Category: scientists

A panel of authors from the anthology “The War on Science”

October 8, 2025 • 11:45 am

As I’ve mentioned, the anthology The War on Science, edited by Lawrence Krauss, has gotten some flak from “progressives”. These critics argue that it really should have been a book about how Trump and the Republicans are attacking science rather than a book about how the Left is damaging science. I’m not going to go after that whataboutery again, as I’ve done it before. No one side is immune from criticism, and there are a gazillion people noting, correctly, that Trump is doing rather serious damage to scientific funding right now. But how many people are showing how the leftist ideology is injuring science? QED. (Full disclosure: Luana Maroja and I have a chapter in this book, one that’s a slight revision of one we wrote for The Skeptical Inquirer.)

At any rate, there is now a longish video, featuring Krauss and three authors, with moderator Joshua Katz.  Everyone on the panel is listed below in bold.  It was based on a discussion held by the American Enterprise Institute, and if you want to damn it because the AEI is a generally conservative venue, damn away, but you’ll be outing yourself as narrow minded.  Here are the AEI notes for the discussion that I’ve put below.

On October 2, AEI’s Joshua T. Katz hosted an event to discuss The War on Science, a new volume to which he and several other AEI fellows contributed chapters.

After brief opening remarks from AEI’s M. Anthony Mills, the Origins Project Foundation’s Lawrence M. Krauss, the volume’s editor, delivered a presentation offering historical context for the book and detailing some notable instances of the imposition of ideology on scholarly practices. Each panelist then gave brief overviews of their respective chapters: AEI’s Sally Satel discussed her chapter “Social Justice, MD—Medicine Under Threat”; AEI’s Carole Hooven discussed her chapter “Why I Left Harvard”; and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s Solveig Lucia Gold discussed “An Apology for Philology,” a chapter she coauthored with Dr. Katz.

Following these remarks, the panelists engaged in a discussion moderated by Dr. Katz, and the event concluded with a Q&A, wherein panelists fielded questions from the audience.

Event description

Among assaults on merit-based hiring, the policing of language, the denial of empirical data in medicine and science, and the replacement of well-established standards with ideological mantras, rigorous scholarship is under threat throughout Western institutions. To make matters worse, many who have spoken up against this threat have faced professional consequences, creating a climate of fear that undermines the very foundation of modern research. In The War on Science, the Origins Project Foundation’s Lawrence M. Krauss assembles a group of prominent scholars from wide-ranging disciplines to detail ongoing efforts to impose ideological restrictions on scholarship—and issue a clarion call for change.

Solveig Lucia Gold, Senior Fellow in Education and Society, American Council of Trustees and Alumni
Carole Hooven, Nonresident Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Lawrence M. Krauss, President, Origins Project Foundation
Sally Satel, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

Moderator:
Joshua T. Katz, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

Now I haven’t yet listened to the whole thing, as I cannot abide long podcasts and videos, so I’m going through it person by person.  So far I’ve heard Krauss’s nice opening (31 min.), which spares no science-warping ideologue from the Left, giving lots of cringeworthy examples.  If you have the patience to listen to a 1.5-hour long discussion all the way through, knock yourself out and comment below.

Our letter to the three societies on the definition of sex—with signers

February 19, 2025 • 10:15 am

Six days ago I posted a group letter to the Presidents of three ecology/evolution/systematics societies who had issued a joint statement that many of us found deeply misguided. As I wrote at the time:

The Presidents of three organismal-biology societies, the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the American Society of Naturalists (ASN) and the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB) sent a declaration addressed to President Trump and all the members of Congress (declaration archived here)  Implicitly claiming that its sentiments were endorsed by the 3500 members of the societies, the declaration also claimed that there is a scientific consensus on the definition of sex, and that is that sex is NOT binary but rather some unspecified but multivariate combination of different traits, a definition that makes sex a continuum or spectrum—and in all species!

I objected to this declaration, and Luana Maroja of Williams College, who agreed with me, drafted a letter that was signed by about two dozen people, many but not all of them members of at least one of the three societies. The point was to show that there is not a biological consensus that sex is a spectrum—indeed, the societies’ letter implied that biologists agree that sex is a spectrum in all species. Nonsense!

Further, the “tri-societies letter” did not involve polling the members of the SSE, the ASN, and the SSB to see if they agreed with the Presidents.  Finally, I am not sure that their letter, addressed to President Trump and “Members of the U.S. Congress,” has actually been sent. Because it may have been changed since the first iteration, I archived it at the link above as soon as it appeared.

When I put up our response, because we were collecting signatures and had not yet asked the signers whether their names could be publicized, it was signed publicly only by Luana and me. Since then, we’ve asked all the signers if they wanted to “go public” with their names.  All but a few agreed, and so I am putting the signed letter below, except for the names of those who objected to going public.

Further, I have heard independently from several other prominent biologists who were peeved at the tri-societies letter and/or were writing their own individual letters to the societies.

This is only the first stab at a response, and we intend to collect more signatures and have devised a method for doing so.  So think about it, and we would like signatures only of those people who don’t mind going public. You need not be a member of any of the societies (though it would be a boon), and can add your society affiliation if you wish. And, of course, you must be a biologist or affiliated with biology

In the meantime, I’m putting up what we have just so the letter at this stage of its evolution can have a public URL.  Ponder whether you’d like to join in, and you should hear more by later today or tomorrow.  Do not email me or put in the comments that you want to be included, as we have a much more efficient way.

What is below is just a start. Our letter is below the line:

Dear presidents of the Tri-societies: ASN, SSB and SSE,

We, Tri-society members and/or biologists, are deeply disappointed by your recent letter “Letter to the US President and Congress on the Scientific Understanding of Sex and Gender” issued last Wednesday, Feb 5, 2025, in response to Trump’s executive order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government”.

