Readers’ wildlife photos

March 15, 2024 • 8:15 am

Today we divert from wildlife for a day so we can read Athayde Tonhasca Júnior’s test-and-photo post of bizarre scientific papers. Athayde’s narrative is indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Nullius in verba

The Royal Society‘s motto, adopted in 1662 and loosely translated as ‘take nobody’s word for it’, is a reminder that scientific advancement and knowledge come from evidence. A while back, we looked at some unusual titles of science papers. Here we explore data gathering done in unorthodox or quirky fashion.

The common knowledge that “every child in Germany knows that ‘storks bring babies'” inspired Professor Helmut Sies to look for an explanation for West Germany’s demographic problem. He found an almost perfect correlation (r = 0.982) between the number of breeding storks and the number of newborn babies (Nature 332: 495, 1988):

Feline pesematology (from the Greek pesema, for ‘fall’), could help us understand why cats have nine lives. Professor Jared Diamond explained in layman’s terms the findings of Whitney & Mehlhaff from 132 careless tabbies who plunged from windows two or more storeys high in New York (High-rise syndrome in cats. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 191: 1399–1403, 1987). 90% of them survived despite landing on hard pavements. “A kitty named Sabrina fell 32 storeys onto a sidewalk and suffered nothing worse than a chipped tooth and mild chest injuries” (How cats survive falls from New York skyscrapers. Natural History 8: 20-26, 1989). It’s all about physics: “a cat falling in the atmosphere reaches a terminal velocity of about 60 mph (compared with 120 mph for adult humans) after only about 100 feet. As long as it experiences acceleration, the cat probably extends its limbs reflexively, but on reaching terminal velocity it may relax and extend the limbs more horizontally in flying-squirrel fashion, thus not only reducing the velocity of fall but also absorbing the impact over a greater area of its body. This may explain the paradoxical decrease of mortality and injury in cats that fall more than 100 feet” (Why cats have nine lives. Nature 332: 586-587, 1988):

Benno et al. proposed that “anyone who has watched a penguin fire a ‘shot’ from its rear end must have wondered about the pressure the bird generates”. So, they set out to investigate the artillery power of the chinstrap (Pygoscelis antarctica) and Adélie (P. adeliae) penguins. Their results suggest giving these birds a wide berth, lest you be hit by a “material of higher viscosity similar to that of olive oil”. They concluded their paper with a warning to other penguin researchers and a hint to funders: “It is interesting to note that the streaks of the faecal material radiate from the edge of the nest into all directions (no preference is noticeable). Whether the bird deliberately chooses the direction into which it decides to expel its faeces or whether this depends on the direction from which the wind blows at the time of evacuation are questions that need to be addressed on another expedition to Antarctica” (Pressures produced when penguins pooh – calculations on avian defaecation. Polar Biology 27: 56–58, 2003):

Entomologist John Wesley Brown left no doubts about his views regarding rules for naming species (Nomenclatural nonsense – flying in the face of a farcical code. Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society 55: 1 -7, 2001):

‘Yes’ was Lorna O’Brien’s answer to Caleb Brown’s question, which he posed in the last line of his and Henderson’s paper: A new horned dinosaur reveals convergent evolution in cranial ornamentation in Ceratopsidae. Current Biology 25: 1641–1648, 2015.

In 1962, Tusko, a male Indian elephant, was enjoying a quiet life at the Oklahoma City Zoo until discovered by psychologist Louis Jolyon West and colleagues in search for a subject for a psychedelic experiment. They injected Tusko with a massive dose of LSD and recorded the outcome: “Tusko began trumpeting and rushing around the pen… his restlessness appeared to increase for 3 minutes after the injection; then he stopped running and showed signs of marked incoordination. His mate (Judy, a 15- year-old female) approached him and appeared to attempt to support him. He began to sway, his hindquarters buckled, and it became increasingly difficult for him to maintain himself upright. Five minutes after the injection he trumpeted, collapsed, fell heavily onto his right side, defecated, and went into status epilepticus.” The men of science suspected things were not going according to plan – whatever the plan was – so they injected Tusko with a huge dose of Thorazine, an anti-psychotic drug. It didn’t work: one hour and 40 minutes after the start of the experiment, Tusko was dead. The authors’ conclusion, reproduced in the image, was that acid ain’t groovy, man; far out. Their paper (West et al. Lysergic Acid Diethylamide: its effects on a male Asiatic elephant. Science 138: 1100-1103, 1962) inspired Alex Boese to title his book on outrageous experiments from the history of science: Elephants on Acid: and other bizarre experiments. Besides trippin’ elephants, Louis West’s other academic interest was mind control trials at the CIA-sponsored Project MKUltra, an organisation that would leave James Bond’s SPECTRE feeling jealous and amateurish.

Possibly the shortest scientific note ever published. Tropical ecologist Dan Janzen‘s acknowledgment that colleagues who refuted one of his hypotheses (Schubart & Anderson. Why don’t ants visit flowers? A reply to D. H. Janzen. Biotropica 10: 310-311, 1978) were probably right.

Stack & Gundlach (Social Forces 71: 211-218, 1992) gave academic support to what many of us have long suspected: Country Music can kill you. These classic country songs of all time could have gone in the paper’s appendix:

I keep forgettin’ I forgot about you.
You done tore out my heart and stomped that sucker flat.
How can I miss you if you won’t go away?
If the phone don’t ring, you’ll know it’s me.
I still miss you, baby, but my aim’s gettin’ better.
I’m so miserable without you, it’s like having you here.
Please bypass this broken heart.
I liked you better before I knew you so well.
Get yore tongue outta my mouth ’cause I’m kissing you goodbye.
My wife ran off with my best friend and I sure do miss him.
She got the ring and I got the finger.

In a properly designed randomized controlled trial, Yeh et al. found that jumping from an aircraft with or without a parachute makes no difference for survival (Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial. British Medical Journal 363: k5094, 2018). The next image gives a possible explanation for this statistically robust result:

The authors’ point was that you don’t need randomized controlled trials to draw reasonable conclusions about certain observed effects. “Advocates of evidence-based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence-based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.”:

Hollywood is taking too long to snap up Yap et al.’s creepy creation: the Necrobotic, a robot built with the carcass of a dead spider (Necrobotics: biotic materials as ready-to-use actuators. Advanced Science 9: 2201174, 2022):

In this age of alternative facts and personal truths, Hoogeveen et al.’s reported ‘Einstein effect’ is heartening: “our results strongly suggest that scientific authority is generally considered a reliable source for truth, more so than spiritual authority. Indeed, there are ample examples demonstrating that science serves as an important cue for credibility; the cover of Donald Trump’s niece’s family history book is adorned by ‘Mary L. Trump, PhD’; advertisements for cosmetic products often claim to be ‘clinically proven’ and ‘recommended by dermatologists’, and even the tobacco industry used to appeal to science (for example, ‘more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette’).” All good, but the paper’s methodology is the best. See next item.

