Category: scientists behaving badly

Isaac Newton in the crosshairs

May 2, 2024 • 11:30 am

Thanks to a comment from Frau Katze (great name!), I found this article and have also stolen her title. It’s not only Newton in the crosshairs, but Carl Linnaeus, the “Father of Taxonomy.” The issue? Their connection with the slave trade, which, at least according to the Science article below, seems a bit tenuous. It’s not that they overtly supported slavery or owned slaves, but that Linnaeus used specimens that were sent to Europe on slave ships, and may have been collected by slaves. . Not only that, but many private natural history specimens were sent on slave ships, with some being collected by slaves (who were apparently paid for each specimen.

In Newton’s case, it appears his sin was just to use data on tides collected in a place that was a port for some slave ships.

This article (click headline below to read) isn’t as bad as others that seek to ruin the reputations of people because of behaviors we consider bad today, nor does it call for removal of all the specimens shipped this way.  It simply asks for understanding and giving the historical context for collections. And that is fine—except that we hardly know the provenance of any of the natural history items collected so long ago. And you know how these things go: if you got specimens sent on a slave ship along with other goods shipped from South America or the Caribbean to Europe, the next thing you know you’ve called an enslvaver yourself, and then the reputation of people like Linnaeus and Newton are besmirched, and then they get erased. (I can’t imagine, however, that Newton could even be faulted for what he did.)

There seems to be a whole genre of historians who try to draw these connections, and I don’t mind their efforts so much, up to the point where they try to cancel people for what is a very tenuous connection to the slave trade.

We all recognize, of course, that slavery was horrible: one of the worst acts you can commit on a person. People were ripped away from their homes, families were separated and people were transported far away under horrible conditions. If they survived, they were turned into unpaid laborers—considered possessions of the slaveowner.  There’s no doubt about the odious nature of what happened.  But the less closely you were connected to this trade, the less guilt your reputation should bear. Linnaeus and Newton, it seems, are relatively guiltless, at least compared to those who captured slaves, transported them, or took possession of them.

Click to read an article about this in Science:

The problem is provenance. One of the big purveyors of natural history specimens was James Petiver, a London apothecary described this way by Wikipedia:

James Petiver (c. 1665 – c. 2 April 1718) was a London apothecary, a fellow of the Royal Society as well as London’s informal Temple Coffee House Botany Club, famous for his specimen collections in which he traded and study of botany and entomology. He corresponded with John Ray and Maria Sibylla Merian. Some of his notes and specimens were used by Carolus Linnaeus in descriptions of new species. The genus Petiveria was named in his honour by Charles Plumier. His collections were bought by Sir Hans Sloane and became a part of the Natural History Museum.

The issue, as the Science article notes, is how the specimens were transported:

Although he rarely left London, Petiver ran a global network of dozens of ship surgeons and captains who collected animal and plant specimens for him in far-flung colonies. Petiver set up a museum and research center with those specimens, and he and visiting scientists wrote papers that other naturalists (including Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy) drew on. Between one-quarter and one-third of Petiver’s collectors worked in the slave trade, largely because he had no other options: Few ships outside the slave trade traveled to key points in Africa and Latin America. Petiver eventually amassed the largest natural history collection in the world, and it never would have happened without slavery.

One quarter and one-third of the collections “worked in the slave trade,” mostly, it appears, as ship’s surgeons who were tasked with collecting specimens. This already makes much of the provenance of the specimens slave-ship free, yet there’s no way of knowing which specimens are “good” and which are “bad.” Specimens of both types are in London’s Museum of Natural History and are apparently still being used. (The collections were mostly ferried on British slave ships, though some Spanish ones were used as well.)

That’s the gist of the story, and here’s how Linnaeus and Newton were involved. I quote from the story:

Linnaeus (already mentioned in the excerpt above).

[Petiver] and visiting scientists wrote papers that other naturalists (including Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy) drew on.

Some historians now refer to those private and institutional collections as the “big science” of their day. Scholars studied those centralized repositories and then circulated accounts of their research to other scientists. Linnaeus drew on such accounts when putting together Systema Naturae in 1735, the book that introduced his famous binomial naming system for flora and fauna.

And that’s it for Linnaeus: he wrote paper and did analysis of specimens that were described by other scientists, specimens transported on slave ships (with some specimens possibly connected by slaves). This is quite a tenuous connection between Linnaeus and slavery, and in itself seems something that shouldn’t tar his reputation.

Newton

Even a field as rarefied as celestial mechanics benefited from slavery. When developing his theory of gravity, Newton studied ocean tides, knowing that the gravitational tug of the moon causes them. Newton needed tide readings from all over the globe, and one crucial set of readings came from French slave ports in Martinique. Delbourgo says, “Newton himself, who’s really the paradigm figure of an isolated, nontraveling, sitting-at-his-desk genius, had access to numbers he wouldn’t have had access to without the Atlantic slave trade.”

Newton’s connection to the slave trade is even more tenuous, as it consists of his using “one crucial set of readings” from a French slave port. Were the data collected by slaves? I doubt it. Is it just that it was a slave port that indicts him? I have no idea. This is really the only mention of Newton beyond saying later that Petiver “he succeeded Newton as president of the Royal Society (which itself invested in slaving companies),” which is not a serious indictment—unless you want to make every member of the Royal Society culpable.

So the accusations against Linnaeus and Newton, at least, bear little weight.  At the piece’s end, Kean ponders what we should do about the connection between collecting data and specimens and the slave trade. He cites historians urging mention of how specimens were gathered, which is absolutely fine with me. If they were gathered illegally, as apparently some of them were, that should also be mentioned, for now collectors must have permission to remove specimens from a country.  But it goes a bit further:

The connections between science and the slave trade could also feed into ongoing debates about reparations and the historical legacies of slavery. Like some U.K. organizations, U.S. universities such as Yale, Georgetown, and Brown have acknowledged how they benefited from slavery. For the most part, Murphy says, those conversations are framed “in terms of just dollars and cents, pounds and pence. Yet [the profits] can also clearly be measured in specimens collected and papers published.”

It’s not clear how the data, especially since we don’t know which specimens were transported on slave ships or collected by slaves, are to feed into these debates. Of course we can and should acknowledge this fact somewhjere, but I’m not sure about what sort of “reparations” are to be made. Who would get them? Readers may wish to weigh in here.

Dawkins and Sokal on the dumb ideological ploy maintaining that human sex is “assigned at birth”

April 9, 2024 • 12:30 pm

What a pair! The renowned biologist and the hoax-exposer/mathematician, teamed up to attack the medical profession’s new and woke tendency to deny the existence of biological sex as a reality. (Yes, all animals have exactly two sexes, which are not made up by society.) This eloquent op-ed is in the Boston Globe, and you can click below to read it for free, or find it archived here (h/t Mark, Barry).

It’s the “sex assigned at birth” meme, which any fool knows was made up to pretend that biological sex doesn’t really exist in nature, but is merely a “social construct”. This is the same risible meme taken apart by Alex Byrne and Carole Hooven in a recent NYT op-ed. As Alan and Richard note below, the distortion of reality was made for ideological reasons—by gender activists who want to see biological sex as a spectrum, and that is based on the the insupportable view that if you distort biology, transgender or transsexual people will not be “erased”. But, as I’ve said ad infinitum, you don’t need to distort biology to justify treating such people with civility and respect, and to confer on them the same moral value as everyone else has.

The excerpt from the above speaks for itself, but has a lot of useful links to show how well the termites have dined.