While we agree that Trump’s executive orders are misleading, we disagree with your statements about the sex binary and its definition. In animals and plants, binary sex is universally defined by gamete type, even though sexes vary in how they are developmentally determined and phenotypically identified across taxa. Thus, your letter misrepresents the scientific understanding of many members of the Tri-societies.

You state that: “Scientific consensus defines sex in humans as a biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia, and secondary sex characteristics.”

However, we do not see sex as a “construct” and we do not see other mentioned human-specific characteristics, such as “lived experiences” or “[phenotypic] variation along the continuum of male to female”, as having anything to do with the biological definition of sex. While we humans might be unique in having gender identities and certain types of sexual dimorphism, sex applies to us just as it applies to dragonflies, butterflies, or fish – there is no human exceptionalism.   Yes, there are developmental pathologies that cause sterility and there are variations in phenotypic traits related to sexual dimorphism. However, the existence of this variation does not make sex any less binary or more complex, because what defines sex is not a combination of chromosomes or hormonal balances or external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. The universal biological definition of sex is gamete size.

If you and the signers of this letter do not agree on these points, then the Tri-societies were wrong to speak in our names and claim that there is a scientific consensus without even conducting a survey of society members to see if such a consensus exists. Distorting reality to comply with ideology and using a misleading claim of consensus to give a veneer of scientific authority to your statement does more harm than just misrepresenting our views: it also weakens public trust in science, which has declined rapidly in the last few years. Because of this, scientific societies should stay away from politics as much as possible, except for political issues that directly affect the mission of the society.

Respectfully,

Daniel A. Barbash, Professor, Molecular Biology and Genetics, Cornell University
Alexander T. Baugh, Associate Professor, Department of Biology, Swarthmore College
Kendall Clements, Professor, School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland
Mark Collard, Chair in Human Evolutionary Studies, Simon Fraser University
Jerry Coyne, Professor Emeritus, Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago
David Curtis, Honorary Professor, Genetics Institute, University College London UK
Richard Dawkins, Emeritus Professor, University of Oxford
Gilly Denham, SSE member, Williams College
Joan Edwards, Samuel Fessenden Clarke Professor of Biology, Williams College
Brian Gill, retired natural history curator from Auckland Museum, New Zealand
Emma Hilton, Developmental Biology, University of Manchester, U.K.
Carole Kennedy Hooven, Senior Fellow, AEI; Affiliate, Harvard Psychology.
Edward Lee, SSE member, Williams College
Luana S. Maroja, Professor of Biology, Williams College
Gregory C. Mayer, Professor of  Biological Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Parkside
Axel Meyer, Lehrstuhl für Zoologie und Evolutionsbiologie, University of Konstanz
Marcella McClure retired from Montana State University
Nicholas J. Matzke, Senior Lecturer, School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland
Anthony M. Poole, Professor, School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland
Philip Ward,  Professor of Entomology,  University of California Davis

In a jeremiad that scientists should become political activists, Agustín Fuentes conflates science with scientists

November 25, 2024 • 11:00 am

Agustín Fuentes is a biological anthropologist at Princeton University, and has appeared in these pages more than a couple of times, for he is also somewhat of a “progressive activist” who, for example, has indicted Darwin for being a racist and espoused the view that sex is non-binary (see video below).   In the latest issue of Science, he justifies his activism, asserting that scientists should be political and ideological activists because this helps us fight what he sees as an encroaching attack on science that will accompany the Trump administration.

But Fuentes’s short letter is deeply confusing, for it conflates the idea of scientists being activists with science itself being activist. I’ll give some quotes to show that conflation, and then give my disagreement with the ideas that science should be activist, as well some reservations with the notion that it’s generally good for scientists to be activists. Click below to read the letter, ironically classified under “expert voices”:

First Fuentes implies that his promotion of activism in science and among scientists in this piece came explicitly because of the threat he sees posed by the Trump administration:

Science, both teaching and doing, is under attack. The recent US presidential election of a person and platform with anti-science bias exemplifies this.

That itself is a problem, as it’s not going to win over half of America (see below).

But to some extent I agree with this, for it certainly looks as scientific truth will be endangered by Trump and, especially, his appointments in the area of public health and science.

Certainly scientists who see their field as endangered are entitled to speak out as individuals against stuff like climate-change denial, vaccine denialism, and opposition to GMOs and nuclear energy.  When politicians or other scientists present misleading data to support a political  position, it is scientists who know the data to correct the record. After all, that is one of the great benefits of science: it is self-correcting.

But of course correcting the record, for example giving data showing that nuclear energy can replace fossil fuels, is not the same things as saying okay, we have to replace fossil fuels with nuclear energy now.  For fixing problems often requires expertise beyond the ambit of scientists: things like political savvy, economic and practical considerations, and so on. Ergo, accepting a scientific argument is not always identical to saying that we must go ahead and fix society according to the “winning” scientific assertion, for in the long run such fixes may be more harmful than helpful. (Note: I am not saying we should keep using fossil fuels as much as we do: this is just an example!)

But I digress. I want to show how Fuentes conflates the activism of scientists as individuals with the activism of science as an institution, something he does throughout the letter (bolding is mine):

Whether science is political, and if it should be, is an age-old debate. Some assert that scientific institutions and scientists themselves should seek to remain apolitical, or at least present a face of political neutrality. Others argue that such isolation is both impossible and unnecessary, that scientists are and should be in the political fray.

Notice that he conflates scientists with scientific institutions, the latter including scientific organizations, journals, and granting institutions.

Here’s more:

The Editor-in-Chief of Science recently wrote that although science has always been political, it “thrives when its advocates are shrewd politicians but suffers when its opponents are better at politics.” Given the current political reality and the expansion of attacks on science, it is time for scientists to be more effective, forceful, and vociferous as their own political advocates.

Who is supposed to be political here—science itself or scientists?  It’s clear that he means scientists, but also throws “science” into the mix as he does in the last sentence of the excerpt below. It’s also clear that the activism he wants from scientists is progressive left-wing activism, presumably of the kind that Fuentes himself has promoted in his previous articles. I don’t think he’s calling for right-wing scientists to be activists!