Hoogeveen et al. tested their hypotheses by using the New Age Bullshit Generator (http://sebpearce.com/bullshit/), which “combines new age buzzwords in a syntactically correct structure resulting in meaningless but pseudo-profound sounding text”. Have a go at it, it’s great fun. Deepak Chopra, Paulo Coelho and Jordan Peterson must have dipped into it:

Brave guinea pigs for the sake of kids’ welfare. Not many people would be keen to gobble down Lego pieces and have their SHAT (Stool Hardness and Transit) and FART (Found and Retrieved Time) scores investigated (Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health 55: 921-923, 2019):

Lastly, this from Australia: Mamils (middle-aged men in Lycra) are thriving (Medical Journal of Australia 209: 490-494, 2018). “It is believed that Mamils have evolved from the dawn patroller species, typically found in droves throughout the nineties and noughties on golf courses”. Now, “Sydney’s Mosman allegedly has more Mamils per square metre than the Tour de France.” “The group bonding… is good for mental health: it may foster stronger bonds between men and have positive effects on their wellbeing and morale, as Mamils are having a wheelie good time.” Excellent health news despite the disturbing aesthetical side effects:

The Biden administration’s program for using “Indigenous Knowledge”

February 16, 2024 • 11:30 am

On November 20, 2022, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a “Memorandum for Heads of Federal Departments and Agencies” designed to guide those agencies in interacting with indigenous people of the U.S. as well as in meldiong their “indigenous knowledge” with modern science in useful scientific and practical endeavors. There’s a long draft proposal (see below) as well as a shorter description of the origin and aims of the project here.

Having read the 46-page draft proposal as well as the ancillary documents, I’ll give my impressions of the project in this post. My general take is that the document is far more concerned with bringing indigenous people into scientific endeavors than it is with improving projects by incorporating indigenous knowledge. Further, it seems more concerned with helping indigenous people’s lives (growing crops, getting better healthcare) than with ferreting out their knowledge. The latter is still a worthy endeavor: Lord knows that Native Americans have been treated horribly by “colonists”, and this project can be seen as a form of reparations. But let us not pretend that the main aim of the project are the ones the government gave below:

Understanding Indigenous Knowledge
Growing and maintaining the mutually beneficial relationships with Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples needed to appropriately include Indigenous Knowledge
Considering, including, and applying Indigenous Knowledge in Federal research, policies, management, and decision making

Of all of these, the second is the one that occupies the most space in the paper: how to collaborate with indigenous people and, especially, how to interact with them in a polite and non-offensive manner. But the aim isn’t really “mutually beneficial” in the sense that modern scientific projects will be enhanced by collaboration with Tribal Nations. Rather, the project is a way of drawing Native Americans into empirical research, even though the number of projects seems limited and the use of “indigenous knowledge” (always ill defined) unclear. I prefer to think of this as a huge DEI project, one designed to achieve some kind of equity in scientific research, but one that’s better than the usual DEI projects because it aims to actually improve the lives of Native Americans. If it does that by masquerading as a way to achieve “knowledge equity”, however, at least we must know of the masquerade, because the presumed equivalence of “indigenous knowledge” with “scientific knowledge” is a growing trope, and we need to understand it. Undue respect for “indigenous ways of knowledge” has substantially degraded science education in New Zealand, and we shouldn’t let that happen here.

Click below to see (or download) the big fat memo:

First, what is indigenous knowledge? Here are two definitions, based largely on the OED, that I gave in a recent post:

knowledge: “The apprehension of fact or truth with the mind; clear and certain perception of fact or truth; the state or condition of knowing fact or truth.” I interpret this to mean “the public acceptance of facts”, so that “knowledge” becomes an apprehension, as Steve Gould argued, that would be held by any person who is not perverse.

way of knowing: A system or group of procedures used to produce knowledge. (This is my definition since it’s not in the OED.)

These don’t comport exactly with the BA’s definitions (below), but the sense is the same: knowledge is the widespread apprehension of what is true. It is the way that knowledge is produced thatdiffers between scientific knowledge and indigenous knowledge. The latter includes sources that some may see as numinous or nonscientific, such as “spiritual” and “cultural grounding”, as well as “lessons passed from generation to generation”. In this way North American indigenous knowledge resembles New Zealand’s indigenous knowledge, or “Mātauranga Māori.” It is a mixture of real empirical observation with myth, legend, and cultural practices.

Here are two definitions of indigenous knowledge given by the Biden administration, the first from the big document and the second from a related page:

Note in part A the connection between “knowledge” and “social, spiritual, and natural systems”. Ideally, knowledge should be free from such considerations, or it isn’t really knowledge in the scientific or empirical sense.

And this government page:

Indigenous Knowledge is a body of observations, oral and written knowledge, innovations, practices, and beliefs developed by Tribes and Indigenous Peoples through interaction and experience with the environment. The Biden-Harris Administration has formally recognized Indigenous Knowledge as one of the many important bodies of knowledge that contributes to the scientific, technical, social, and economic advancements of the United States and our collective understanding of the natural world.

Henceforth we’ll use the abbreviation “BA” for “Biden Administration,” “IK” for indigenous knowledge, and “SK” for scientific knowledge (the stuff that science accepts today as provisional truth). One important difference between IK and SK is that the latter can be kept secret if the tribes with that knowledge so wish it. So, on p. 31 of the document, and elsewhere, you can find this:

Funded by the National Science Foundation, ELOKA responds to twin imperatives: The Federal mandate to make data collected with Federal dollars public and broadly accessible, and the right of Tribes and Indigenous Peoples to control their own knowledge.

This means that if Native Americans wish to keep their indigenous knowledge to themselves rather than making it public, they have the right to do so. If that’s the case, it violates the ethos of science, which is to make all knowledge (at least knowledge resulting in publication) available to everyone. Knowledge kept private isn’t really “knowledge,” as it can’t be tested by others to see if it’s true. Leaving that aside, let’s move on.

The report is divided into several parts, but the two main ones are parts 2-6 (pp. 4-21), which lay out ways to interact with Native Americans when collaborating with them on projects using IK, and Appendix A, “Examples of indigenous knowledge application and collaboration between the federal government and tribes and indigenous peoples,” which occupies pages 22-33. (There are a few more appendices with references and the like.) It’s this second part that most interests me, but I’ll say a few words about the first bit.

Part I not only explicitly brings up the historically abysmal treatment of Native Americans, but also blames science for part of this. All of it is to the end of how to deal with Native Americans, and I have little objection to most of it:

Acknowledge Historical Context and Past Injustice. Understanding the different experiences of Tribal and Indigenous Peoples is critical for Agencies to work with them and engage effectively with Indigenous Knowledge. Agencies should acknowledge the history of the department or agency they represent, and the Federal Government broadly, when working with Tribes and Indigenous Peoples. Recognizing past injustice, while upholding Tribal treaty and reserved rights, and respecting Tribal and Indigenous communities, cultures, and values will assist Agencies in developing collaborative processes that are more equitable and inclusive of Indigenous Peoples and their knowledge systems. The genocide and ethnocide of Indigenous Peoples in the United States is well documented.39 Historically, Federal policies have resulted in the separation (both physically and intellectually). of Indigenous Peoples from the places they are connected to, severing relationships with lands, waters, and social systems, which are all critical elements of Indigenous Knowledge. 40 These policies systematically served to assimilate and displace Native people and eradicate Native cultures.41

Historically, Federal policies have resulted in the separation (both physically and intellectually) of Indigenous Peoples from the places they are connected to, severing relationships with lands, waters, and social systems, which are all critical elements of Indigenous Knowledge. These policies systematically served to assimilate and displace Native people and eradicate Native cultures.