The American Medical Association says that the word “sex” — as in male or female — is problematic and outdated; we should all now use the “more precise” phrase “sex assigned at birth.” The American Psychological Association concurs: Terms like “birth sex” and “natal sex” are “disparaging” and misleadingly “imply that sex is an immutable characteristic.” The American Academy of Pediatrics is on board too: “sex,” it declares, is “an assignment that is made at birth.” And now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urge us to say “assigned male/female at birth” or “designated male/female at birth” instead of “biologically male/female” or “genetically male/female.”

After discussing the biological definition of sex, which, as you know well by now involves differences in developmental systems that produce gametes of different size and mobility, Sokal and Dawkins give a sharp rap on the knuckles of the medical establishment. I’ve put the last two paragraphs in bold; the penultimate one shows the trend and motivation, while the last one shows the damage.

Much is speciously made of the fact that a very few humans are born with chromosomal patterns other than XX and XY. The most common, Klinefelter syndrome with XXY chromosomes, occurs in about 0.1 percent of live births; these individuals are anatomically male, though often infertile. Some extremely rare conditions, such as de la Chapelle syndrome (0.003 percent) and Swyer syndrome (0.0005 percent), arguably fall outside the standard male/female classification. Even so, the sexual divide is an exceedingly clear binary, as binary as any distinction you can find in biology.

So where does this leave the medical associations’ claims about “sex assigned at birth”?

A baby’s name is assigned at birth; no one doubts that. But a baby’s sex is not “assigned”; it is determined at conception and is then observed at birth, first by examination of the external genital organs and then, in cases of doubt, by chromosomal analysis. Of course, any observation can be erroneous, and in rare cases the sex reported on the birth certificate is inaccurate and needs to be subsequently corrected. But the fallibility of observation does not change the fact that what is being observed — a person’s sex — is an objective biological reality, just like their blood group or fingerprint pattern, not something that is “assigned.” The medical associations’ pronouncements are social constructionism gone amok.

. . .For decades, feminists have protested against the neglect of sex as a variable in medical diagnosis and treatment, and the tacit assumption that women’s bodies react similarly to men’s bodies. Two years ago, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet finally acknowledged this criticism, but the editors apparently could not bring themselves to use the word “women.” Instead the journal’s cover proclaimed: “Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.” But now even this double-edged concession may be lost, as the denial of biological sex threatens to undermine the training of future doctors.

The medical establishment’s newfound reluctance to speak honestly about biological reality most likely stems from a laudable desire to defend the human rights of transgender people. But while the goal is praiseworthy, the chosen method is misguided. Protecting transgender people from discrimination and harassment does not require pretending that sex is merely “assigned.”

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It is never justified to distort the facts in the service of a social or political cause, no matter how just. If the cause is truly just, then it can be defended in full acceptance of the facts about the real world.

And when an organization that proclaims itself scientific distorts the scientific facts in the service of a social cause, it undermines not only its own credibility but that of science generally. How can the public be expected to trust the medical establishment’s declarations on other controversial issues, such as vaccines — issues on which the medical consensus is indeed correct — when it has so visibly and blatantly misstated the facts about something so simple as sex?

 

Read also Byrne and Hooven; click below (or read it archived here):

Finally, the infamous Lancet cover:

Science-Based Medicine goes down the drain

January 5, 2024 • 11:45 am

Lordy, how many of us used to love the Science-Based Medicine (SBM) site? I did! It was the go-to place for enjoying the debunking of medical quackery and the scrutiny of dubious medical claims. Started in 2008 by Steve Novella and David Gorski (“Orac”), SBM is affiliated with the Society for Science-Based Medicine.

Sadly, it’s now going down the tubes, having bought heavily, like the ACLU and FFRF, into gender activism. It started with an incident I reported here, involving Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage and a positive review by SBM editor, skeptic, and physician Harriet Hall. Let’s let Wikipedia sum it up:

On June 15, 2021, Science-Based Medicine published a book review of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage written by founding editor Harriet Hall. In her review, Hall wrote that Shrier’s book had raised legitimate concerns about the science surrounding drug treatments for gender dysphoria in children and that there was a lack of quality scientific studies on the subject. Several days after the review was published, Novella and Gorski replaced the review with a retraction notice and responded with a review of their own, the first of six SBM posts rejecting Shrier’s claims and addressing the retraction.

Skeptic magazine republished Hall’s review, and she remained one of three editors at SBM along with Novella and Gorski after the retraction until her death in 2023.

That SIX articles were needed to defend the retraction of Hall’s review and criticize Shrier’s book was not only a sign of trouble at SBM, but an almost obsessive act. And this obsessiveness is very evident in the piece below, written by A. J. Eckert, a doctor of osteopathy. Here’s some information about the author from Anchor Health:

AJ Eckert, DO, is Connecticut’s first out nonbinary trans doctor and serves as the Medical Director of our Gender & Life-Affirming Medicine (GLAM) Program. Dr. Eckert has over 17 years’ experience in LGBTQ health care, with 9 years as a provider of primary care and gender-affirming services.

As a nonbinary trans doctor, he has written several articles for SBM on trans and gender issues, including two pieces defending SBM’s removal of Hall’s review of Shrier’s book, and has written on these issues elsewhere.

Click to read Eckert’s piece at SBM (h/t Jez)

What the sweating author is trying to do in this tremendously long piece is express dismay about a book by Helen Joyce, a book shortlisted for the John Maddox Prize in 2023. I wasn’t aware, and can’t find on the web, that Joyce had a book in 2023, but her own site notes that it must have been a 2023 edition of a book she’s already written (and one that I’ve read): Trans.

I’m also an author: my first book, ‘Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality’, was published by OneWorld in July 2021. It was reissued in 2023 under a new title: ‘Trans: Gender Identity and the New Battle for Women’s Rights’.

Although Joyce was shortlisted, she didn’t win; the winner was Nancy Olivieri. What really bothered Eckert was that the reissue of Joyce’s book was even considered for a prize given to “individuals who have shown courage and integrity in standing up for sound science and evidence.” That really rankled Eckert, who, as a gender activist, doesn’t think that Joyce has in any way stood up for sound science and evidence. I’ll give Eckert’s intro, as it gives Luana and me a shout-out for contributing to last year’s “hit” on science by “scaremongering”:

Science has taken many hits in 2023. Anti-environmentalism continues to spread; anti-vaxxers loudly deny COVID-19; some physicians have made themselves comfortable spreading medical misinformation and even urging others to resist public health mandates. An anti-trans paper promoting the many-times-over–discredited theory of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD) was published without obtaining ethics approval in a peer-reviewed journal; an anti-vaxx paper was published in a fake journal made to appear legitimate, replete with an editorial board of antivaxxers. Both papers, when retracted, spun a narrative blaming an ideological suppression of science and lamenting about cancellation when the truth is simple: flawed and incorrect science should not be disseminated. Evolutionary biologists Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja were heavily featured in the Skeptical Inquirer and CSI scaremongering about “the ideological subversion of biology.” At least one-third-33% or more-of trans youth now live in states with unscientific bans on gender-affirming care due to ignorance and the spread of false narratives. At the end of September, Dr. Gorski lamented the likely permanent pause in funding a program designed to counter scientific misinformation and warned of the ongoing war on science-based regulation and public health.

The latest example was announced in October, when Irish journalist Helen Joyce was shortlisted for The John Maddox Prize, an initiative of UK charity Sense About Science and the international scientific journal Nature. The eponymous prize is named for the editor of Nature from 1966-73 and 1980-95; according to his obituary, science writer and scientist Sir John Maddox argued for objectivity and rationality in science and once worked alongside my personal favorite James Randi to debunk Jacques Benveniste’s claims about homeopathy and water memory. Sir John Maddox was knighted and worked on the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, and Richard Dawkins called him “the last great scientific polymath.” Thus, the John Maddox Prize carries quite a legacy and considerable prestige.