There are many taking vocal stances asserting key scientific findings and practices in the face of attacks by anti-science forces. Most scientists are familiar with the prominent cases of Anthony Fauci or Peter Hotez in public health, and of Michael Mann in climate science. But for every one of the high-profile examples, there are other, less publicly known attacks on scientists and science educators working in public spheres, social media, and the classroom. These attacks are often especially intense when the scientists are also women, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color), queer, or from other marginalized groups. The increasingly anti-science political ecosystem creates a dire need for science to be proactive, not only reactive.

More conflation:

If one’s job, salary, research support, etc. are at risk, it is not surprising that one may not want to “stick their neck out.” And such threats will grow in the US under the incoming administration. There also remains some prominent fear of the term “political” in the scientific community, as if being political represents a bad thing or something that diminishes the value of science or the scientist.

Finally, here’s Fuentes’s final pronouncement that science itself should become a vehicle for promoting a social mission, almost certainly the “progressive mission of the left”:

As the social scientists Fernando Tormos-Aponte, Scott Frickel, and John Parker discovered in a survey just after the 2020 US elections, for many scientists “political advocacy is no longer anathema to scientific research, but should be embraced as a central aspect of science’s social mission.” This is even more true here at the end of 2024.

Once again this conflates what scientists should do with how we conceive of the “social mission of science”, that is, we should change our view of science to make activism a part of it.

Fuentes doesn’t seem to realize, as we know from statistics about the public’s view of science and of universities, that there is indeed a danger to scientists and to science itself from scientists taking stands in particular venues, like journals or professional societies. We know that when Nature endorsed Joe Biden for President in 2020, it not only did not convince more people to vote for him, but reduced the credibility of the journal, and of science itself, in the eyes of readers. When Scientific American became activist, publishing article after article taking “progressive” stands, including two misguided pieces by Fuentes himself, it lost credibility in the eyes of many and, in the end, the editor-in-chief left the journal, probably because she had no choice.  What was the cause of the final rupture between the magazine and the editor? Her attacks on Bluesky against supporters of Trump.

Finally, we know that public trust in science among both Democrats and Republicans has declined significantly in the last decade, and there’s been an even steeper drop in public confidence in colleges and universities.

Now of course you’ve surely said to yourself, “But there is no impersonal ‘science’ that takes stands. It must be the scientists themselves who do.” And of course that’s correct.  But what I am trying say is that there are ways and ways of scientists being activists, and some of them are useful but others are not. My points are below:

a.) Scientists should use their recognized expertise to correct false arguments that affect society. For example, if vaccines are effective and we have data on their efficacy, and we also have data that they don’t cause autism, we should say so.  But arguments are more effective when the scientists making them are experts in the area, which leads to the next point:

b.) Scientists should shy away from making scientific arguments outside their sphere of expertise. A prime example of this is evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, who has severely hurt his own reputation by making statements about covid vaccines and touting the efficacy of ivermectin as both a treatment for and preventive of Covid.  Weinstein did not know what he was talking about, and had no good data to back up his claims. He was dead wrong, but of course people used his statements to justify using horse de-wormer for their virus infection. Such statements may well harm or even kill people.

c.) Scientists should not make arguments that they say are scientific if they are imbued with ideology. This only serves to turn off a public who may know better. Luana and I deal with six of these arguments in the paper by me and Luana Maroja in Skeptical Inquirer, including rejection of the sex binary, claims that there are no evolved differences between males and females, and the idea that indigenous knowledge should be considered coequal with modern science. Ideology based arguments in these areas are misleading and injurious to the public understanding of science.

d.) “Science” itself should not be seen as incorporating activism as a necessary component.  Sure, scientists can use their knowledge to cure diseases like Covid, or create vaccines to fight polio. If you see that as “activism”, well, it’s not a form of activism that is very injurious, since nobody wants those diseases around. However, there will still be opposition to vaccination, and part of that, for covid, was due to scientists themselves either not being straightforward with data (not good) or changing their recommendations based on changing understanding of the virus and its transmission (a normal party of science).

Here are some forms of activism that can be seen as part of science itself and should be avoided:

1.) Scientific journals, magazines, or societies making ideological statements (viz. Lancet, the Society for the Study of Evolution. etc. saying that sex is a spectrum)

2.) Scientific organizations using ideology to dispense scientific funding, for example using criteria other than merit to advance “equity”.

3.) Scientists claiming the authority of science when advancing what is are biased and ideological views (see my paper with Luana).

4.) Scientists hiring other scientists or accepting graduate students based on criteria other than merit (ee #2).

In general, science gets eroded when its practitioners elevate criteria other than merit, including ethnicity, gender, or Marxist beliefs in human malleability.

Now all of these, in my view, have the potential to damage science itself, as well as to damage universities, in which science education plays a large part.  When people see the criteria above violated, they become more anti-science and more anti-university. They are less willing to support science or to give their kids (or themselves) higher education.

It is largely the ideological neutrality of “science itself”, as ideally instantiated in science departments, science journals, granting agencies, and science societies and organizations, that has kept the reputation of science unsullied.  But now it is getting sullied, and sullied from both the right and left. One of the reasons for this is the very activism that Fuentes wants so badly.

As I said, scientists have an important role to play in improving society, but that role should, as far as possible, be limited to ensuring that the data fed into societal arguments be as accurate as possible. When scientists go beyond that, infusing their data with ideology, the potential for harm to their brand is very real.  This doesn’t mean that scientists shouldn’t have free speech, for of course they should and they do.  What it means is that unless they speak carefully, and avoid a partisan bias, they risk the reputation of the very fields they love.