But then we get to the inevitable criticisms of “science” as being oppressive:

. . . At times, Western science has been used as a tool to oppress Tribal Nations and Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous Peoples in the United States have experienced significant unethical health research abuses, including the use of genetic data and health records without their knowledge or consent.

I wouldn’t say that “Western science’—again, a term I abhor since science has become worldwide—oppressed Tribal Nations, but rather unethical or uncaring scientists did. It’s not a dictum of “science” to “use data from people without their consent” . This is a way of doing down science itself as an oppressor—something we see in New Zealand as well. But here’s one more example of how to collaborate with Native Americans

Include Indigenous Knowledge into Federal Decision Making and Research. Agencies should obtain consent from Tribal Nations and Indigenous Peoples prior to including Indigenous Knowledge in Federal policy, research, or decision making. After securing consent to access Indigenous Knowledge, Agencies should ensure that Indigenous Knowledge is appropriately included in the Federal action. Inclusion of Indigenous Knowledge in Federal decision making and research starts with the recognition that Indigenous practices and methodologies underlie Indigenous Knowledge. Accordingly, Indigenous Knowledge should guide metrics and evaluation; Agencies do not need to judge, validate, or evaluate Indigenous Knowledge using other forms of knowledge in order to include Indigenous Knowledge in Federal policy, research, or decision making.

I’m not sure I agree with the last two sentences, but then again I’m not sure what they mean. If they mean that indigenous knowledge should not be tested against modern scientific knowledge, I disagree.

Here’s a note about the co-equality of Indigenous and modern science (bolding is mine):

When [Federal] funding is awarded, especially through competitive grant processes, Agencies should ensure that the methods, people, and grant assessment process are not biased against proposals that include Indigenous Knowledge. To guard against such biases, Agencies can ensure that Indigenous Knowledge holders are included in funding allocation decisions, and can ensure that merit-based funding decisions involve scoring rubrics that value Indigenous Knowledge on par with other forms of evidence and methods of inquiry. Agencies should also develop evaluation criteria that includes Indigenous methodologies and approaches to ensure that Indigenous Knowledge is not inappropriately disadvantaged in the review process.

I would say that valuing indigenous knowledge in comparison to scientific knowledge would depend on how that indigenous knowledge is generated. If it’s through tradition and word of mouth, for example, you might cast a cold eye on it. To ensure that indigenous knowledge is comparable to modern scientific knowledge, of course, it has to be judged by the standards of modern scientific knowledge, not by the standards of indigenous knowledge.

Part II deals with specific projects that are said to involve indigenous knowledge, and the document gives a fair number of examples. The problem is that with many of these examples, it’s not clear either what the relevant indigenous knowledge is or how it’s supposed to be used. Here’s one example of that:

ACHP Advances Indigenous Knowledge in Policy on Burial Sites, Human Remains, and Funerary Objects The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) strives to ensure Agencies implement their work in harmony with the National Historic Preservation Act. The ACHP is incorporating Indigenous Knowledge into its updated Policy Statement on Burial Sites, Human Remains, and Funerary Objects82 to elevate consideration of Indigenous Knowledge in Federal historic preservation decisions. Incorporating Indigenous Knowledge into the policy statement will help Indigenous People elevate their concerns during the Section 106 process, which requires Agencies to consider the effects of projects they carry out, approve, or fund, on historic properties throughout the country.

Elizabeth Weiss has emphasized that this is problematic in two ways. First, it is really indigenous claims that are taken as knowledge. If a skull or a funerary object is found on land once occupied by a given tribe, it’s taken for granted that the remains and funerary objects revert to that tribe. No DNA analysis is necessary, though it should be when possible. Second, this section has been expanded to mean that all Native American objects found must be given custodial care under the direction of Native Americans who claim them, regardless of the strength of their claim. If an object is deemed “sacred” or “powerful,” it might be taken off exhibit completely, or given back to a tribe. This is bowing not to indigenous knowledge but to indigenous religion, since such objects are deemed “sacred”.

But there are examples where indigenous knowledge can contribute to conservation. I’ll just give two.

Sweetgrass Shared Governance in Acadia National Park

In Acadia National Park, the National Park Service is working with citizens of Wabanaki Tribes—the Aroostook Band of Mi’kmaq, the Houlton Band of Maliseets (Wolastogiyik), the Passamaquoddy (Peskotomuhkati) Tribe at Sipayik, the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Indian Township, and the Penobscot Indian Nation—on shared governance and research on sweetgrass harvesting.80 Wabanaki people have harvested sweetgrass for generations. Research in Acadia, guided by Indigenous methodologies, reinforces what Wabanaki people have always known: that harvesting sweetgrass through a Wabanaki philosophy enhances sweetgrass abundance. Wabanaki knowledge, and the gatherers who generate this knowledge, are leading National Park Service research and management strategies that will enable restoration of Wabanaki harvesting within Acadia National Park.

Here the knowledge of harvesting and cultivating sweetgrass is likely to be useful for keeping this plant going. What I object to here is how “Wabanaki philosophy enhances sweetgrass abundance.” And what the philosophy might be is, of course, not given. To see if it really works, you’d have to test it—but with modern science.

One more example before I pass on. Eulachon is a kind of smelt:

Tribal-led Research and Conservation of Eulachon

Coastal Indian Tribes, including the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, have fished and traded for eulachon (Thaleichthys pacificus) in tributaries of the Columbia River since time immemorial. NOAA and the Cowlitz Indian Tribe— who initiated the project—applied Tribal oral histories to reconstruct historic distributions of the eulachon.96 The Cowlitz Tribal oral histories aided in identifying key spawning habitat, timing of eulachon runs, and run differences between tributaries, and directly informed NOAA’s decision to list a population segment as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.97 The project facilitated joint efforts to identify and protect critical habitat, increase abundance of the species, and promote species recovery.

Here we have some indigenous knowledge that, in combination with scientific conservation, may indeed allow assessments that can help with species conservation. There are a few other examples like this, but also others where the relevant “knowledge” isn’t specified. Here it’s clear: knowledge about habitats, timing, and subjective judgments of species numbers. Sadly, even this kind of knowledge is missing from most of the examples given.

Overall, I have to say that I wasn’t much impressed with this document. I can’t disagree that indigenous knowledge, which is invariably practical knowledge about foods or plants useful to Native Americans, can be useful—mostly for Native Americans themselves but sometimes for overall conservation. But the article doesn’t make a persuasive case that “indigenous knowledge” is either coequal to modern scientific knowledge or constitutes a “different way of knowing”. To paraphrase Mike Aus, “There is knowing and there is not knowing, and that’s all there is in this world.” Of course we have to realize that many claims of indigenous knowledge (like the provenance of found human remains) should be tested using modern scientific knowledge as well.

The reason I highlight this is simply to acquaint you with the nature of this program, since if you’re American you’re paying for it. Also, the “indigenous knowledge is sacred” trope has hopped the pond from New Zealand to here and is now invading America piggybacking on wokeness, ergo it must be carefully and critically inspected. Knowledge can’t be immune from modern scientific scrutiny simply because it comes from indigenous people—always people who lack much of the modern toolkit of modern science (hypothesis testing, publication, pervasive doubt, replication, and so on).

