of magazines, websites, blogs, podcasts, and other media sources that cover those issues endlessly 24/7 from left, right, and center.

SciAm readers go to your site to get straight science, not political commentary, and deciding that the “progressive” (i.e., extreme) Left has the correct positions on these issues is to essentially alienate over half the country, including moderate liberals like me being turned off by this risible political posturing.

Let me speak frankly: some of the editorials I’ve criticized involve lying or distorting the truth for politics. It’s simply not true, for example, that mathematics and other STEM fields are irredeemably racist and misogynistic [see also here], that Darwin and Mendel were racists, that the Jedi in Star Wars are toxically masculine white saviors, that SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is implicitly racist and colonialist, and that denial of evolution is an expression of white supremacy. These assertions are ridiculous, and yet you not only give them space in your magazine, but refuse to publish any opposing opinions. Thus others like Michael Shermer and I have to rebut them on our websites (as you know, Shermer wrote a column for Scientific American for eighteen years, but then was fired because he failed to hew to the ideology you’re promoting).

It is your magazine, of course, but I am not alone in being appalled at the direction it’s taken. I can assume only that you have given it that direction. This is a great pity: Americans can get their politics in a million places, but there are few where they can get straight science untainted by ideology.  Scientific American used to be that way, but it isn’t any more.

cheers,Jerry

I’ll note one more thing: Thirty-one biologists, including some very notable ones, wrote a letter to Scientific American pushing back on their article that E. O. Wilson (along with Darwin and Mendel) was a racist. Of course the magazine refused to publish our critique. You can see that letter, the signers, and my take on it here.

What is crystal clear is that Scientific American has decided to take on a social-justice program of a particular stripe—that of the “progressive” or “woke” Left—even if the politics the journal espouses have nothing to do with science. Not only that, but they refuse to publish any pushback or criticism of some of their crazier assertions. (Show me where Mendel was a racist, for instance!) It’s very odd that what was once America’s premier science magazine not only has taken up woke cudgels, but is stifling criticism of what they publish. In this way Scientific American can act as if there’s no opposition to the politics they cram down the throats of curious people who just want to read about science. They are censorious, and certain they’re right. Such views have repeatedly stifled and misguided science over the years, right up to the time of Lysenko.

And that is why I’m writing this post.

_________________

About Sci Am’s refusal to let me write; sent by a friend:

It would be so easy to just let you have your say in the magazine and then whenever so accused of bias they could say “we published Jerry Coyne’s rebuttal!” And could hold their heads high for at least offering some balance, but they obviously can’t even bring themselves to do that! It’s all so unnecessary, but if they feel it is necessary (to do their share of social justice) then at least let the other side speak.