Category: wokeness

Nature Human Behavior is back, this time touting “allyship”

February 24, 2025 • 12:15 pm

In the summer of 2022, the journal Nature Human Behavior put out a notice that it could reject articles that were “stigmatizing” or “harmful” to different groups, regardless of the scientific content. The problems with this stand, which were immediately called out by Steve Pinker, Michael Shermer, and others, is that what is seen as stigmatizing or harmful is pretty much a subjective matter, and, as Pinker tweeted:

I think the journal and its editor were taken aback by this and similar reactions to their statements, and on Day 2 of our USC conference on Science and Ideology in January, the Chief Editor of the journal, Stavroula Kousta, walked back their statement a bit in here 24-minute talk (go here to here her talk; it’s the first one on the video).

But the walking-back didn’t mean that Nature Human Behavior was becoming less woke. Indeed, it just published a ridiculously repetitive and trite paper about how science needs “allyship” to produce a “diverse, equitable, and inclusive academia.” It’s not that STEM isn’t seeking a diversity of groups and viewpoints—though, inevitably, “diversity” in their sense means “diversity of race or sex”—but that this article says absolutely nothing new about the issue. What the journal published now is a prime example of virtue-flaunting that, in the end accomplish nothing.  You can read it by clicking on the screenshot below (it should be free with the legal Unpaywall app), and you can get the pdf here.

The piece begins with the usual claim of “harm”: the same issue that the same journal discussed before:

In academia, despite recent progress towards diversity, biases and microaggressions can still exclude and harm members of disadvantaged social groups.

The person who sent me this article wrote “No citations are given for this claim about bigotry and discrimination at the most liberal, open, welcoming institutions that have ever existed in human history. Amazing.”

The article then gives these figures, which are baffling because one would expect younger women to drop out more rather than less frequently. But they may be correct; I am just not sure that they reflect misogyny:

Such patterns of marginalization are not specific to students. Among US faculty members, for example, women are 6%, 10% and 19% more likely to leave each year than their men counterparts as assistant, associate and full professors, respectively.

I suspect that these departures have little to do with ongoing “structural bias” against women academics, not only because no instances of inbuilt structural bias are actually given, but also, at least for women, a big and recent review by Ceci et al. found either no bias against women’s achievements in academic science or a female advantage—save for teaching evaluations and a slight difference in salary, about 3.6% lower salary for women.   However, the authors do not dismiss the possibility and importance of bias against women.

At any rate, if you haven’t heard come across this advice about “allyship” before, and are an academic, you must be blind and deaf. I’m not going to reprise the paper for you, as you’ve heard it all before.

I’m assuming that well-meaning people agree with me that marginalized scientists should be treated just like everyone else.  But how many times do we need to hear that? At any rate, this paper rings the chimes again, singling out six areas where we’re told how to behave. These are direct quotes.

1.) Listen to and centre marginalized voices.

2.) Reflect on and challenge your own biases (I guess you determine them by taking an “implicit bias” test, a procedure that’s been severely criticized

3.)  Speak up to include and support disadvantaged groups

4.)  Speak out against bias when it happens

5.)  Advocate for institutional initiatives to promote equity and inclusion

6.)  Dismantle institutional policies and procedures of exclusion

#4 and #6 are no-brainers, though, speaking personally, I don’t know of any institutional policies and procedures of exclusion in biology.  The rest are ideological statements assuming that everyone except for the marginalized is biased, and that the way to achieve inclusion is to promote “equity” (do they even know what “equity” means?) And, of course, the entire program reflects the tenets of DEI, which are on the chopping block in the U.S.

Now this article isn’t as bad as ones on feminist glaciology or ones maintaining that Einstein’s principle of covariance supports the view that minorities have an equal claim to objectivity..  No, it’s just superfluous, a farrago of what decent human beings already do, misleading assertions about bias, mixed with patronizing advice that we already follow. It accomplishes nothing save further erode the credibility of editor Kousta.