In my view implementing this project as a better-than-usual DEI endeavor—a way to bring indigenous people into modern science—is better done in the long run simply by giving Native Americans the opportunities to study, engage in, and ultimately practice modern science as professionals. I know we’re a long way from that, but this is the solution for all problems of equity. In this case, “indigenous knowledge” automatically becomes fused with modern science. But of course if you want to do something now, this bloated document doesn’t convince me that the BA program is a great one.

Canadian university advertises for scientists expert in Indigenous “ways of knowing”

January 22, 2024 • 1:15 pm

The combination of Canadian wokeness and the migration across the Pacific of New Zealand’s “indigenous ways of knowing” trope has led to this ad by The University of Victoria. The U of V wants to hire three candidates in any branch of science with expertise “in either (a) working with Indigenous ways of knowing, or (b) in infusing Indigenous science approaches and perspectives into science.”

Click below to see the ad:

But before giving specifics, this being Canada, the ad has to have a VIDEO territory acknowledgment, to wit:

We acknowledge and respect the Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ peoples on whose traditional territory the university stands and whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day. We invite applicants to watch the “Welcome to the Territory” video and to visit the Songhees, Esquimalt, and W̱SÁNEĆ Nations’ websites to learn more about these vibrant communities. To learn more about the Indigenous community on campus, please see the Indigenous Academic and Community Engagement (IACE) office’s website.

Well, whose territory is it? And shouldn’t they be giving the U of V back to either the Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ peoples? (I guess they first need to determine who morally owns the land.)

Oy! This is part of a job ad! Well, granted, it may help attract those three scientists who are tasked with furthering indigenous ways of knowing or melding them with modern science:

But now the real meat: the job ad itself. Bolding is theirs:

Indigenization and Decolonization at UVic
The University of Victoria is committed to the ongoing work of decolonizing and Indigenizing the campus community both inside and outside the classroom. UVic released our second Indigenous Plan in 2023 and the Faculty of Science has drafted its Indigenization Implementation Strategy (2022-2026) as we prepare ourselves for the work ahead. Decolonization and Indigenization are integral aspects of the 2023 UVic Strategic Plan and the 2022 Faculty of Science Strategic Plan.

To advance our work on Indigenization and decolonization, the Faculty of Science is excited to invite Indigenous applicants for three faculty positions in any field of Science. The three available positions are at the tenure-track assistant professor level and are cross-posted across our six departments: Biochemistry & Microbiology, Biology, Chemistry, Earth & Ocean Sciences, Mathematics & Statistics, and Physics & Astronomy.

Among the qualifications is this:

“The candidate has interest, potential or experience in either (a) working with Indigenous ways of knowing, or (b) in infusing Indigenous science approaches and perspectives into science.”

Do I need to emphasize once again that there are no “indigenous ways of knowing” beyond the ways that modern science “knows” things. To be frank, indigenous “ways of knowing” are inferior to modern science, which has a whole armamentarium for determining what counts as “knowledge” (experimentation, controls, replication, hypothesis-testing, pervasive doubt, and so on). In contrast, indigenous ways of knowing invariably come down to simple observation of natural phenomena or assertions (say, about the efficacy of plants as medicines) that aren’t tested using blind studies. And without verification and replication and testing, you don’t have knowledge; you have claims.

In addition, Indigenous “ways of knowing” are almost invariably gotten down with a large dose of spirituality, religion, or tradition. Some Native Americans, for example, deny that their ancestors came to the area around 20,000 years ago, saying that their tradition tells them that they were “always here.” Under indigenous ways of knowing, experiments must conform to what is sacred: you can’t build a telescope, for example, on Hawaiian land that’s seen as sacred, or send ashes to the Moon because “Grandmother Moon lit the way for our ancestors.” (There are better reasons not to clutter up the Moon.)

It’s also for these reasons that part b) above—”infusing Indigenous science approaches and perspectives into science”—is largely futile. What does this even mean? What is an “Indigenous science approach/perspective”? Does this mean that fish are best found in area X at time Y, and that berries are likely to be found in locality Z in the fall? Or plant Q can cure you if you have malady R? If so, then yes, that’s empirical “knowledge” of a sort, but it has to be tested using real science, not “Indigenous science approaches”. The approaches may suggest hypothesis, but these “approaches” cannot become part of modern science until they’re verified using the tools of modern science. In other words, there is not Indigenous science, only science done by Indigenous peoples using the methods of modern science.

It is, then, more or less of a travesty for the U of V to hire three Indigenous people to “decolonize” science, which means, of course, to throw away the tools of modern science, developed by oppressive colonizers, and use whatever empirical/spiritual knowledge the new professors have. Or, as Wikipedia puts it,

According to Mpoe Johannah Keikelame and Leslie Swartz, “decolonising research methodology is an approach that is used to challenge the Eurocentric research methods that undermine the local knowledge and experiences of the marginalised population groups”.

Yes, science, now used worldwide by many non-European people, is still seen as not only “Eurocentric”, but as “undermining local knowledge and experiences” of Indigenous groups. But that like science undermining, as some Māori insist, their tradition that their Polynesian ancestors discovered Antarctica in the 7th century A.D? If so, then “colonizing science”, which really means using modern science, is going to win, for it tells us that there is not a shred of evidence for such claims. As best we know, Antarctica was seen by Russian sailors in 1820.

These job ads, then, are threefold travesties. They undermine real science by replacing scientists who could be finding out real stuff with scientists committed to buttressing Indigenous “ways of knowing”. They suck up money by funding largely futile endeavors. And, worst of all, they confuse students (and the populace) about what science really is: a set of methodologies, developed over a few centuries, that gives us ever closer approaches to truth. It has no legends, Gods, or spirutuality.

One could add, I suppose, that these adds are really efforts to advance science, but a big DEI initiative to advance Indigenous people themselves. That’s fine, but you shouldn’t don’t do that by sacralizing their ways of knowing. Instead, you ensure that they get the opportunities to study and practice modern science—the so-called “Eurocentric” science that is the only real “way of knowing”. To do otherwise is to erode the understanding of science.

***********

Finally, we see below the racial requirements (their bolding). Note that you don’t really have to be an indigenous person; you only have to identify as indigenous, and do so in writing. But that is weird. If the University has an equity plan and the government a Human Rights Code limiting applicants to Indigenous peoples, on what basis do they allow a non-Indigenous person who self-identifies as one? (I doubt such people would be accepted for the job anyway.). Of course this would be considered a violation of the law in America, but Canada isn’t the U.S.

In accordance with the University’s Equity Plan and pursuant to section 42 of the BC Human Rights Code, the selection will be limited to Indigenous peoples. Our search committee will review the pool of applications from those who self-identify with this designated group. Candidates from this group must self-identify in their cover letter to be considered for this position.

h/t: Luana

The Navajo Nation tries to prevent human ashes from being sent to the Moon

January 8, 2024 • 11:30 am

Here’s an example of how indigenous peoples, on the basis of their superstitions and religion, try to control modern technology or how it’s used and science. In this case, reported by CNN (click on screenshot below), a commercial enterprise is taking some small amounts of human remains (presumably ashes, though it’s not clear) to the Moon, in violation of no Earthly statute. But because this presumably pollutes the moon, sacred to the Navajos, the tribe would like it stopped. And the White House, which isn’t in charge of this mission (it’s a private commercial venture), is holding a meeting to deal with this vexing problem. (They are not, of course, on the side of the rocketeers).