In the five-minute video below we see Fuentes being an ideologue while at the same time arguing that science shouldn’t “become ideology”.  He mischaracterizes atheism as saying ‘I know for sure there is no god,”  argues that evolutionary biology is imbued with racism and sexism, and maintains that the sex binary “is not the best way to characterize humans.” Yes, humans are messy and vary in their gender, but the sex binary, as I’ve argued, applies as much to humans as it does to any other animal. There are exactly two sexes, and there are no more than two sexes. Yes, Dr. Fuentes, the world is “complex and messy”, but I don’t buy your claim that the sex binary itself somehow misrepresents or distorts our knowledge of variation in human behavior or culture. After all, the sex binary is just a definition, and one that has the advantage of holding universally in all animals and vascular plants. It has nothing to say about culture or variation in behavior.

From the YouTube notes:

This interview is an episode from ‪@The-Well‬, our publication about ideas that inspire a life well-lived, created with the ‪@JohnTempletonFoundation‬.

Templeton! Wouldn’t you know it?

h/t: Anna and Luana, my partners in crime

More ideology in science: DEI infects the process for handing out scientific grants

July 22, 2024 • 9:40 am

I held the same National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant for about 30 years, renewing it under a competitive process every three years. It was onerous (I took six months to write each renewal application), but at least you could be sure that the proposals were judged on merit. Sure, you had to check a box with your “race” (the NIH considers that a social construct), but that was for record-keeping purposes only  and, during the times I sat in on evaluation committees, ethnicity and identity were never even discussed when ranking proposals.

That has now changed, not only with the National Institutes of Health, but with all the major funding agencies: the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).  All of these agencies, though legally forbidden to take into account the ethnicity of those who apply for grants, or to boost those of minority status, have found ways around that restriction, adhering to today’s DEI Zeitgeist.  This of course devalues scientific merit in proposals—a dangerous strategy if the aim of science funding is to promote the understanding of nature (with health benefits to humans in the case of the NIH). Giving grants based on minority status rather than merit also reduces the public’s trust in science.  The situation has become so fraught that I am positively elated that I no longer have to write grants, as I’m not sure how to write a diversity statement, and am opposed to them in general.

A new paper in SSRN (“Social Science Research Network”) calls attention to the pervasive attempts to circumvent race-based funding in the federal government, and outlines the problems that such attempts produce. You can go to the paper’s website by clicking on the screenshot below, or you can download the pdf here (go to “download without registration” at the upper right).

You’ll probably recognize a couple of names among the authors:

If you want a short take, you see below a summary and preview by Krylov and Tanzman from Heterodox STEM (click headline to read).  But I’ll be citing excerpts from the long paper itself.  It has not escaped my notice that the government’s attempt to circumvent restrictions on race-based funding parallel those now used by universities after the Supreme Court ruled out race-based admissions.

I’ll summarize the paper’s main points, indenting quotes and putting the main points under headers of my devising. All bolding is mine.

What is DEI?

While no reasonable person can oppose the morality of trying to to give every American equal opportunity to become a scientist (and that starts with birth), the mandates that condition federal funding call not for equal opportunity, but for equity—“equal outcomes” so that minoritized groups—not just races, but LGBTQ+, the disabled, women, and anybody said to be disadvantaged because of oppression—are represented in proportion to their occurrence in the general population. Here’s the authors’ construal of DEI as it is actually implemented by the government:

Actual DEI policies do not promote viewpoint diversity, equitable treatment of individuals based on their accomplishments, or equal opportunity for individuals regardless of their identity (e.g., race, sex, ethnicity). It can scarcely be questioned (Krylov and Tanzman, 2024) that DEI programs today are driven by an ideology, an offshoot of Critical Social Justice1 (CSJ) (Pluckrose, 2021; Deichmann 2023). DEI programs elevate the collective above the individual. They group people into categories defined by immutable characteristics (race, sex, etc.) and classify each group as either “privileged” or “victimized,” as “oppressor” or “oppressed.” The goals of DEI programs are to have each group participate in proportion to their fraction of thepopulation in every endeavor of society and to obtain proportionate outcomes from those endeavors. Disproportionate outcomes (with respect to science, such outcomes as publications, funding, citations, salaries, and awards), or disparities, are axiomatically ascribed to systemic factors, such as systemic racism and sexism, without consideration of alternative explanations (Sowell, 2019, 2023). Claims, such as “The presence of disparities is proof of systemic racism” and “Meritocracy is a myth” are propagated widely despite the vagueness of the claims and their lack of support by concrete data. Similarly, tenets that are central to DEI ideology—such as diversity is excellence, diverse teams outperform homogenous teams, and the advancement of women is impeded by biases—lack a robust evidence base, particularly when applied to science (Abbot et al., 2023; Krylov and Tanzman, 2023; Ceci et al., 2021, 2023).

Note that several important claims, including the assertion that underrepresentation of minoritized groups is due to ongoing systemic racism (which would be illegal) and that diverse scientific teams consistently outperform more homogeneous ones. Neither claim is supported by evidence.

My own opinion (and that of the authors; see below) is to give as many people as possible the opportunity to do science, and choose for advancement those who do the best work.  That might not result in equity, but it does allow equal opportunity. I recognize, of course, that we’re a long way from giving different groups equal opportunity, which must begin at or even before birth. But equal opportunity is the only permanent way to solve the problem of disproportional representation in science (or any endeavor). Effecting that will be hard, and requires immense effort, money, and empirical tests of educational systems, but once it’s in place, unequal representation would reflect other things, like behavioral differences or differential preferences among groups.

How do funding agencies employ DEI? This takes place through the use of required statements and plans to enhance diversity that must accompany grant proposals. Here are two examples; the first is from an HIH program:

Recruitment Plan to Enhance Diversity (NOT-OD-20-031):

The applicant must provide a recruitment plan to enhance diversity. Include outreach strategies and activities designed to recruit prospective participants from diverse backgrounds, e.g., those from groups described in the Notice of NIH’s Interest in Diversity. Describe the specific efforts to be undertaken by the program and how the proposed plan reflects past experiences in recruiting individuals from underrepresented groups.