Unfortunately, Helen Joyce was shortlisted for The John Maddox Prize for…

…her courage in highlighting the need for further research and evidence to be brought into discourse and policy discussion related to gender identity, and raising the importance of acknowledging biological sex differences.

A Closer Look at Nature and Sense about Science’s Decision

Let me put this statement by the board behind the Maddox prize into context:

  1. Joyce is a prominent member of the UK “gender critical” movement and author of a “deeply anti-transgender” book. “Courage” is not a word I would ever associate with her.
  2. Joyce did not “highlight the need for further research and evidence,” at least not in any sort of productive way. Physicians practicing gender-affirming care and scientists involved in transgender studies generally agree that there is a need for more research. However, we neither need nor want a gender-critical trans-exclusionist to highlight the areas of need and thus continue the pattern of stigma and research about us without us. We’re on it. What we need are resources and funding, regular and consistent data collection on gender identity, notably absent from prior research, and involvement of the trans community, along with overlooked intersectional minorities previously excluded or underrepresented due to issues such as systemic racism, not lectures from people who deny existing science.
  3. Trans health and research-all medicine and research-belongs in the realm of science. It is the ignorant meddling of policymakers that harms our work. Gender-affirming healthcare should be between the health professional and the patient (and the patient’s parents or medical guardians, as applicable). Though politics are inextricably linked to trans healthcare—as is the case for all healthcare, actually—that does not mean that politicians should be able to dictate the standard of care in medicine, any more than politicians should be able to force a woman to carry a nonviable fetus to term when there is no chance of the fetus surviving and continuing the pregnancy risks the mother’s health.
  4. Here, we have on display two scientific organizations espousing the “importance of acknowledging biological sex differences,” an essentialist trope that serves to criminalize, dehumanize, and pathologize trans and intersex people. Their reasoning is also scientifically unsound. The science of biological sex does not mesh with Sense About Science’s comments. Trans people are very aware of biology and how our bodies work, sometimes painfully so. This is not about human biology and its supposed denial; it is about advancing a hostile agenda toward trans people and bad science. Updating gender markers to match one’s identity—which, naturally, Joyce is vehemently opposed to—has nothing to do with denying biology and everything to do with personal dignity, respect, equality, autonomy, and safety. Having the wrong marker on documents means being constantly exposed as trans in a cruel and sometimes violent society and being regularly undermined and questioned about gender. Gender is determined by one’s gender identity, which in turn should determine one’s legal sex designation. As for Nature, it has published multiple articles about the spectrum of sex and the fallacy of biological sex differences. So what gives?

Sorry for the long excerpt, but it tells you what the review is about.

If you’ve read Joyce’s book, like I have, you’ll be baffled at Eckert’s claim that it’s “fiction”.  In fact, the piece is a 17-page (as I print it out in 9-point type) defense of affirmative therapy, and an attack on the idea that there are two biological sexes, which Eckert considers “transphobic”.  As #4 above notes, Eckert thinks that legal sex designations should be the same as gender identity (which of course can change). But there are obvious problems with that, the most obvious being the existence of “women’s spaces” like women’s sports, jails, or rape treatment. In such cases biological sex does matter, for trans women should not compete athletically against women or be put in women’s prisons; and rape victims should have the option to be treated or counseled by a biological woman.

I’ll give just a few quotes from Eckert as I don’t want to make this too long. Quotes from the article are indented, while, as always, my responses are flush left:

[Joyce] thinks men are infiltrating female spaces, both in restrooms and in sports, and that this is a vast and dangerous issue despite a lack of evidence and a predominance of evidence that sports participation on the correct team is vital to both mental and physical health, especially for trans youth.

The prohibition of trans women in female sports is to assure fair competition for women, not “mental and physical health”.

Joyce is no scientist. Joyce’s Twitter bio includes the line “show me the 3rd gamete & we can talk.” Joyce considers the term “TERF” a slur. It is evident throughout the painstaking reading of her online footprint and book that she labors under confusion, ignorance, and lack of scientific knowledge. And, of course, Joyce believes that trans activists are suppressing research.

I like the third gamete quote because it is indeed the presence of only two types of gametes that is the definition of sex: men have small mobile ones and women large immobile ones. And yes, “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) is indeed a slur by gender activists against “gender-critical feminists” like Joyce.  Here’s the very first result I got when I googled TERF.  DEROGATORY!

Another quote:

 Joyce doesn’t understand why she’s seen as transphobic; in one interview, she claims,

“So according to them, I’m transphobic for just saying human beings come in two types, male and female…that’s transphobic.”

No, Helen. That’s not why you’re transphobic. Asserting two sexes is just incorrect. You’re transphobic because you claim that individuals cannot ever change biological sex, and anyone who disagrees with that statement is just frightened of activists. Your analogy is:

Again, Eckert is wrong here.  There are two sexes and no, you cannot change your biological sex—not unless you can change your developmental system so that it can make gametes different from those produced by your natal sex.

There’s a lot of guilt by association; here’s one case, combined with a false statement:

Natasha Loder was a judge [of the Maddox prize] both this year and in 2018 and, like Joyce, works for The Economist. According to her Twitter, Loder believes that campaigning for women’s rights means restricting trans rights, that the European consensus on treating trans youth is shifting due to weak evidence, and that gender-affirming care is experimental (false on all counts).

In fact, in nearly all European countries at present, the use of puberty blockers in children or adolescents—part of “gender-affirming care”—is indeed considered an experimental treatment, used in only very rare situations.

Two more bits of juvenilia. Eckert loves to give pejorative middle names to the people Eckert doesn’t like. To wit:

Joyce’s anti-trans origin story is not original (unoriginality is her ongoing theme). Like Abigail “I made the term ‘irreversible’ popular to use in trans medicine even though it’s nonsense” Shrier—Joyce wrote her book a favorable blurb, prominent on the back cover—and Lisa “I created a new Satanic panic with rapid-onset gender dysphoria, which despite all efforts, still doesn’t exist” Littman, Joyce became randomly aware of transgender issues with no prior knowledge of our community and became concerned about it/this/that, whatever that means.

Finally, here’s a labeled photo to show Eckert’s guilty-by-association trope:

  1. Professor Kathleen Stock, philosophy don who quit Sussex University amid gender row. Author of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters For Feminism
  2. Maya Forstater, co-founder of the Sex Matters campaign group
  3. Alison Bailey, co-founder of the LGB Alliance
  4. Helen Joyce, journalist, author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality and activist with Sex Matters
  5. Liane Timmermann, activist with Get The L Out– Lesbian Not Queer campaign group
  6. Angela C Wild, businesswoman and creator of Wild Womyn
  7. JK Rowling
  8. Suzanne Moore
  9. Julie Bindel,  journalist and women’s rights campaigner, author of Feminism for Women

This is Helen Joyce, the person short-listed for a prestigious science award.

What a bunch of TERFs!  Joyce is right behind J. K. Rowling, so clearly some of the TERFiness has rubbed off.

I won’t go on further; you can look at Eckert’s piece (but beware of their references, which are cherry-picked), and judge for yourself.  Eckert’s article is an unholy gemisch of false accusations, misrepresentations, and almost unhinged fulmination—all because Joyce’s book was short-listed for a science prize, and didn’t even win! This is not an evenhanded or even-tempered review, but a way-too-long rant against those people who are simply calling for caution in “gender affirming care”. What a shame that Science-Based Medicine has sunk so low!