Here’s the conclusion:

For allyship to be effective in academia, it must be grounded in a deep commitment to DEI. This means recognizing that allyship is not a one-time event, but an ongoing process of learning, reflection and action. Moreover, it needs to go above and beyond symbolic or superficial acts (performative allyship) to demonstrate substantial and meaningful support that is recognized as beneficial by those it is meant to serve (substantive allyship). It is noteworthy to understand and accept that we will make mistakes along the way. No one is perfect, and as explained above, allyship requires a willingness to engage in humility and self-reflection. When mistakes are made, it is important to listen to feedback from disadvantaged groups, take responsibility for any harm caused, and commit to doing better in the future.

In conclusion, everyone can engage in allyship and work to challenge and dismantle systemic bias, creating a more just, equitable and inclusive academic community for all.

At least they used “equitable” properly, meaning “treating people fairly.”  But couldn’t the whole article have consisted of just that sentence?

Konstantin Kisin: “The tide is turning”

February 24, 2025 • 10:00 am

Trigger(nometry) warning: semi-conservative video.

I can’t remember who recommended I watch this video, which features satirist, author, and Triggernometry co-host Konstantin Kisin speaking for 15 minutes at a meeting of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). The group is described by Wikipedia as “an international organisation whose aim is to unite conservative voices and propose policy based on traditional Western values.”

The talk is laced with humor, but the message is serious:  Kisin argues that societies based on “Western values” are the most attractive, as shown by the number of potential immigrants; but they are endangered by the negativity and “lies” of those who tell us that “our history is all bad and our country is plagued by prejudice and intolerance.” To that he replies that people espousing such sentiments still prefer to live in the West. (But of course that doesn’t mean that these factors still aren’t at play in the West!)  Kisin then touts both Elon Musk (for “building big things”) and (oy) Jordan Peterson for “reminding us that our lives will improve if we accept that “honesty is better than lies, that responsibility is better than blame, and strength is better than weakness.”

He continues characterizing the West as special: “the most free and prosperous societies in the history of humanity, and we are going to keep them that way.” To accomplish that, he promotes free speech as the highest of Western values, and rejects identity politics, arguing that “multiethnic societies can work; multicultural societies cannot.” Finally, he claims that human beings are good, denying (as he avers) the woke view that “human beings are a pestilence on the planet.”  Kisin calls for more reproduction and making energy “as cheap and abundant as possible.”

The talk finishes with the most inspiring thing Kising says he’s ever heard: that we’re going to die; ergo, we have nothing to lose. “We might as well speak the truth, we might as well reach for the stars, we might as well fight like our lives depended on it—because they do.”  I’m not exactly sure what he means, nor do I feel uplifted or inspired by these words, which don’t really tell us why he thinks the tide is turning. And, at the end, I could see where this optimistic word salad came from: it’s in Wikipedia, too:

[The ARC] is associated with psychologist and political commentator Jordan Peterson. One Australian journalist identified the purpose of ARC as follows: “to replace a sense of division and drift within conservatism, and Western society at large, with a renewed cohesion and purpose”.

Do any readers get inspired by this kind of chest-pounding?  I have to add that I do like Triggernometry, one of the few podcasts I can listen to, but I’m not especially energized by the co-host’s speech.

FIRE rebukes U Conn’s medical school for compelled speech by confecting and forcing on students a social-justice Hippocratic oath.

January 31, 2025 • 11:00 am

Speaking of FIRE and free speech, I got an email from that organization this morning about how The University of Connecticut has altered the traditional Hippocratic Oath to reflect Social Justice considerations. (It’s far from the only med school that has done this.)  This can be considered compelled speech, which students are supposed to recite even if they disagree with it. You can see the traditional forms of the oath here, and hear the newer one here, starting at 44:12. The students are asked to repeat the oath after the speaker.

The new oath is also transcribed below at the Do No Harm site; I’ve put in a red box the parts that disturbed FIRE:

Here’s the email I got from FIRE:

Incoming medical students typically recite the Hippocratic Oath, a pledge to do no harm to patients. But last August, the University of Connecticut required freshmen medical students to recite an ideologically-charged version of the Hippocratic Oath that reads, in part, 

“I will strive to promote health equity.
I will actively support policies that promote social justice and specifically work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination and racism.”