Click to read:

An excerpt:

The White House has convened a last-minute meeting to discuss a private mission to the moon — set to launch in days — after the largest group of Native Americans in the United States asked the administration to delay the flight because it will be carrying cremated human remains destined for a lunar burial.

If successful, the commercial mission scheduled to launch Monday — dubbed Peregrine Mission One — will be the first time an American-made spacecraft has landed on the lunar surface since the end of the Apollo program in 1972. But Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren said that allowing the remains to touch down there would be an affront to many indigenous cultures, which revere the moon.

“The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology,” Nygren said in a Thursday statement. “The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations.”

How can you respond to this except to say, “Sorry, too bad. Those aren’t even Navajo remains being sent to the Moon, and why should we cater to your superstition?”

And, in fact, and amazingly, that’s how the company responded (bolding here and below is mine):

The private companies providing these lunar burial services, Celestis and Elysium Space, are just two of several paying customers hitching a ride to the moon on Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology’s Peregrine lunar lander. The uncrewed spacecraft is expected to lift off on the inaugural flight of the United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

Celestis’ payload, called Tranquility Flight, includes 66 “memorial capsules” containing “cremated remains and DNA,”which will remain on the lunar surface “as a permanent tribute to the intrepid souls who never stopped reaching for the stars,” according to the company’s website.

“We are aware of the concerns expressed by Mr. Nygren, but do not find them substantive,” Celestis CEO Charles Chafer told CNN.

“We reject the assertion that our memorial spaceflight mission desecrates the moon,” Chafer said. “Just as permanent memorials for deceased are present all over planet Earth and not considered desecration, our memorial on the moon is handled with care and reverence, is a permanent monument that does not intentionally eject flight capsules on the moon. It is a touching and fitting celebration for our participants — the exact opposite of desecration, it is a celebration.”

But of course the Biden Administration has its knickers in a twist, as the Navajos are indigenous peoples and therefore sacred. And they’ve objected before, again without fruit:

This isn’t the first time Navajo Nation has expressed concerns about burials on the moon. In a December letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Nygren referred back to NASA’s Lunar Prospector mission, which in 1999 deliberately crashed a spacecraft into the moon carrying the remains of former astronaut Eugene Shoemaker.

“At the time, Navajo Nation President Albert Hale voiced our objections regarding this action. In response, NASA issued a formal apology and promised consultation with tribes before authorizing any further missions carrying human remains to the Moon,” Nygren said.

I didn’t know about Eugene Shoemaker, but the “remains,” described by Wikipedia, were some of his ashes:

On July 31, 1999, some of [Shoemaker’s] ashes were carried to the Moon by the Lunar Prospector space probe in a capsule designed by Carolyn Porco. Celestis, Inc. provided the service—at NASA’s request—commercially, making Shoemaker’s ashes the first private delivery to the lunar surface.

But NASA isn’t in charge of this mission; it’s described as “one customer among many paying to put technology and cargo on Astrobiotic’s lunar lander.” So NASA can grovel all it wants before the Navajos, but they lack authority. And believe me, NASA is groveling. For example, Joel Kearns, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration, said this:

“American companies bringing equipment and cargo and payloads to the moon is a totally new industry — a nascent industry — where everyone is learning,” Kearns said. “We take concerns expressed from the Navajo Nation very, very seriously.”

That is virtue signaling of the first water. Would they take concerns about the Vatican if any of those ashes belonged to former Catholics? Again, Celestis brushed off the concerns about the sacredness of the Moon:

“No one, and no religion, owns the moon,” Celestis’ CEO told CNN. “If the beliefs of the world’s multitude of religions were considered, it’s quite likely that no missions would ever be approved. Simply put, we do not and never have let religious beliefs dictate humanity’s space efforts. There is not and should not be a religious test.”

But the Navajos deny below that they own the Moon. Of course, what they think they own is control of what gets sent to the Moon:

Ahasteen argues that Navajo Nation’s intent isn’t to claim the moon.

“We’re saying be respectful. We’re turning the moon into a graveyard and we’re turning it into a waste site,” Ahasteen said. “At what point are we going to stop and say we need to start protecting the moon as we do the Grand Canyon?”

The last point is the only one worth considering: what kind of stuff are we allowed to dump on the Moon? But whatever concerns enter into such a discussion, religion should not be one of them. Worry about ecology, spying, polluting a not-fully-explored planet, yes, of course. But do not stifle technology in the name of nonexistent gods or “sacredness”. For religion worships fictions, but science tells us what is real about the world. Yes, I “respect” people’s desire and ability to practice their own religion, but they don’t have the right to foist their faith on others. And that’s what the Navajos are doing when trying to prevent ashes from being sent to the Moon.

It’s especially pernicious to use religion to try to block scientific knowledge. Mauna Kea, a mountain on Hawaii’s Big Island, is perhaps the best place in the world to place telescopes, as it’s high and clear, but the indigenous Hawaiians have for years tried to block, with some success, the placement of scopes on the mountain. Your opinion may differ, but mine is that the mountain isn’t really sacred, and if it doesn’t formally belong to the native people but to the government or state, science should take precedence over sacredness, particularly in a such a great site for science like Mauna Kea. After all, they’re not proposing to put a telescope on the spire of Notre Dame!

Here’s a photo I took of Mauna Kea with its telescopes in 2019:

Censorship in science: a compilation of references

December 24, 2023 • 9:45 am

If you’re interested in STEM subjects, it’s salubrious to follow the Heterodox STEM Substack site, where you’ll see takes on science that are sufficiently heterodox that they’d be hard to publish in regular journals. Also, there are useful summaries of the literature, including as this one on scientific censorship published today by Anna Krylov and Jan Tanzman.

Their article has an introduction, a report on the increase in scientific censorship, and then a useful list of articles about the nature, causes, and effects of that censorship. If you don’t think the practice exists, or is exerted only minimally, have a look at the piece and the papers it cites.

Click on the screenshot to read:

The introduction:

We have prepared a compilation of recent articles documenting present-day censorship in science and explaining the mechanism by which censorship in science operates.

Recently, science journals and publishers have opened a new and disturbing chapter in the history of scientific censorship: the censorship of scientific articles that are alleged to be “harmful” to a particular group or population, a practice that violates the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The practice began with scientific journals retracting articles in response to the demands of online mobs, but has since been codified into policy by various editorial boards and scientific publishers.

Censorship is objectionable on both philosophical and pragmatic grounds. On the philosophical side, the notion that that the public must be protected from dangerous or harmful knowledge is at odds with liberal Enlightenment values, according to which knowledge is power, which the public is capable of using responsibly. On the practical level, by hiding selected facts, censorship distorts our understanding of the world, thereby undermining our ability to solve challenging problems. Censorship also leads to distrust in science. When scientists hide selected facts to promote their political agendas, the public rightfully perceives them as politically motivated agents rather than objective and trustworthy experts.