ADDENDUM FROM READER JOOLZ (given with permission):

Eckert: “[Joyce] thinks men are infiltrating female spaces, […] despite a lack of evidence”.
Joolz:
There IS evidence. Plenty. I attach an image with some names. They can all be googled, eg: Shawn Hallet or Jacob Guerro. 
This information has been shared with activists many, many times. But they ignore it and continue with the same false assertions.
It’s frustrating. It’s like fighting fog. They insist TW [trans women] are safe, and that ‘you are trans if you say you are’, but when I mention the 436 TW prosecuted for rape over a 7-year period in England and Wales, they say ‘those men weren’t trans’. How convenient 🤦‍♀️

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.

The American Association of Biological Anthropologists denies the sex binary in humans (on ideological grounds, of course)

December 23, 2023 • 10:30 am

The other day I discussed how several anthropologists wrote a letter supporting the decision of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropological Society (CASCA) to cancel a panel on sex (“Let’s talk about sex, baby: why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology”) at their annual meeting. Appaerntly they objected to the fact that there are two sexes in humans that can be identified in skeletons with a high degree of accuracy.

One of the three signers of the letter was our old friend Agustín Fuentes, a Princeton professor who apparently decided to devote most of his career being uber-woke (he has, for example, damned Charles Darwin for promoting genocide and being a misogynist).

The letter by Fuentes et al, attacked the sex binary in humans, implying that in our relatives the orangutans there are more than two sexes, because there are two types of males in at least one of the three named species: big dominant males with cheek flaps, and smaller males lacking jowls. The statement was this was this (my bolding):

People are born with non-binary genitalia every day – we tend to call people who fall into this group intersex. People are born with sex chromosomes that are not XX or XY but X, XXY, XXXY and more, every day. The same is true with gonads. What’s more, someone can have intersex genitalia but not intersex gonads, intersex chromosomes but not intersex genitalia. These bodily differences demonstrate the massive variation seen in sex physiology across vertebrate species. Looking beyond humans, we see three forms of the adult orangutan. Does this represent a sex binary? Significant percentages of many reptile species have intersex genitalia. Are we still trying to call sex a binary? The binary limits the kinds of questions we can ask and therefore limits the scope of our science.

Well that’s just stupid. They’re clearly implying that there are more than two sexes in orangutans. In fact, as all sane primatologists agree, there are only two sexes in orangs: in this case there are two types of males and one type of female. Yep, still two sexes!  Even Wikipedia recognizes that the two forms of males are, yes, MALES. They produce sperm, and that’s the diagnosis and definition of males in animals (and vascular plants).

I will say no more except to add that this letter and its craziness comes purely from the ideological view that if there are humans who don’t feel that they are members of their natal sex, then we must be able to see a spectrum of biological sex in nature. That is, we impose what we want to be true upon nature itself, an error called the “reverse appeal to nature” fallacy. Luana and I described that in our paper:

This inverts an old fallacy into a new one, which we call the reverse appeal to nature. Instead of assuming that what is natural must be good, this fallacy holds that “what is good must be natural.”

If there are humans with gender dysphoria, then we must see a spectrum of sex in humans. But in fact we don’t. And we don’t see it on other animals either. The “reverse appeal to nature” is the basis for six misstatements by ideologues in my field that Luana Maroja and I discussed in an article called “The ideological subversion of biology.”

But now there’s another infection of anthropology by wokeness that I’ve learned of, and it’s an infection not just of cultural anthropology, but anthropology in general. I refer to the following statement by the American Association of Biological Anthropologists. This is an old and venerable (founded 1928) organization that used to be called the American Association of Physical Anthropology, but changed their name after a series of votes, though I’m not sure why. At any rate, I hear that it’s the home of the top peer-reviewed journal in anthropology.

That, however, didn’t keep it from going full woke, and it issued a statement in support of trans lives (below) that denies the sex binary in humans. And it clearly does that on ideological grounds. Here’s the statement (it appears here). I’ve added red where they go off the rails.

This society, like all science societies, really should institute a policy of institutional neutrality, because this has almost nothing to do with anthropology. It’s virtue-signaling, pure and simple, and their denial of the sex binary is simply nonsense. Of course it’s proper to oppose bias and bigotry against trans people, but it’s also proper to oppose attacks on innocent Israelis and the murder of Syrians by their own President. Note as well that they make a contentious statement here, approving of “care that is gender and life affirming,” There are many people, presumably including anthropologists, who don’t approve of the form of “gender-affirming” care that immediately accept’s a child’s self-diagnosis of being born in the wrong body, and putting them on a conveyer belt that ineluctably leads to hormone treatment and surgery.

Shame on the American Association of Biological Anthropologists! Not only do they make a big scientific mistake, but, in their effort to show how wonderful they are, promote a form of therapy that may well be harmful to the very group of gender-dysphoric youngsters that they want to help.

h/t: Elizabeth Weiss

Scientific American is back to distorting the facts to buttress its ideology

October 24, 2023 • 11:00 am

It’s been a while since Scientific American has published misleading and distorted articles to buttress its “progressive” Left ideology, and I hoped they had shaped up. (To be honest, I haven’t followed the magazine, and got the following link from a reader.) My hope was dashed yesterday when I read this new article claiming that women constituted a high proportion of hunters in early hunter-gatherer societies.  It is full of misconceptions and distortions (some of which must be deliberate), neglects contrary data, is replete with tendentious ideological claims, and even misrepresents the claim they’re debunking.  You can read it for free by clicking on the screenshot below or by going here:

First, the idea that they’re trying to debunk is that women were “second class citizens” in early societies, forced to gather food because they were tied to childcare duties, while men did all the hunting. This is apparently an attempt to buttress the editors’ and authors’ feminism. But feminism doesn’t need buttressing with data on hunting; women’s equality is a moral proposition that doesn’t depend on observations about hunting. In other words, women have equal moral rights and should not be treated unfairly because fair treatment is the moral thing to do. If women never hunted, would we then be justified in treating them as second-class citizens? Hell, no!  Here’s their thesis:

Even if you’re not an anthropologist, you’ve probably encountered one of this field’s most influential notions, known as Man the Hunter. The theory proposes that hunting was a major driver of human evolution and that men carried this activity out to the exclusion of women. It holds that human ancestors had a division of labor, rooted in biological differences between males and females, in which males evolved to hunt and provide, and females tended to children and domestic duties. It assumes that males are physically superior to females and that pregnancy and child-rearing reduce or eliminate a female’s ability to hunt.

Man the Hunter has dominated the study of human evolution for nearly half a century and pervaded popular culture. It is represented in museum dioramas and textbook figures, Saturday morning cartoons and feature films. The thing is, it’s wrong.

The story is in fact the cover story of the November issue, so the magazine will never, ever issue a correction or clarification:

Click to read for yourself:

First, note that I’ve written at least five pieces on the “woman hunter” hypothesis: here, here, here, here, and here. The source of the hypothesis was a PLOS One paper arguing the following (from the PLOS One paper):

Of the 63 different foraging societies, 50 (79%) of the groups had documentation on women hunting. Of the 50 societies that had documentation on women hunting, 41 societies had data on whether women hunting was intentional or opportunistic. Of the latter, 36 (87%) of the foraging societies described women’s hunting as intentional, as opposed to the 5 (12%) societies that described hunting as opportunistic. In societies where hunting is considered the most important subsistence activity, women actively participated in hunting 100% of the time.