New applications must include a description of plans to enhance recruitment, including the strategies that will be used to enhance the recruitment of trainees from nationally underrepresented backgrounds and may wish to include data in support of past accomplishments.

Renewal applications must include a detailed account of experiences in recruiting individuals from underrepresented groups during the previous funding period, including successful and unsuccessful recruitment strategies. Information should be included on how the proposed plan reflects the program’s past experiences in recruiting individuals from underrepresented groups.

For those individuals who participated in the research education program, the report should include information about the duration of education and aggregate information on the number of individuals who finished the program in good standing. Additional information on the required Recruitment Plan to Enhance Diversity is available at Frequently Asked Questions: Recruitment Plan to Enhance Diversity (Diversity FAQs).

Applications lacking a diversity recruitment plan will not be reviewed. [Emphasis ours.]

And one from NASA:

The assessment of the Inclusion Plan will be based on […] the extent to which the Inclusion Plan demonstrated awareness of systemic barriers to creating inclusive working environments that are specific to the proposal team. [Emphasis ours.]

But to those of us in science, there are no systemic (codified) barriers to advancement, although of course there is still some racism. But those who make the claim of systemic barriers have to ignore the ways universities are falling all over each other to recruit qualified women and members of minority groups.

Why are these requirements bad for science?  Besides taking up an enormous amount of time confecting such statements, which are surely often deliberately misleading, they are palpably illegal, violating civil rights laws:

These requirements to incorporate DEI into each research proposal are alarming. They constitute compelled speech, they undermine the academic freedom of researchers, they dilute merit-based criteria for funding, they incentivize illegal discriminatory hiring practices, they erode public trust in science, and they contribute to administrative overload. “Diversity,” which is sometimes described as “diverse backgrounds” or “diverse views,” actually refers to select underrepresented identity groups (Honeycutt, 2020; Brint and Frey, 2023; Brint, 2023).

. . .The demand to provide an inclusion plan without evidence that there is a need for one is compelled speech and an intrusion of ideology into the conduct of science. Forcing scientists to “acknowledge” and “show awareness of” systemic racism and “barriers to participation” in their institutions and teams (Nahm and Watkins, 2023), even if none can be documented, misrepresents reality, is an offense to scientists who have worked hard to establish fair and transparent hiring practices in their institutions, and is inconsistent with scientific professional ethics and, indeed, the very vocation of the scientist.

The paragraphs below identify what’s illegal. I’m fairly convinced that these DEI requirements do indeed violate civil-rights laws, and that the only reason they persist—just as DEI requirements for job applications in academia persist—is that nobody has challenged them in the courts. To do so, you need “standing”, that is, you must demonstrate that you have been injured by these requirements. And anybody doing that would be forever demonized in academia, not to mention tied up in legal battles that would last years.

The interaction of DEI with the legal system is troubling. First, the demands that PIs “acknowledge” systemic racism and “barriers to participation” in their institutions (Nahm and Watkins, 2023), and insert land acknowledgements in their scientific publications (NSF, n.d.(b)) raise grave legal concerns. The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States strictly forbids compelling people to say things they do not believe are true. The circumstances under which government may condition grants or benefits on attesting that one holds a certain belief (e.g., “acknowledges” the truth to be this or that with respect to a contested matter), though somewhat obscure, are certainly limited (Supreme Court, 2013). At a minimum, government’s engaging in such conditioning on contested questions raises significant civil liberties concerns and is in tension with core First Amendment values.

Second, there are strict laws against discrimination on the basis of race and gender, both at federal and state levels. Thus, invoking DEI explicitly attempts to circumvent existing laws. Any actual “barriers” or “systemic discrimination” can be prosecuted under existing anti-discrimination statutes, following due process.

Third, even more worrying is that successful applications require principal investigators and their home institutions to engage in practices that are likely illegal.  For example, DEI “equity”-based plans for equal gender or racial participation can, in practice, only be implemented by gender- and race-preferential hiring. This is strictly illegal under civil rights employment law (Title VI; Title IX; EEOC, n.d.).

How do funding agencies get around the illegality of this process?

Funding agencies attempt to circumvent the laws prohibiting them from basing funding decisions on race or ethnicity by cloaking DEI requirements in nebulous language (NIH, 2019; Renoe, 2023) and by disguising racial preferences and even quotas as “diversity of backgrounds” and unequal treatment as “broadening participation of underrepresented groups.” The determination of which groups to treat as underrepresented and worthy of special treatment is highly subjective, as Americans hold many identities and can be split up in a multitude of ways. In practice, implementing equity-focused DEI programs means preferring members of some groups over others (Kendi, 2019). To paraphrase Orwell, all groups are equal, but some groups are more equal than others (Orwell, 1945).

The evaluations of submitted DEI plans are not open to public scrutiny. Agencies run diversity-focused programs but refuse to give guidance on how to determine eligibility for them; they are careful to state that compliance with all applicable employment laws is the responsibility of the host institution. However, DEI metrics, which must be reported annually to the funding agency, are criteria for renewal (NIH, 2023b). It remains unclear how a principal investigator is supposed to be nondiscriminatory in hiring and at the same time fulfill de facto DEI quotas for renewal. In this way, programs are developed that are de jure “open to everyone,” but de facto allocated according to identity metrics, reminiscent of the pre-civil rights era in the U.S.

Why is this happening?  The proximate reason for DEI requirements is government regulations (see below), but the ultimate reason is the “racial reckoning” taking place in America, a reckoning speeded up by the death of George Floyd and extending now to many minority groups save those who have done well, like Jews and Asians.  The paper doesn’t mention ultimate causes, but does show several federal requirements that gave rise to DEI mandates:

In fact, the mandate that funding agencies implement DEI comes directly from the White House. Executive Order 13985, titled “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” directed all federal agencies to allocate resources to DEI and to incorporate “equity” into their decision making as a principle (EO 13985).