Despite the long history of scientific censorship and its current prevalence, the mechanisms by which censorship operates, the agents who impose censorship and their motives, and the ultimate costs of censorship have not been systematically investigated. A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Cory Clark and 38 co-authors, Prosocial Motives Underlie Scientific Censorship by Scientists: A Perspective and Research Agenda (Clark et al. 2023), takes a stab at this issue. The paper lays out important questions regarding the nature and consequences of censorship and puts out a call for systematic research on the subject.

One of the paper’s co-authors, psychology professor Steve Stewart-Williams, summarizes the evidence for the current wave of scientific censorship and self-censorship, as well as the rise of censorious attitudes among scientists, which motivated the paper:

Increasing numbers of scientists report being sanctioned for conducting politically contentious research.

Retractions of papers have become more and more common over the last decade, and at least some of these appear to have been driven primarily by concerns other than scientific merit. One group of scholars even retracted their own paper, not because it was scientifically flawed, but because it was being cited by conservatives in ways the authors didn’t approve of.

Several lines of research suggest that studies reaching politically unpalatable conclusions may have a harder time negotiating the peer-review process than they would if the conclusions were in the opposite direction. As the paper notes, “When scholars misattribute their rejection of disfavored conclusions to quality concerns that they do not consistently apply, bias and censorship are masquerading as scientific rejection.”

Recent surveys suggest that many academics support censuring or censoring controversial research, with support being strongest among younger scholars.

Unsurprisingly, recent polls also suggest that many academics now self-censor on even mildly controversial topics.

A large number of academics express a willingness to discriminate against conservatives when it comes to hiring, publications, grants, and promotions. Unsurprisingly, conservative scholars are particularly likely to self-censor.

A growing number of journals have explicitly committed to judging scientific papers not just on the quality of the research but also on their (supposed) social or political impact. “In effect,” note Clark et al., “editors are granting themselves vast leeway to censor high-quality research that offends their own moral sensibilities.”

Table 1 of Clark et al. presents the following taxonomy of censorship:

As the Table shows, and as Luana and I emphasized in our paper on the ideological subversion of biology, this wave of censorship differs from previous ones because scientists and science journals themselves are involved in censoring. We’re muzzling ourselves!

The intro continues:

. . . Motivated by publication of this foundational paper (Clark et al. 2023), we have compiled a virtual collection of scientific papers, viewpoints, and op-eds that document the modern rise of censorship in science. Our list is most likely incomplete and we encourage readers to add relevant references in the comments.

There follow a list of 38 papers, with some commentary by Anna and Jay. It’s an extremely useful compilation of discussions about how scientific truths are prevented from coming to light, usually because they are politically unpalatable or present data and conclusions that make people uncomfortable in a “progressive” climate.

To be a wee bit self-aggrandizing, I’ll show two examples given by Anna and Jay of useful scientific critiques that had a hard time finding a home (I helped write one of them). I’m familiar with both, and the first one (not mine) is a doozy. The first one is discussed in the paper by Reichhardt et al. (2023), Resistance to Critiques in the Academic Literature: An Example from Physics Education Research, Eur. Review 31 547, 2023.

The authors present a rebuttal of a paper recently published in the physics education journal Physical Review—Physics Education Research. The paper, which is titled Observing Whiteness in Introductory Physics: A Case Study, arguably sounds more like a hoax than an actual paper with content relevant to physics education. But the rebuttal treats the paper seriously and offers a substantive, professional, and detailed critique. The rebuttal, which was submitted to the same journal as the original paper, was rejected by the editors. The main reason cited for the rejection was that the rebuttal was “framed from the perspective of a research paradigm that is different from the one of the research being critiqued”—indeed, the authors used scientific methods to debunk a postmodernist paper. The communication between the authors and the journal revealed the true nature of rejection.

The second example is the story of how a paper with the seemingly mundane title In Defense of Merit in Science (Abbot et al. 2023) wound up being published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. The story is narrated by Coyne and Krylov in The ‘Hurtful’ Idea of Scientific Merit, an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal (for a non-paywalled transcript see Our Wall Street Journal Op-ed: Free at Last!, published by Coyne on Why Evolution is True).

The reference list gives a lot more, some of which cite papers like the “whiteness in physics one” which are so off the rails that they instantiate the last thing Luana and I wrote:

Unless there is a change in the Zeitgeist, and unless scientists finally find the courage to speak up against the toxic effects of ideology on their field, in a few decades science will be very different from what it is now. Indeed, it’s doubtful that we’d recognize it as science at all.

Censorship in science: a new paper and analysis

November 25, 2023 • 12:00 pm

Well, a paper criticizing the “woke” aspects of science has finally appeared in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, though peer-reviewed critiques of scientific censorship or ideological pressure have appeared in the Journal of Controversial Ideas (a push for judging science on merit rather than ideology), and in the Skeptical Inquirer (an explication of how evolutionary biology is being distorted by ideology). I was an author of both of those papers (the second was reviewed, but not by a group of scientists in the field), but I’m not on the present one (I wish I were!).

The article below, which just came out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a prestigious journal, has a panoply of authors, many of whom you will recognize. It was certainly peer-reviewed, and its topic is the censorship of scientific papers, defined as “actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific quality.” It presents the problem, shows who the censors are, gives examples of censorship and studies of the problem as a whole, analyzes the motives of censors, explains why censorship is bad for both science and society, and suggests some fixes that might reduce censorship.

Click below to see the paper, and then below that to see an article about the paper, written by two of its authors, in The Chronicle of Higher Education. If you want just a quick take, read the Chronicle article, but the PNAS one is accessible to the nonscientific reader.

The two main conclusions of the PNAS paper are these:

a. Censorship of papers is increasing rapidly, and often takes the form of “soft” censorship, which is censorship based on social opprobrium, rather than outright banning by authorities (“hard censorship”)

b. The censors are usually fellow scientists, and usually act not out of malicious motives, but out of “prosocial ones”; that is, they try to keep stuff out of the literature because they think it’s harmful for society.

The diagram below, from the paper, is really a summary of its points—except for fixes of the problem.

As I said, most censorship is soft; as the paper notes:

Contemporary scientific censorship is typically the soft variety, which can be difficult to distinguish from legitimate scientific rejection. Science advances through robust criticism and rejection of ideas that have been scrutinized and contradicted by evidence. Papers rejected for failing to meet conventional standards have not been censored. However, many criteria that influence scientific decision-making, including novelty, interest, “fit”, and even quality are often ambiguous and subjective, which enables scholars to exaggerate flaws or make unreasonable demands to justify rejection of unpalatable findings.

And it’s also prosocial: meant to prevent the “harm” that we so often see claimed to occur when one’s own ideology is violated:

But censorship can be prosocially motivated. Censorious scholars often worry that research may be appropriated by malevolent actors to support harmful policies and attitudes. Both scholars and laypersons report that some scholarship is too dangerous to pursue, and much contemporary scientific censorship aims to protect vulnerable groups. Perceived harmfulness of information increases censoriousness among the public, harm concerns are a central focus of content moderation on social media , and the more people overestimate harmful reactions to science, the more they support scientific censorship. People are especially censorious when they view others as susceptible to potentially harmful information In some contemporary Western societies, many people object to information that portrays historically disadvantaged groups unfavorably and academia is increasingly concerned about historically disadvantaged groups Harm concerns may even cause perceptions of errors where none exist.