According to the authors’ data, then, 36 out of 50 societies in which there were data on women hunting (72%), the hunting was intentional.  That is the important result: in most societies, women participated in hunting.  The present paper also implies that this was not rare participation—say a few women included in a big hunting party—but that women constituted a substantial proportion of those engaged in hunting, and that a substantial proportion of hunter-gatherer societies had women hunting.  Here’s how the new Sci Am paper ends:

Now when you think of “cave people,” we hope, you will imagine a mixed-sex group of hunters encircling an errant reindeer or knapping stone tools together rather than a heavy-browed man with a club over one shoulder and a trailing bride. Hunting may have been remade as a masculine activity in recent times, but for most of human history, it belonged to everyone.

“Hunting. . .  belonged to everyone” clearly implies, as the paper does throughout, that women’s hunting was nearly as frequent and important as men’s hunting. This is an essential part of the authors’ ideological contention, for if women hunted only rarely, or constituted only a small fraction of hunting groups, that would imply intolerable hunting inequity.

But the authors’ defense of their hypothesis is deeply flawed. Here are six reasons, and I’ll try to be brief:

1.)  Nobody maintains that, as the authors assert, “men carried this activity out to the exclusion of women”. This may have been a trope in the past, but even those rebutting Obocock and Lacy’s (henceforth O&L’s) data these days do not claim that women never hunted. Of course they did, and no scientist would say that “no women ever hunted” because we cannot document that. The question, which the authors don’t address, is how frequently they hunted and what proportion of hunters did they constitute?  (See below for more.)

2.) I don’t know anyone (I may have missed some) who argues that men evolved to hunt: that is, natural selection acting on hunting behavior itself caused a difference in the sexes in their propensity to hunt. The alternative hypothesis—and one that is far more credible—is that sexual selection based on male-male competition and female choice led, in our ancestors, to the evolution of greater size, strength, musculature, and physiology in men than in women. Once that had evolved, then men would obviously be the sex that would participate in hunting. (And yes, childcare by women is also a possible reason.) The authors’ claim that “males evolved to hunt and provide, and females tended to children and domestic duties” is thus misleading in that males probably got their generally superior athletic abilities (see below) as a result of selection, and their hunting then became a byproduct of that. Similarly, women tend to their children more because that’s another result of sexual selection (women have greater reproductive investment in children), and their lower participation in hunting could also be a byproduct of that.

O&L don’t mention this alternative hypothesis in their paper.

3). The authors neglect important data casting doubt on O&L’s conclusions. Soon after the original paper by Anderson et al. appeared, other anthropologists began to find fault with it. To see examples of how Anderson et al.’s data is dubious,  see my posts here, here and here giving other people’s rebuttals.

Here are the conclusions from one critique, which does recognize women’s value in hunting small animals:

100% of the societies had a sexual division of labor in hunting. Women may have participated with men in some hunting contexts, typically capturing small game with nets, but participated much less in large game hunting with weapons or by persistence. Even within these contexts, it was usually the case that the role of women during the communal hunt was different. For example, women flushed wild game into nets while men dispatched the game.

These are my subjective ratings based on the papers I read in Anderson et al. (2023) and the supporting literature I cited. You may disagree and assign some different ratings. The point is that there is substantial variation across cultures in sex-based hunting roles. Additionally, none of the societies truly have an absence of these roles.

. . . Why did the perception of “man the hunter” arise? It’s likely because we see many sex-segregated hunting practices, particularly in hunting large game with weapons. Additionally, when you think of hunting, the first thing that comes to mind may not be chasing birds into nets. You probably think of a man with a spear — usually a man, not a woman, with a spear.

Here are tweets from another anthropologist looking at many societies, about which I wrote this:

Before I go, I’ll call your attention to a series of tweets by Vivek Venkataraman (start here on Twitter), an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology of the University of Calgary. His university webpage describes his interests:

Dr. Venkataraman is an evolutionary anthropologist who is broadly interested in the evolution of the human diet and food systems, and their relation to life history and behavior. He is assistant director of the Guassa Gelada Research Project ,and also the co-founder and co-PI of the Orang Asli Health and Lifeways Project (OAHeLP)

Venkataraman is somewhat dubious about some of the PLOS One paper’s results, especially the 80% frequency of women hunting among all hunter-gather societies. On the other hand, like me, he applauds any new data that can change our views of biology, and thinks the frequency of hunter-gatherer societies in which women hunt is somewhere between 13% and 80%; but he also thinks that women’s hunting was even more frequent in the past than it is now (see below)

Have a look at these. . . .  tweets, which involve examining many more “forager” societies:

 

The O&L paper does not mention these criticisms, and therefore does not answer them.  They are relying on data that has come into severe question because of its incompleteness and possible cherry-picking. They simply cannot be unaware of these data; they just ignored them.  (Note: I haven’t looked for more recent data addressing O&L’s claim,)

4.) The authors repeatedly imply that, in effect, males and females are equal in athletic performance, undercutting the idea that men hunted because they were athletically better equipped to hunt. But O&L’s claim of “athletic equity” is false. The authors note that women outcompete men in some endurance sports, citing this:

Females are more regularly dominating ultraendurance events such as the more than 260-mile Montane Spine foot race through England and Scotland, the 21-mile swim across the English Channel and the 4,300-mile Trans Am cycling race across the U.S.

I looked up the Montane Spine Foot race, and the Wikipedia tables for summer and winter events give the results of 17 races, one of which was won by women. (I presume they compete together; if not, the women’s times are still slower.)

Likewise, in all English Channel crossings in which there are men’s and women’s records (there are two- and three-way crossings in addition to single crossings), the men have faster times.

Finally, in all the Trans Am Bike Race results given on Wikipedia (11 are shown), a woman won only once: Lael Wilcox in the 2016 eastbound race. In all other races save one, in which a woman finished third, no women ever placed in the top three.

I conclude that O&L’s claim that women “regularly dominate” in these events is at best a distortion, at worst a lie. There is no “dominance” evident if a woman only had the fastest time in a single event.

Further, while it may be the case (I didn’t look it up) that women more often win events in archery, shooting, and badminton, in every other competitive sport I know of, men do better than women. Here is a table from Duke Law’s Center for Sports Law and Policy giving men’s and women’s best performances in 11 track and field events, as well as boys’ and girls’ best performances. In every case, not only was the record held by a man, but the best boy’s performance was better than the best women’s performance.

There is no doubt that, across nearly all sports, men perform better than women. That’s expected because of men’s greater upper-body strength, bone strength, athletic-related physiology, and grip strength. I didn’t look up sports like tennis, but we all know that the best men outcompete the best women by a long shot, something Serena Williams has admitted.  And. . .

She and her sister Venus were both thrashed by Germany’s world No.203 Karsten Braasch at the Australian Open in 1998 while trying to prove they could beat any man outside the top 200.

If I erred here, please correct me!

Here’s a quote by O&L (my bolding)

The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women’s events because of the belief that they will make the women “artificially faster,” as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.

Here the authors are wading into quicksand. In fact, the entire quote is offensive to reason, for it implies that, if women were treated the same as men in sports, they would do as well. Given the differences between the sexes in morphology and physiology, such a claim flies in the face of everything we know.  The “pacesetters” argument is purely hypothetical, and I’m betting that women who had pacesetter men (note: not pacesetter women), would not turn women into winners. But of course it’s worth a try if O&L are right.

5.) O&L claim that both sex and gender are a spectrum, and sex is not binary. Here’s their quote (emphasis is mine):

For the purpose of describing anatomical and physiological evidence, most of the literature uses “female” and “male,” so we use those words here when discussing the results of such studies. For ethnographic and archaeological evidence, we are attempting to reconstruct social roles, for which the terms “woman” and “man” are usually used. Unfortunately, both these word sets assume a binary, which does not exist biologically, psychologically or socially. Sex and gender both exist as a spectrum, but when citing the work of others, it is difficult to add that nuance.