The school violated students’ First Amendment rights against compelled speech by forcing them to affirm contested political viewpoints. The oath effectively emboldens administrators to punish students who, in their opinion, failed to uphold these nebulous commitments. What, exactly, must a medical student do to “support policies that promote social justice”? If a student disagrees with UConn’s definition of “social justice” or chooses not to promote it in the prescribed way, could she be dismissed for violating her oath?

Today, free speech group FIRE called on UConn to make clear that students may refrain from reciting all or part of the oath without any threat of penalty and will not have to affirm any political viewpoints as a condition of their education at the school.

FIRE Program Officer Ross Marchand: “The constant threat of discipline hangs over UConn students. At any time, administrators could decide that a student has broken the vague, partisan oath that she was forced to take. Even an insufficient commitment to ‘social justice’ could land a student in trouble. UConn prioritized politics and ideology above education and the First Amendment, creating a culture of compulsion and fear.”

Thanks! Check out our letter to the school and our blog post.

The blog post notes this:

In August, UConn required the incoming class of 2028 to pledge allegiance not simply to patient care, but to support diversity, equity, and inclusion. The revised oath, which was finalized in 2022, includes a promise to “actively support policies that promote social justice and specifically work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination and racism.”

This practice is a grave affront to students’ free speech rights. In January, FIRE called the medical school to confirm that the oath is mandatory; an admissions staff member told us it was. We are asking them to confirm this in writing.

As a public university, UConn is strictly bound by the First Amendment and cannot compel students to voice beliefs they do not hold. Public institutions have every right to use educational measures to try to address biases they believe stymie the healthcare system. But forcing students to pledge themselves to DEI policies — or any other ideological construct — with which they may disagree is First Amendment malpractice. This is no different than forcing students to pledge their allegiance to a political figure or the American flag.

. . .   and adds that these “Social Justice Oaths” are not uncommon:

UConn isn’t alone in making such changes to the Hippocratic Oath. Other prestigious medical schools, including those at Harvard, Columbia, Washington University, Pitt Med, and the Icahn School of Medicine, have adopted similar oaths in recent years. However, not all schools compel students to recite such oaths. When we raised concerns in 2022 about the University of Minnesota Medical School’s oath, which includes affirming that the school is on indigenous land and a vow to fight “white supremacy,” the university confirmed that students were not obligated to recite it. That’s the very least UConn could do to make clear that it puts medical education — and the law — ahead of politics.

The letter suggests that taking this oath is not optional but mandatory. From FIRE’s letter from Marchand to Dean Bruce Liang of the UConn Medical School:

FIRE called the UConn School of Medicine Admissions Office to clarify whether the oath, including these additions, is mandatory for students participating in the ceremony. A staff member confirmed that this oath is required for all incoming students. We have also emailed the admissions office to confirm the mandatory nature of the oath but have yet to receive a
written response.

. . . While UConn may encourage students to adopt the views contained in the oath, the First Amendment bars the university from requiring them to do so.  The First Amendment protects not only the right to speak but the right to refrain from speaking. As the Supreme Court has notably held, public institutions may not compel individuals to “declare a belief [and] … to utter what is not in [their] mind.”8 Requiring new students to pledge their loyalty to a particular ideology violates students’ expressive rights, is inconsistent with the role of the university as a bastion of free inquiry, and cannot lawfully be enforced at a public institution. UConn can require students to adhere to established medical standards, but this authority cannot be abused to demand allegiance to a prescribed set of political views—even ones that many students may hold.  Specifically, the school may not compel students to pledge to support or promote concepts such as “social justice” and “equity,” notions that have long been the subject of intense political polarization and debate

You’d think that these deans would know something about the prohibition about compelled speech, but of course they cannot conceive that anybody would opopose the social justice-y bits of their new Oath. They clearly need a lesson in the First Amendment!