Prosocial motives for censorship may explain four observations: 1) widespread public availability of scholarship coupled with expanding definitions of harm has coincided with growing academic censorship; 2) women, who are more harm-averse and more protective of the vulnerable than men, are more censorious; 3) although progressives are often less censorious than conservatives, egalitarian progressives are more censorious of information perceived to threaten historically marginalized groups; and 4) academics in the social sciences and humanities (disciplines especially relevant to humans and social policy) are more censorious and more censored than those in STEM .

Now the data adduced in the paper largely involve not censorship of papers, but censorship of academics, expecially that compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). These cases are not censorship in the strict sense used by the authors (scientific papers), but are still attempts to keep academics’ ideas in all areas from reaching the public. The caption for the three plots given below (the paper has three more) is “Characteristics of higher education scholars targeted for their pedagogy and/or critical inquiry between 2000 and June, 2023 (n = 486) and characteristics of their targeters.”

The figures beow are FIRE’s data on not just science, but all form of scholarship:

First, the rise in censorship; the figures for this year are incomplete, and there was a drop between 2021 and 2022. But look at the increase since 2000:

Below: which disciplines are targeted (blue means the targeted scholar was attacked by someone from his/her left, and red denotes attacks from his/her right. Overall, and as I’ve noted often, most attacks came from the left. Note too that the humanities experience more targeting incidents than does science.

Finally, the topics targeted for censorship. As you might expect, race and gender are the top two, though institutional policy is a close third. As race and gender are closely connected with claims of oppression, it’s not surprising that prosocially-motivated attacks on scholarship involve trying to prevent harm to minorities.

The diagrem below, taking into account all attempts at censorship, show that most come from the left of the attacker (blue) compared to the right. (Gray is either unknown or “neither”). This again is no surprise; the right is not only less often represented in colleges, but is also less likely to engage in prosocially motivated censorship::

The PNAS article is copiously documented (there are 130 references), and I like it. But there are two problems that I think slightly reduce its effectiveness. The first is that the article lacks tangible examples of how odious this kind of censorship can be. Examples really hit home, especially when you see how hypocritical and sneaky authors and journals can be, even when acting prosocially. In fact, only one case is described in both the paper and the Chronicle article below, but it’s a doozy, well known among many of us. This was an article which was retracted not because it had scientific problems, but because its conclusions violated what gender ideologues want to see. It also led to a shameful call for censorship in general of articles that might be “harmful”.

The Chronicle summary (click to read):

Both the paper and the Chronicle article have nearly word-for-word identical descriptions of the incident (this, by the way, is self-plagiarism), but the Chronicle piece has links, so I’ll excerpt that one:

Moral motives have long influenced scientific decision-making. What’s new is that journals are now explicitly endorsing moral concerns as legitimate reasons to suppress science. Following the publication (and retraction) of an article reporting that the mentees of male mentors, on average, had more scholarly success than did the mentees of female mentors, Nature Communications released an editorial promising increased attention to potential harms. A subsequent Nature editorial stated that authors, reviewers, and editors must consider the potentially harmful implications of research, and a Nature Human Behaviour editorial declared the publication might reject or retract articles that have the potential to undermine the dignity of particular groups of people. In effect, editors are granting themselves vast leeway to censor high-quality research that offends their own moral sensibilities, or those of their most sensitive readers.

The paper, found at the first link (and now retracted) found that in mentor/mentee relationships in science, the quality of the mentor had a positive effect on the career of the mentee, BUT, thethe paper also reported this:

We also find that increasing the proportion of female mentors is associated not only with a reduction in post-mentorship impact of female protégés, but also a reduction in the gain of female mentors. While current diversity policies encourage same-gender mentorships to retain women in academia, our findings raise the possibility that opposite-gender mentorship may actually increase the impact of women who pursue a scientific career. These findings add a new perspective to the policy debate on how to best elevate the status of women in science.

That is, same-sex mentorship of women seemed to be less helpful for their careers than being mentored by a male. Now this is, of course, ideologically unacceptable, and, though as far as I know the data were sound, it raised a ruckus. As the Nature Communications editors noted when retracting the paper:

They retracted the paper simply because of criticisms that the results weren’t ideologically comfortable, and before the criticisms were considered. Also, have a look at the two editorials, especially the Nature Human Behavior one which became the subject to considerable pushback, including this tweet by Steve Pinker (an author of the present PNAS manuscript); see also my post about the fracas, which contains another long tweet by Michael Shermer.

Journalists & psychologists take note: Nature Human Behavior is no longer a peer-reviewed scientific journal but an enforcer of a political creed. I won't referee, publish, or cite (how do we know articles have been vetted for truth rather than political correctness)? https://t.co/3qXFGizt6h pic.twitter.com/G5BgB2hpqD

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) August 26, 2022

At any rate, I’d like to have seen more examples of censored papers that would drive home the repugnance of censorship and the urgency of fixing it. One that came immediately to mind was James Damore’s firing at Google for suggesting that inequities in representation may be due to preferences rather than bias. Anna Krylov, one of the authors of the PNAS paper, tells me she’s writing a blog post for the Heterodox STEM site that will give several more examples of censorship, and I’ll highlight them when her piece appears.

Finally, what are the harms of censorship and how can we fix them? I won’t go into detail about this (the paper does more), except to say that the harms are obvious: censorship keeps the truth hidden, and the truth not only will out, but may be valuable. While it is possible that some solid science should be suppressed if it offends certain groups or leads to “harm”, I can’t think of any scientific result that really should be censored because of its implications. Readers may want to suggest some below.

Second, scientific censorship could harm the public’s trust in the field and the trust of the scientific literature by scientists. As the PNAS paper notes,

Censorship may be particularly likely to erode trust in science in contemporary society because scientists now have other means (besides academic journals) to publicize their findings and claims of censorship. If the public routinely finds quality scholarship on blogs, social media, and online magazines by scientists who claim to have been censored, a redistribution of authority from established scientific outlets to newer, popular ones seems likely. Given the many modes of dissemination and public availability of data, proscribing certain research areas for credentialed scientists may give extremists a monopoly over sensitive research. Scientific censorship may also reduce trust in the scientific literature among scientists, exacerbating hostility and polarization. If particular groups of scholars feel censored by their discipline, they may leave altogether, creating a scientific monoculture that stifles progress.

So what’s to be done? The PNAS article gives a whole laundry list of fixes, nearly all of which are good. They include making reviews of papers, both accepted and rejected, public; third-party audits of scientific journals to measure the quality of their editorial practice, independence of sociopolitical pressures, and so on; and making serious calls for retractions of papers available publicly available to concerned scholars. This is all under the rubric of transparency, and names could be anonymous.