No, Scientific American: I know your editor thinks that biological sex is a spectrum, but she’s wrong and so are you. The “sex is a spectrum” mantra is another ideological tactic mistakenly used to buttress trans people or people of non-standard genders. But Mother Nature doesn’t care about ideology, and, as Luana Maroja and I showed in our paper on “The Ideological Subversion of Biology” (see point #1, about sex), sex is binary in all animals. In humans, for example, the frequency of exceptions to the binary is only 0.018%, or 1 person in 5600. That is about the same probability of flipping a nickel and having it land on its edge, but we don’t say “heads, tail, or edge?” when calling a coin toss.  For all practical purposes, sex is binary, and if you want to argue about it, don’t do so here. And, as Luana and I emphasized, whether or not sex is binary has no bearing on the treatment (or nearly all rights) of trans and non-standard-gender folks.

6.) Whether or how often women hunted is irrelevant to our views of men and women. Really, why does ideology push Scientific American, and in this case O&L, to distort the facts and to leave out contrary data, when the rights of women don’t depend in the least on whether they hunted or on their relative athletic performance?  Women’s rights rest on morality, not on observations of nature. Yes, there are some trivial exceptions, like those of us who don’t think that transwomen should be allowed to compete athletically against biological women, but there are many feminists who agree with that.  The real feminist program of equal rights and opportunities for women has nothing to do with whether they hunted as much as men in ancient (or in modern) hunter-gatherer societies.

In the end, we have still more evidence that Scientific American is no longer circling the drain, but is now in the drain, headed for, well, the sewers. It used to have scientists writing about their field, with no ideological bias, but now has ideologues (these authors happen to be scientist-ideologues) writing about science in a biased and misleading way.

Apparently this trend will continue, and apparently the publishers won’t do anything about it. So it goes. But those of you who want your science untainted by “progressive” ideology had best look elsewhere.

More mishigas: Two anthropology societies cancel an accepted symposium on sex and gender because it would “harm” their members

September 27, 2023 • 12:30 pm

I’m probably late to the party, but the latest gossip about the Authoritarian Left involves the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) deciding to deplatform an entire symposium on sex and gender in anthropology—all because of the claim that it could cause mental “harm”to some people.

There are three letters involved, all of which you can see at a site set up by Elizabeth Weiss, a physical anthropologist at San Jose State (I’ve written about her before, as she’s been professionally demonized for wanting to scientifically study Native American remains).

You can see all the letters in the tweets below from Colin Wright, or at Weiss’s site.

Here’s the skinny in three parts

1.) Six women anthropologists proposed to hold a symposium at the AAA and CASCA’s joint meeting in Toronto called “Let’s Talk about sex, baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology.” (The title comes from a popular song by Salt N Pepa.) You can see their proposal here. It’s a mixed bag, with some intriguing talks, like Weiss’s, and some others that are postmodern or confusing.  But that’s irrelevant to what happened. At any rate, you might intuit from the title why the seminar got ditched. Guess!

Kathleen Lowery at the University of Alberta organized the symposium. Here’s the summary:

Session Descripton: While it has become increasingly common in anthropology and public life to substitute ‘sex’ with ‘gender’, there are multiple domains of research in which biological sex remains irreplaceably relevant to anthropological analysis. Contesting the transition from sex to gender in anthropological scholarship deserves much more critical consideration than it has hitherto received in major disciplinary fora like AAA / CASCA. This diverse international panel brings together scholars from socio-cultural anthropology, archaeology, and biological anthropology who describe why in their work gender is not helpful and only sex will do. This is particularly the case when the work is concerned with equity and the deep analysis of power, and which has as an aim the achievement of genuine inclusivity. With research foci from hominin evolution to contemporary artificial intelligence, from the anthropology of education to the debates within contemporary feminism about surrogacy, panelists make the case that while not all anthropologists need to talk about sex, baby, some absolutely do.

Elizabeth told me that the contributions, which you can see at the link, were so diverse and wide-ranging that it was likely that the six panelists would have disagreed with each other.

As I said, the proposal was accepted by the AAA and CASCA for the meeting. But then they has second thoughts—and rejected it (see below).  I suspect that the main issue was Weiss’s talk, which maintained that “skeletons are binary”, which is true, but not something that cultural anthropologists, at least, would find comfortable. THERE IS NO BINARY IN WOKEWORLD!

Here’s Elizabeth’s own proposed presentation, which I think helped scupper the symposium (not her fault!):

No bones about it: skeletons are binary; people may not be. Sex identification – whether an individual was male or female – using the skeleton is one of the most fundamental components in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology. Anthropologists have improved their ability to determine sex since their initial studies on skeletal remains, which depended on subjective assessment of skeletal robusticity to say whether someone was male or female. An understanding of physical differences in the pelvis related to childbirth, hormonal impacts on bones, and extensive comparative studies have provided anthropologists with an array of traits, such as those in the Phenice Method, to determine sex using just bones. The use of DNA to identify sex in skeletons by their 23rd chromosomes enables anthropologists to say whether infants are male or female for use in both criminal abuse cases and archaeological cases, such as in recognizing infanticide practices. Anthropologists’ ability to determine whether a skeleton is male or female is not dependent on time or culture; the same traits can be used to make a sex estimate in a forensic case in Canada, or to estimate sex in a Paleoindian dated around 11,500 years ago in Brazil. As anthropologists study more remains from more cultures and time periods, sex identification has improved, because sex differences are biologically-determined. In forensics, however, anthropologists should be (and are) working on ways to ensure that skeletal finds are identified by both biological sex and their gender identity, which is essential due to the current rise in transitioning individuals and their overrepresentation as crime victims. —Elizabeth Weiss

Note that Weiss even mentions that there may be forensic ways to identify gender identity (e.g., she mentioned the presence of “signs of plastic surgery” to me). But I suspect the assertion of the binary nature of skeletons is what eventually raised hackles,

At any rate, the symposium was still accepted and scheduled for the meetings.

2.) But then, in November, the two societies decided to deep-six the panel, and here are the reasons they gave:

Dear panelists,

We write to inform you that at the request of numerous members the respective executive boards of AAA and CASCA reviewed the panel submission “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” and reached a decision to remove the session from the AAA/CASCA 2023 conference program(me). This decision was based on extensive consultation and was reached in the spirit of respect for our values, the safety and dignity of our members, and the scientific integrity of the program (me). The reason the session deserved further scrutiny was that the ideas were advanced in such a way as to cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large.

While there were those who disagree with this decision, we would hope they know their voice was heard and was very much a part of the conversation. It is our hope that we continue to work together so that we become stronger and more unified within each of our associations. Going forward, we will undertake a major review of the processes

There’s a lot to say about this, but you can see the problem: the assertion of “our values” (which of course are unstated and surely not shared by all), the ritual invocation that the panel would harm “the safety and dignity of our members” (you’d have to be a fool to buy that), and the ludicrous claim that the sessions would “harm” members of the trans and LGBTQ1 anthropology community and “the community at large” (my response is “no they wouldn’t”).

This is all nonsense, of course. If scientists can’t listen to presentations like the ones accepted without being “harmed”, they need therapy, not canceled talks.  And, of course, the societies are imposing ideological standards on the community that will chill dissent: exactly what you don’t want in science.  That’s clear from the last paragraph, which implies that all symposia will be vetted in the future for political correctness.