. . .If “consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals” means equality of opportunity and equitable treatment of people’s accomplishments based on their merit, we’re all for it. However, the Order goes on to make clear that the goal is not to achieve equal opportunity and equitable treatment, but to achieve equal outcomes for identity groups. The Order conflates racism in the past with disparities in the present and equitable treatment with equal outcomes. It attributes unequal participation in the present to alleged discrimination in the present. It charges the Domestic Policy Council with the task “[of] remov[ing] systemic barriers,” thus implicitly asserting the existence of such barriers in the present. It calls for “redress[ing] inequities,” “affirmatively advancing equity,” and “allocating Federal resources in a manner that increases investment in underserved communities, as well as individuals from those communities.” Whatever is to be said about such goals in relation to, say, social welfare programs, we question their value and appropriateness for science funding.

The authors note that in this executive order “merit,” “excellence” and “achievement” are not mentioned at all.

There is one more federal order:

The goal of promoting “equity” in science is reinforced in Executive Order 14091 (EO 14091). Titled “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” it explains how equity is to be implemented in various domains, and specifically calls for the “promot[ion] [of] equity in science.” It lays out specific DEI requirements for federal agencies, including NASA and NSF, such as the following:

The Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Director of the National Science Foundation […] (agency heads) shall, within 30 days of the date of this order, ensure that they have in place an Agency Equity Team within their respective agencies to coordinate the implementation of equity initiatives and ensure that their respective agencies are delivering equitable outcomes for the American people.

Both of these are orders are enforced by the government’s Office of Management and Budget, which monitors agencies to ensure that they meet DEI concerns.

What is to be done? The purpose of scientific research is not to be a lever for creating social justice. That’s the job of the government, but the government cannot violate the law to effect the change we need. In lieu of creating new law, they have to effect desired change within existing legal boundaries.  My own view, which is echoed by the authors, is to hold scientific merit as the overweening criterion for funding research.

At the same time, it would be churlish to ignore the palpable inequality in American society, an inequality that deprives some groups of simple access to doing science, often because their backgrounds and the existence of past racism or bigotry. This leads to the need for equal opportunity, something that Americans apparently lack the stomach for. Equity has become  a quick fix, a way to tell us that we’re good people, but it’s neither a permanent fix nor, in science, a way to best advance the field.  So ditch the DEI requirements mandating equity and do this:

Systemic disparities in opportunity, especially those related to socio-economic status, are real and well documented. Solid family structure, access to healthcare, good nutrition, an environment free from violence and drugs, high-quality preschool and K–12 education are necessary to nurture the next generation of scientists, but they are not equally available to all Americans. Rather than attempt to institute “equity” by mandating proportional participation through the manipulation of grant funding, we believe that increased efforts should be made to promote equality of opportunity as early in people’s lives as possible so that young people who aspire to standing in any field, including scientific fields, can succeed on merit (Abbot et al., 2023; Abbot et al., 2024; Loury, 2024).

It is sad that to write something like that, or the paper itself, is an act of courage in today’s political climate. But if you’re committed to advancing science, with equality of opportunity as a moral ancillary, then one must judge science on merit alone while working politically to eliminate differences in opportunity.

In the end, DEI statements should be no more than this: “This project will not discriminate against anybody on the grounds of race, religion, disability status, gender, or sexual identity or orientation.” End of story.

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.

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.

The journal Science discusses positionality statements

November 16, 2023 • 9:15 am

Science magazine (you can call it a “journal” if you wish) recently published a surprisingly objective article on “positionality statements,” statements about the author’s background, race, gender, and views that are often included these days along with scientific papers. (Science is usually woke and often doesn’t present both sides of an issue.)

Positionality statements are often quite detailed, intended to give readers an idea of where the author is coming from, even though that’s supposed to be irrelevant in judging science. Another reason quoted in the article is that writing such statements somehow makes the author aware of his or her biases or unconscious reasons for doing the work, or to reflect on what future work they should do given their background.  To my mind, that’s weird, as authors should already know that, and there’s no reason to make public your thoughts on these issues.

I’ve written about positionality statements before. Below are three examples I gave, and you’ll also want to read Sally Satel’s article at Persuasion, “Focus on the research, not the researcher.”  There Satel suggests that positionality statements may actually be inimical to science as they may condition editors to accept papers out of sympathy, may themselves be biased, and of course violate the dictum that you judge science by, to quote a famoous man, the content of the paper, not the color of the author’s skin.  However, Satel says that in one restricted area such statements may be justified:

 . . . . positionality statements do make more sense in some narrow contexts. According to Jukka Savolainen, a Professor of Sociology at Wayne State University, positionality statements probably originated in ethnographic research. When we spoke, he told me that “it makes sense to be concerned about the characteristics of individual scholars doing field work when they are the only instrument of data collection and interpretation.”  That is, when a researcher is working alone in a foreign culture, it may be worth illuminating possible sources of inadvertent bias.

But of course such statements are widespread in many fields beyond anthropology. None of the three statements I give below are from such papers:

So, here we go (the posts will lead you to the original papers):

From this post:

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

From another post, a statement about several authors:

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

And one given by Sally Satel in her article below:

Consider the positionality statement by the authors of “Low-income Black mothers parenting adolescents in the mass incarceration era: The long reach of criminalization,” which appeared in the American Sociological Review in in 2019:

“Both authors are middle-to upper-middle-class white women—one is a mother, the other is not. A commitment to antiracist, intersectional, and feminist principles guides our research efforts, and we conducted this work with an awareness of the politics, dangers, and limitations of affluent white academics writing about the lives of low-income Black Americans.”

So what we see above is both self-flagellation and virtue signaling, but does it help you assess the science? Not to my mind.  The papers are already of a woke tenor, and to learn that the authors are themselves engaged in confessional identitarianism doesn’t help you judge them better. All you can say is, “Yes, the authors are minoritized or aware of their status as outsiders,” but does that help you judge the results?  Nope.  Maybe it helps the authors to examine their own viewpoints, as the Science article below avers, but they can do that on their own time. It needn’t be splashed all over a paper. As Sally noted:

Currently, only one journal I could find—the Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering—requires positionality statements. Others, like the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, “encourage” but don’t require them.