The only “fix” that sounds hard to implement is testing the proposition that some science creates more harm than good. The authors suggest that there might be some way to measure this, but I’m not convinced:

Scholars should empirically test the costs and benefits of censorship against the costs and benefits of alternatives. They could compare the consequences of retracting an inflammatory paper to 1) publishing commentaries and replies, 2) publishing opinion pieces about the possible applications and implications of the findings, or 3) simply allowing it to remain published and letting science carry on. Which approach inspires more and better research? Which approach is more likely to undermine the reputation of science? Which approach minimizes harm and maximizes benefits? Given ongoing controversies surrounding retraction norms, an adversarial collaboration (including both proponents and opponents of harm-based retractions) might be the most productive and persuasive approach to these research questions.

Frankly, I don’t think this is feasible; such controlled tests can’t be done! When Luana Maroja and I wrote our paper on the ideological erosion of science, we discussed whether any solid scientific result should be censored because of its possible harms. After much discussion, we agreed on “no.”

Readers may dissent, and dissent is welcome in the comments. But the point of this post is that censorship is pervasive in science, in general it’s harmful since, on the grounds of preserving a favored ideology, it prevents the dissemination of truth, and that scientists should stop it. That, of course, would mean keeping the tentacles of the ideological octopus off of science, but that doesn’t seem to be in the offing. I hope that the new PNAS paper will help keep those suckers out of our field.

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.

University of Auckland continues to promote indigenous ways of knowing while not allowing a promised debate between that and modern science

September 12, 2023 • 9:45 am

In July, 2021, a group of seven University of Auckland academics (two now deceased) published a letter in the Magazine “the Listener” saying that the local (Māori) “ways of knowing”, or Mātauranga Māori (MM), while of significant cultural, sociological, and anthropological value, was not equivalent to modern science. It was written because the New Zealand government and academic establishment was proposing to teach MM as coequal to modern science in the science classroom. (This plan is still going on.) Since MM is a gemisch of some genuine empirical trial-and-error knowledge with superstition, ideology, ethics, and undocumented tradition, the seven authors were absolutely right in asserting that that mixture of “ways of knowing, feeling, and living” was not equivalent to pure modern science.

This now-infamous “Listener Letter” (it has its own Wikipedia page) caused a huge fracas, with academics writing petitions against it, the Royal Society of New Zealand denouncing it and then investigating two of the letter’s authors who belonged to the Society (that went nowhere), and then the Vice-Chancellor of Auckland Uni (i.e., the head of the University), Dawn Freshwater, issuing a statement damning the letter:

A letter in this week’s issue of The Listener magazine from seven of our academic staff on the subject of whether mātauranga Māori can be called science has caused considerable hurt and dismay among our staff, students and alumni.

While the academics are free to express their views, I want to make it clear that they do not represent the views of the University of Auckland.

The University has deep respect for mātauranga Māori as a distinctive and valuable knowledge system. [Note that MM is far more than a “knowledge system.”] We believe that mātauranga Māori and Western empirical science are not at odds and do not need to compete. They are complementary and have much to learn from each other.

This view is at the heart of our new strategy and vision, Taumata Teitei, and the Waipapa Toitū framework, and is part of our wider commitment to Te Tiriti and te ao principles.

It’s not clear that Auckland Uni even had any views on the issue, and the letter, which you can read here, caused “hurt and dismay” only among the perpetually offended. The Listener Letter was simply a defense of modern science against “ways of knowing” that include superstition, religion, legend, and ethics.

Freshwater later walked back her rancor a bit, promising that within a year, Auckland Uni would have a debate about modern science versus MM’s indigenous “ways of knowing.” Here’s her promise (link same as above, emphasis is mine.)

I am calling for a return to a more respectful, open-minded, fact-based exchange of views on the relationship between mātauranga Māori and science, and I am committing the University to action on this.

In the first quarter of 2022 we will be holding a symposium in which the different viewpoints on this issue can be discussed and debated calmly, constructively and respectfully. I envisage a high-quality intellectual discourse with representation from all viewpoints: mātauranga Māori, science, the humanities, Pacific knowledge systems and others.

I recognise it is a challenging and confronting debate, but one I believe a robust democratic society like ours is well placed to have.

That promise was a lie. Freshwater never organized such a debate, and it’s 2½ years on. It’s clear that she will not allow critics of teaching MM as coequal to science to have any forum at Auckland Uni. Freshwater was just stalling for time, and her behavior was and is unforgivable.

Instead, Auckland Uni is going full steam ahead pushing the scientific value of MM while criticizing modern science. Have a look at this article in the Auckland Uni newsletter, sent me by a university member too fearful to reveal their name (given the censorious climate in NZ, that’s par for the course):

Click on the screenshot below to read. Nope, it’s not a debate, but a kumbaya-fest on the value of MM. I reproduce the entire short piece. “Pūtaiao” can be loosely translated as “science”. As usual, the article is full of Māori words that aren’t understood by most readers; some have been translated by the UNI, and I’ve translated the most important ones remaining.

Notice that “STEM” has now become “STEAMx3,”, standing for “Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Maths, Medicine, and Mātauranga Māori.” MM has become coequal with science in the very term!

Māori researchers from within the University and across the country were gathering this week for the inaugural biennial Pūtaiao Symposium at Tai Tonga campus.

The two-day event aimed to connect and inspire researchers, educators, students, influencers, and movers and shakers in Pūtaiao and STEAMx3 (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Maths, Medicine, and Mātauranga Māori)

‘Ma Mua Kaa Hua,’ exploring the past to inform the future, was the theme, with an overarching aim of supporting future generations of Māori students and researchers.

Organised by Te Whare Pūtaiao, Faculty of Science, the first day of the event, on 7 September, was to focus on researchers, the second day on educators, influencers, iwi, hapū and community leaders.

A broad range of topics was to include the decolonisation of science, grounding research in kaupapa Māori, and data sovereignty, with an emphasis on participants engaging kanohi ki te kanohi (face to face) and a whakawhanaungatanga (relationship building) approach.

This is an attack on modern “colonialist” science and an approbation for the “way of knowing” of MM (“kaupapa Māori” is “things done according to Māori principles”). It is a symposium designed to show the superiority of MM over colonial “Western” ways of knowing.

And of course it’s a far cry from the promised “debate”: it is one-sided boosterism, sponsored by Auckland Uni, for indigenous ways of knowing.

So I ask Vice-Chancellor Freshwater: ˆwhere is the discussion you promised over two years ago about the relationship between mātauranga Māori and science? You committed yourself and your University to that debate. Were you lying? Was your intent always to denigrate modern science at the expense of Māori ways of knowing, an intent furthered by Chris Hipkins, your new Prime Minister and former Minister of Education, who’s always pushed the equivalence of indigenous ways of knowing with modern science?

I can only watch on the sidelines, sadly shaking my head as people like Freshwater and Hipkins transform New Zealand science into a program for social justice, prioritizing indigenous knowledge over genuine science. Auckland University is the best school in the country, but is becoming a joke.

I will be writing Freshwater, asking where that promised symposium is, but I wouldn’t hold my breath that it will ever take place. The lobby for all things indigenous has created a climate in which not only such a symposium could never be held, but also in which those who want such a discussion are even afraid to bring it up lest they lose their jobs.

Poor New Zealand! If you want to do science, I’d suggest either leaving (if you’re a resident), or choosing some other country in which you can study science without being hectored by those pushing indigenous “ways of knowing.”

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