Here we see a good example of how science is being bowdlerized via some topics being declared taboo. It’s infuriating, and the two societies should be embarrassed.

3.) In a very good defense of their symposium, the panelists wrote back to the societies; you can see their letter here.

But of course despite their good objections, the AAA and CASCA aren’t going to move.  The symposium is considered “harmful”, and so it can’t go on.

How many of these things have to happen before scientists realize that the chilling of speech, the declaring of topics taboo to both research and discuss, and the ritual invocation of “harm” to minority groups by the to-and-fro discussion inherent in science—that all of this is going to kill off science as we know it? But they don’t care, for their main concern is not the discovery of scientific truth but adherence to the current liberal and orthodox ideology.

Colin’s tweets on the fracas:

 

New Zealand government spends $2.7 million to test already-debunked indigenous theory about the effect of lunar phases on plants

July 30, 2023 • 9:45 am

We’ve already learned that, with respect to some indigenous “scientific” theories, the New Zealand government is willing to commit the “Concorde” or “sunk cost” fallacy, continuing to fund lines of inquiry even though those projects have already been proven wrong or unproductive. A particularly egregious example, which I’ve documented before (see here, here and here) is the NZ government’s handing out $660,000 (NZ) to Priscilla Wehi of the University of Otago to pursue claims that the Polynesians (ancestors of the Māori) had discovered Antarctica in the early seventh century.  That claim was debunked by Māori scholars themselves, who discovered it was based on a mistranslation of an oral legend. The real discoverers of Antarctica were members of a Russian expedition in 1820. But Wehi was still given a big chunk of money to pursue a palpably stupid idea—only because it was based on an faulty indigenous legend.

The same thing is about to happen again, but this time involving more money. Now $2.7 million (NZ) has been given out to Māori workers to test (not really a “test”, as there’s no control) their notion that the phases of the moon affect plants to the extent that you can improve crop yield by planting and harvesting during certain propitious lunar phases.

This idea had already been debunked decades ago, but once again the Kiwis who hand out grants don’t care; they just want to proffer money to Māori, presumably as some form of affirmation of indigenous “ways of knowing”.

But read on about the government’s funding of Māori “tests” of the effects of lunar phases on planting.  Is there a control that ignores Moon phases? Not that I see. Further, the data already exists in the literature to show that this endeavor is useless. It’s not a “test,” but a complete waste of taxpayers money.

This article is from a section of New Zealand’s most widely read newspaper, the New Zealand Herald.  Note that “maramataka” is the Māori lunar calendar

Note that throughout the article there are reference to “positive results” of relying on the Moon’s phases for planting and harvesting, but no data have been published, and none are given. This is an exercise in confirmation bias, in giving money based on what people want to be true. 

Using ancient Māori knowledge of moon phases has shown positive results on pasture growth and riparian planting resilience for Bay of Plenty farmers Miru Young and Mohi Beckham.

The farmers were among those who spent two days on historic Te Kūiti Pā being guided through the Māori lunar calendar at a first-of-its-kind workshop.

They were shown why moon phases can influence aspects of plant growth, seed-sowing effectiveness and the potency of healing properties in native plants that Māori farmers have used to counter illnesses in farm animals for decades.

“We’re not here to preach maramataka (lunar calendar) but encourage farmers to observe so they can utilise the tools around us,” said Erina Wehi-Barton.

“Using maramataka and traditional plant knowledge is about working smarter not harder.

. . .Erina is a mātauranga practitioner and project specialist/kairangahau Māori for the trial Rere ki uta rere ki tai.

Note the implication below that this is a controlled study: mātauranga, characterized as “Māori science” is to be tested alongside “Western science”. But that’s the only time you hear anything about a control, and I’m pretty sure there isn’t one. My bolding:

The Government-funded trial explores mātauranga — Māori science —alongside Western science and farmer knowledge to improve soil health.

It is one of three place-based projects awarded funding as part of the Revitalise Te Taiao research programme. Paeroa-based Rere ki uta rere ki tai has been allocated $2.7 million to test farming methods that aim to “enhance the mana and mauri of the soil” across 10 farms.

“Mana” refers roughly to “spiritual power”, while “mauri” means “life principle/vital essence”.  Both are teleological words that have no place in science.  But there’s more:

Erina said farmers already spent their days observing differences in pasture and forest growth through the seasons and were uniquely placed to gain insights over a lunar cycle. [JAC: where are the data?]

. . . The workshop came about after Erina visited Miru’s 80ha dairy farm in Pukehina, and had a conversation about maramataka.

Miru’s father Patrick and late granddad Steve had shared what they knew about maramataka, but the workshop allowed Young to learn more about each individual moon phase and how it might influence his farm.

“I grew up with maramataka from Dad and Koro (grandad), and Dad used it for gardening, hunting, fishing and diving. Now I do it for all of those, but I never thought about doing it for farming,” he says.

“What I do with fishing and diving is I write down what I get when I go out and what the moon phase is, then I know where to go back at what time. I saw patterns, more seasonal than anything.

“But with farming, I didn’t know how it might work because we use a contractor for planting, and he comes down when he’s ready, not when I’m ready.

“After I’d spent two years writing down my planting and the moon phases, I’d built a better relationship with my contractor, and I picked a better time to plant on, and now he’ll come then.”

Miru has recorded his observations that pasture was slower to get going at certain moon phases.

During the workshop on the marae, he talked with Wehi-Barton’s “ngahere parents” — who have taught her their knowledge of the forest — and related this to his experience hunting by the moon phase.

“I could see the patterns with hunting and diving.”

What patterns? Where are the data?

Fellow Bay of Plenty farmer Mohi Beckham grew up in a big family and learned from his mother who incorporated traditional Māori knowledge into her garden that helped sustain the whānau [extended family].

He has employed contractors who use the lunar cycle to guide riparian planting times on his brother’s Scylla Farm in Pukehina, a 208ha mixed dairy farm and orchard that he manages in the Bay of Plenty.

“We’re already doing maramataka on our farm through our planting of riparian plants, and the results they’ve had are amazing,” he says.

“The contractors only work in the high energy days of the lunar cycle, which is anywhere between 12 and 20 days compared to five days a week for conventional planting contractors. But the productivity is higher in the maramataka boys.

“A lot of our stuff has been under water this year and there’s a 93 per cent survival rate for their [maramataka] plantings. Usually, you are lucky when the survival rate is at 80 per cent.”

That’s about all the data we get, and it’s not only anecdotal, but not precise.  They didn’t even record the observations! (my bolding)

Mohi says he hasn’t kept a diary to properly record observations, but had experimented with sowing pasture on different moon phases that are resting and dormant phases or high-energy phases for plant growth.

“Two years ago we planted some according to the best phase of maramataka and some a week before that high-energy period. The maramataka outgrew the first area sown, even though it was planted seven to 10 days later.”

Taranaki farmer Nick Collins, the farm engagement adviser for Rere ki uta rere ki tai, has used moon phases during his 18 years as an organic dairy farmer.

“With hay, we found it cures better on the new moon, or after the full moon, because there’s lower moisture levels in the pasture,” he says.

“Leading up to the full moon is the active phase, which was a good time for silage because we weren’t worried about drying the plant. But we found that with hay, it seemed to dry better when the plant has lower moisture levels, and that’s a waning moon.”

Note: the hay “seems to dry better”.  When you hear stuff like that, remember Feynman’s remarks about  the nature of science:

“The first principle is not to fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”

What we see above is simply an exercise in reinforcing self-foolery. And of course the newspaper doesn’t dare raise any questions about it.