Click on the screenshot below to access the Science article, which you can also find archived here:

 

Here are the “pros” as quoted in the article,:

“It’s an invitation to think more broadly about what your role as a researcher is in the work that you’re trying to understand,” says Alejandra Núñez-de la Mora, a biological anthropologist at the University of Veracruz. She published a 2021 paper in the American Journal of Human Biology arguing that reflecting on one’s positionality can pay off in future work, helping researchers address inequities such as “parachute research,” unchecked power dynamics, and gaps in inclusivity. If you’re an astronomer, for example, think about where your telescope is, she says. “Are you part of that community? Is that telescope put there with knowledge of the people who call that place their land?”

To that I’d say, “okay, fine: keep it to yourself and, if you need to say it, publish it elsewhere”. This isn’t anywhere near Satel’s exception above, as your positionality doesn’t affect your astronomical results.

Another:

Positionality statements also benefit readers, supporters say, peeling back the curtain on researchers’ decisions that would otherwise remain invisible—from what questions they pursue to how they interpret their data. “It’s not just that we want to know about people’s socially constructed identities. That’s not the point,” says Julie Martin, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, which has required positionality statements since July 2020. “The point is how do those and your worldview affect the decisions you make in the research?”

Again, this has nothing to do with the published research itself, which reflects what’s done after the author has winnowed down the questions. And really, is the author the person to judge this question? Doesn’t a therapist need to help with this? At any rate, let those authors ponder it on their own, for this is a subjective reflection on behavior, not science.

Please, sir, can I have one more?:

As for [Genevieve] Wojcik, she says reflecting on her positionality has helped her realize her identity is inextricably linked with her work, enriching it and shaping the directions it takes—including, for example, her work to design genetics studies to be more inclusive of multiracial individuals. “I’ve sort of come into the notion that who I am can actually make my work better and lead me to question things that hadn’t been questioned before.”

Here’s Wojcik’s positionality statement:

Genevieve L. Wojcik (she/her): I am unsure as to how I identify, as my experience as a biracial individual in the USA has largely been defined by what I am not, instead of what I am. My mother immigrated here from Taiwan and my father’s parents from France and Poland. My research interests in genetic epidemiology for diverse, and specifically admixed, populations have been partially motivated by my background to ensure that discoveries will also benefit my loved ones, whether family or friends, with increased urgency for my multiracial children.

This is again a statement about motivation that, while perhaps Wojcik was insufficiently reflective to know this stuff before she wrote it out, has no bearing on the paper.

And the cons:

But others question the statements’ value. “I find it amazing that [publishing positionality statements] is becoming so widespread without any evidence that it actually achieves what it sets out to achieve,” says Patricia Nayna Schwerdtle, who studies global public health at Heidelberg University and coauthored a February critique of the practice in Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Indeed. And it might even be counterproductive, as Satel notes above. One of the worst effects of this tsunami of wokeness is that it encourages one to judge science by immutable characteristics of people or their irrelevant views on politics or ideology. Below you can see a study in progress that’s designed to find out whether positionality statement achieve what they’re designed to do, which is almost invariably to increase the diversity of scientists or encourage new ideas. But that study seems to have serious problems.

From my friend Anna, quoting a paper on which there were many coauthors, including me:

But some researchers think airing this information in the literature violates a central tenet of science: that a researcher’s work should be judged independently of who they are. Spotlighting a scientist’s identity represents a “bizarre turn back to [the] Dark Ages,” says Anna Krylov, a chemist at the University of Southern California who wrote an April critique alongside 28 co-authors in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. “It was not a good time when people were treated by their attributes and not by their achievements, not by their merit,” Krylov adds.

Some of the many authors of our paper have discussed positionality statements via email, and I have to say that there was no sentiment in favor of them. But what do you expect from a group of authors making the case that science should be judged by its merit alone?  Some of us amused ourselves by confecting positionality statements that we would have appended to our own JCI paper. Here’s mine:

“Jerry A. Coyne is a lugubrious old white Jewish male, descended from Ashkenazi ancestors, who doesn’t think this paper has a chance of being published.”

Positionality statements encourage readers to judge papers not by their merit alone, but by characteristics that distort your judgements about the merit of the research, and that merit is really the way science should be judged.  Even if your astronomical results come from using a telescope that indigenous people claim sits on their land, this affects the scienfitic results not one whit. Issues like politics, indigenous rights, and so on, can be argued out in other places, but shouldn’t pollute the scientific literature, since they’re ideological and political questions.

Another “con”:

Another concern is that positionality statements serve only as virtue signaling and gloss over deeper issues, such as the reproducibility crisis in science. They seem like a “last ditch effort before you publish your paper,” Nayna Schwerdtle says. Instead, researchers should strengthen upstream solutions, such as open science and participatory research, she argues.

Well, the reproducibility crisis is not something that needs addressing in a given paper, since whether or not a paper’s results are reproducible depends on other papers yet to be published, or on a literature review.

One of the biggest arguments against positionality statements is that there’s no evidence that they accomplish anything save for the authors’ statement that it made them reflect their motivations, something I largely doubt. Here’s what the new article says:

At least one team of researchers is studying whether these statements have their intended effect. Rose Oronje, a researcher at the African Institute for Development Policy, and her colleagues at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine are evaluating the results of publishing reflexivity statements—a similar practice that encourages researchers engaged in global collaborations to consider how their work acknowledges the communities involved.

The team is reviewing published statements in global health journals and interviewing authors and journal editors to gauge whether this measure at the time of publication has the power to shift researchers’ mindsets and lead to more equitable practices. Publication guidelines can provide powerful incentives for scientists to effect systemic change, Oronje says. “When you start there, it becomes very easy for us to want to do it, because we want to publish.”