But there’s really no need to waste this $2.7 million, because there are already many, many published studies examining whether the phases of the moon influence crop physiology or yield. They’re summarized in the paper below from journal Agronomy, published by MDPI.  And the answer is that the lunar phases have no palpable effect on crop growth or yield, mainly because the influence of the Moon’s phases is simply too miniscule to affect plants. In other words, we already know that the studies above won’t show a positive effect, because similar work has already been tried.

Click the screenshot to read.

The authors did an extensive survey of the influence of lunar phases on plant physiology and, looking at all published studies, found no effect. 

Here’s the abstract, which pulls no punches, noting that popular agricultural practices that are tied to lunar phases have “no scientific backing.” Did that stop the NZ government from handing out millions to farmers using indigenous “ways of knowing” based on those phases? Nope.

All bolding is mine.

Abstract

This paper reviews the beliefs which drive some agricultural sectors to consider the lunar influence as either a stress or a beneficial factor when it comes to organizing their tasks. To address the link between lunar phases and agriculture from a scientific perspective, we conducted a review of textbooks and monographs used to teach agronomy, botany, horticulture and plant physiology; we also consider the physics that address the effects of the Moon on our planet. Finally, we review the scientific literature on plant development, specifically searching for any direct or indirect reference to the influence of the Moon on plant physiology. We found that there is no reliable, science-based evidence for any relationship between lunar phases and plant physiology in any plant–science related textbooks or peer-reviewed journal articles justifying agricultural practices conditioned by the Moon. Nor does evidence from the field of physics support a causal relationship between lunar forces and plant responses. Therefore, popular agricultural practices that are tied to lunar phases have no scientific backing. We strongly encourage teachers involved in plant sciences education to objectively address pseudo-scientific ideas and promote critical thinking.

And the conclusion:

Conclusions

Science has widely established different evidences: (i) the Moon’s gravity on the Earth cannot have any effect on the life cycle of plants due to the fact that it is 3.3 × 10−5 ms−2, almost 300,000 times lower that the Earth’s gravity; (ii) since all the oceans are communicated and we can consider their size being the size of the Earth, the Moon’s influence on the tides is 10−6 ms−2, but for a 2 m height plant such value is 3 × 10−13 ms−2 and, therefore, completely imperceptible; (iii) the Moon’s illuminance cannot have any effect on plant life since it is, at best, 128,000 times lower than the minimum of sunlight on an average day; (iv) the rest of possible effects of the Moon on the Earth (e.g., magnetic field, polarization of light) are non-existent.

The logical consequence of such evidence is that none of these effects appear in physics and biology reference handbooks. However, many of these beliefs are deeply ingrained in both agricultural traditions and collective imagery. This shows that more research should be undertaken on the possible effects observed on plants and assigned to the Moon by the popular belief, addressing their causes, if any. It would also be interesting to address these issues in both compulsory education and formal higher agricultural education in order to address pseudo-scientific ideas and promote critical thinking.

Well, the “research” being undertaken above is not scientific, as there’s no control—but perhaps “control studies” are an invidious artifact of “Western science”. Because of this, it doesn’t count as the “more research on possible” effects called for by Mayoral et al.

If this was a proposal submitted to the U.S.’s National Science Foundation, it would never be funded for two reasons: it flies in the face of what’s already established knowledge in agronomy, and preliminary studies haven’t been done to show that there’s a likely effect of lunar phases on crop yield.

Mayoral et al. also warn that studies like the one above border on “pseudoscience” and can pollute science teaching. I’d leave out the words “border on” and say “are pseudoscience.”  From the Agronomy paper:

We are concerned about the insidious spread of pseudo-scientific ideas, not only in the field of plant science (which determines many of the behaviours, habits and techniques of many farmers in rural areas) but into the broader population through both formal and informal education. As science educators, we are especially concerned about the widespread belief in pseudo-science throughout the general populace and especially in science teachers. Solbes et al. showed that 64.9% of a sample of 131 future science teachers agree or partially agree with the expression “The phase of the Moon can affect, to some extent, several factors such as health, the birth of children or certain agricultural tasks”. [If they surveyed the Māori, the proportion would be higher than 65%.]

Given this worrying scenario, teachers must promote critical thinking as an essential part of citizenship development. . .

Is that going to happen in New Zealand? Again, not a chance. It’s considered “racist” to denigrate Māori practices or Māori “ways of knowing”. Yes, there are some empirical trial and error bits of knowledge in MM, but none of them are based on the kind of hypothesis-testing used by modern science. This study is just another bit of unscientific work. Further, it has the potential to damage Kiwi agriculture, basing it on traditional lore rather than hard scientific tests. And, as the authors note, it has the potential to damage the scientific education of New Zealand’s youth as well, for the government under PM Chris Hipkins is determined to teach mātauranga Māori in science classes as equivalent to modern (“Western”) science. (Note that science isn’t “Western”; it’s the purview of workers throughout the world.)

I was sent the Herald article by three separate New Zealand scientists who found it wrongheaded and foolish. One of them sent me a thoughtful take on it, which I reproduce with permission:

“If the proponents of this lunar phase proposal had a commitment to using both science and mātauranga Māori they would have done some homework on the relevant scientific literature beforehand. Rather, it appears that either they were happy to ignore existing scientific data that challenges their claims, or they believed the scientific data didn’t count because it wasn’t done from a mātauranga Māori perspective. It is currently unclear in epistemological terms what would constitute a legitimate test in mātauranga Māori. Another important question is whether there is a commitment to publishing negative results of the proposed work

Framing this as “Western science” versus mātauranga Māori thus opens the door to ignoring previous work. This will lead in many cases to wasteful duplication of previous research, some of which should disqualify proposals based on discredited ideas. This is the point that Jonathan Rauch makes in “The Constitution of Knowledge” about the importance of societies having to agree on a common set of facts. Once we abandon that, as we must if we buy into postmodernist cultural relativism, we’re condemned to some form of process argument based on political power. This would inevitably involve direct comparisons between mātauranga Māori and science that would benefit no one. Much better to treat each as distinct and of value for different reasons. Many proponents of mātauranga Māori agree that it is distinct from science, but if that is the case why is it being taught and funded as science?

One obvious difference between the two is the epistemological commitment to testing hypotheses that is inherent in science. Both mātauranga Māori and science involve careful observation. Science generally also involves some form of test or experiment. Proponents of mātauranga Māori may argue that trial and error counts as this, at least to some extent. What science seeks that mātauranga Māori does not is an additional layer of understanding: causal explanations based on theories of mechanism. This is the difference between science and technology. The latter just needs to work. We don’t necessarily need to know why. However, distinguishing between cause and effect is a key component in science, and this involves distinguishing between causal factors and correlation. Maramataka is a very detailed body of knowledge based on seasonal and lunar correlations, but it doesn’t explain why things happen at certain times, only that certain events coincide. The flowering of the pohutukawa tree doesn’t cause the gonads of sea urchins to ripen and thus become good to eat: the two events are both driven independently by environmental temperature. Inductive reasoning can be effective at making predictions under constant conditions, but when things change, as they are under climate change, such patterns are likely to become increasingly unreliable.”

It’s time for New Zealand’s scientists, both Māori and non-Māori, to stop this nonsense. Indigenous knowledge has its place, but it’s not equivalent to modern science. And the taxpayers of New Zealand continue to throw millions of dollars away on worthless studies funded only to propitiate the indigenous culture. Is that worth destroying science in New Zealand? After all, this $2.7 million could have gone for real science or medical research instead of trying to prop up a confirmation bias based on spirituality and tradition.