Now tell me, given that this involves self-report about whether one’s mindset shifts in result to woke and subjective statements, whether there can be any result other than “yes, these statements work!”? Given the history of research that goes against what “progressives” want, like the retraction of a Nature Communications paper showing that female-female mentorships may actually hurt women’s scientific careers, I’m not optimistic.  And how can you judge whether positionality statements create more equitable practices given that the Zeitgeist itself is pushing “more equitable practices”.  There’s a correlation/causation issue here that will be almost impossible to resolve. How do you separate the temporally increasing trend towards practices that progressives consider “equitable” from the effect of  positionality statements? I don’t see how.

In the end, science should be judged by merit alone, not by race, gender, politics, ancestry, sexuality, or family history of the scientist. In a few cases, which fall under the Satel Exception, as when you’re doing work that could be thought exploitative, as in anthropology or collecting organisms in other countries, it may be useful (and sometimes required) to show how you complied with required or recommended practices. And maybe—just maybe—you can mention inadvertent biases or problems with the research.  But those are very restricted, much less subjective, and often aren’t even positionality statements!

Positionality statements are likely to be biased and self-serving. I have to say that if they’re of any value to me in science, it’s that when I see them I tend to avoid reading the paper. If you want to indulge in narcissism or self-flagellation, leave it out of your paper, and do it on your own time!

But kudos to Science for publishing a pretty objective article on this issue.

A new and tendentious “scientific” field: Critical Ecology

May 6, 2022 • 12:30 pm

A reader sent me this announcement of a talk given at Cornell University by a scientist from the California Academy of Science. I reproduce the announcement in full, complete with italicization and bolding, though I’ve removed Zoom links and email addresses. (I can’t find the talk online, though she does have a short talk on “Ecology as a Locus for Social Change.)  I won’t belabor it at length, as I find its content simply flabbergasting, but I want to point out five things:

  1. It is “critical ecology” in that it infuses real science (ecology) with “critical theory”, itself containing a big dollop of postmodernism.
  2. It is written in the obscurantist style of postmodernism fused with modern wokeist strains (e.g., use of preferred pronouns)
  3. It is tendentious: there is no way that this style of science can be objective. Its aim, as suggested below, is simply to confirm preconceptions of the writer and to push her ideology into ecology. Note especially this sentence: “Pierre aims to offer systemically oppressed populations a praxis for redress beyond environmental justice.” This is social engineering, not science.
  4. This is also an example of the invasion of wokeism into science, as instantiated by Steve Pinker’s recent statement on climate change in the journal Science. But at least the Science stuff, however wrongheaded, was explicitly about policy. Here we have what purports to be a form of science that involves hypothesis testing, but the answers must only come out in a preferred direction.
  5. Note the criticism of “objectivity,” as in this sentence: “critical ecology also provides a space to address the tension present in defining what is ‘objective’, a practice that has neglected the phenomena experienced by racialized communities.”  Note that “objective” is in scare quotes, and is opposed to the lived experience of those in racialized communities.  It is this redefinition of “objectivity” as “the master’s (e.g. white supremacist’s) tools” that poses the biggest danger of science. Science then merely becomes a matter of one’s preferred opinion or “lived experience”: things not checkable by scientific methods.

The entire announcement is indented.

Critical ecology provides a framework for integrating social critiques of imperialism, enslavement, and modern racial capitalism into the quantitative analysis of human oppression as a process organizing the biophysical drivers of global environmental change.

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The Research Fellows group at Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability will host Dr. Suzanne Pierre of the Critical Ecology Lab for a visiting lecture at 4:00 pm on May 5th in Weill Hall 226. We hope you will attend; feel free to forward this invitation to colleagues.

Guest Lecture by Dr. Suzanne Pierre, California Academy of Sciences

Location: Weill Hall 226

Date: May 5

Time: 4:00-5:00 pm

[JAC: Zoom and email address redacted]

Critical Ecology: Testing Hypotheses in Service of Liberation 

Dr. Suzanne Pierre (she; Cornell Ecology and Evolutionary Biology ’18), will introduce critical ecology as an emerging approach to global environmental change research. Pierre’s work in critical ecology provides a framework for integrating social critiques of imperialism, enslavement, and modern racial capitalism into the quantitative analysis of human oppression as a process organizing the biophysical drivers of global environmental change. Pierre’s goal is to couple theory from decolonial studies, Black feminist studies, and other schools of liberatory thought to inform testable ecological hypotheses. Her work aims to document patterns in relationships between societal oppression/extraction and resultant ecosystem perturbations, currently focusing on her expertise in soil microbial ecology and forest biogeochemistry. 

 As Audre Lorde said, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. In keeping with this wisdom, critical ecology also provides a space to address the tension present in defining what is “objective”, a practice that has neglected the phenomena experienced by racialized communities. Through the practice of theory and basic research, Pierre aims to offer systemically oppressed populations a praxis for redress beyond environmental justice. Pierre will also introduce her nonprofit research organization, the Critical Ecology Lab, as a locus for reflexive critique, methods development, and liberation work by interdisciplinary scientists and students.   

 Dr. Suzanne Pierre is the founder and lead investigator of the Critical Ecology Lab, where transdisciplinary scholars seek to reframe the objectives and methods of academic research in support of equity and decolonial futures. The Critical Ecology Lab is a space to investigate and explain how the natural world, from soils to atmosphere, has been shaped by racial and cultural supremacy, natural resource exploitation, and social exclusion. Before building the CEL community, Dr. Pierre completed her doctoral research in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology here at Cornell University. Her experience within traditional academic structures encouraged her to act for greater inclusiveness in academic research spaces, so she co-founded and organized the first Diversity Preview Weekend. The impact of Dr. Pierre’s research and organizing is felt across Cornell today, and we are honored to host her as she continues to lead through intellectual contributions and direct action. 

I’ll leave it to readers to tender comments.