Finally FIRE asks for a response in two weeks:

FIRE calls on UConn to make clear that students may refrain from reciting all or part of the oath without any threat of penalty and will not have to affirm any political viewpoints as a condition of their education at the school.
We request receipt of a response to this letter no later than the close of business on February 14, 2025

You can go to this page to send a quick fill-in-the-form letter. I did.

More wokeness in biology

January 28, 2025 • 12:15 pm

I thought I was clever when I decided that an alternative word for a woke person could be a “Passive Progressive”, but then was told that woke people aren’t passive because they create a lot of noise and kerfuffle. I still like my new term, though, as by “passivity” I meant “performativeness”.  That is, a woke person espouses progressive Leftist ideals but does not do anything to enact them, ergo the passivity.

But I digress. While poring through some scientific literature yesterday, I came upon an issue of The American Naturalist from July 2022. This used to be one of the go-to journals for publishing evolutionary biology, and I was a corresponding editor for a while, but in my view it’s slipped a bit. This issue, with its special section on “Nature, data, and power” is about as ideologically captured as you can get. And this was three years ago! Well, capture started well before that. If you want to read any of these articles, just click on the screenshots below (there are two because the section is so long. There are other real science papers not soaked in politics, but I haven’t put them down.

Which paper is your favorite?

 

The scandal of English grooming gangs

January 7, 2025 • 11:15 am

UPDATE:  A UK government report from 2020 suggests that there are conflicting data on the ethnicity of the offending “grooming gangs”. Click below to see the study and I quote from page 10 of the Executive Summary (bolding is mine):

17. A number of high-profile cases – including the offending in Rotherham investigated by Professor Alexis Jay,3 the Rochdale group convicted as a result of Operation Span, and convictions in Telford – have mainly involved men of Pakistani ethnicity. Beyond specific high-profile cases, the academic literature highlights significant limitations to what can be said about links between ethnicity and this form of offending. Research has found that group-based CSE offenders are most commonly White.4 Some studies suggest an over-representation of Black and Asian offenders relative to the demographics of national populations.5 However, it is not possible to conclude that this is representative of all group-based CSE offending. This is due to issues such as data quality problems, the way the samples were selected in studies, and the potential for bias and inaccuracies in the way that ethnicity data is collected.6 During our conversations with police forces, we have found that in the operations reflected, offender groups come from diverse backgrounds, with each group being broadly ethnically homogenous. However, there are cases where offenders within groups come from different backgrounds.7

Stay tuned, and if you know of more dispositive data, place it in the comments. If this be true,  then even bringing in the element of race is misguided. But as I say below, it doesn’t matter what color or ethnicity the pedophiles were, for nearly everyone agrees that the whole issue of grooming gangs has been grossly mishandled by the UK authorities, and largely swept under the rug.

UPDATE 2: A reader calls attention to this NYT article claiming that Musk’s tactics in exposing the grooming gangs are dishonest and politically motivated.

 

The Free Press headline below may be exaggerated, but it comes close to the truth.  For it’s about the “grooming gangs” that have plagued England for several decades.  They involve groups of men—most often of Pakistani or Bangladesi ancestry—whose goal is to subjugate and rape young children of both sexes. Some children have been killed.  But because the perps are usually people of color, the government, the police, and the public have largely ignored the issue.  This is a huge scandal involving, once again, a clash of ideologies that came down the wrong way. The warring ideologies are to avoid denigrating immigrants of color versus protecting children against pedophiles.

Yes, some of these gangs have been broken up and the perps sent to prison, but only now, with the prompting of Elon Musk, is it being publicized as the heinous crime it is. (The fact that Musk is widely hated makes it hard for people to accept the situation, but his actions in this case are right.) For the grooming is still going on, and not just in the UK but in other places in Europe.  Unfortunately, calling attention to these gangs is seen not only as racist, but as anti-immigrant, both characterizations being horrible to liberals.

I’m not going to describe these crimes in detail, as they makes me sick, but you need to know about them, and the UK needs to start taking the issue VERY seriously.

First, a piece from the Free Press, which you can access by clicking on the headline.

There’s a thread of incidents tweeted by Elon Musk you can find at the link, and of course everybody is festooning them with community notes because Musk. This first one, for example, happened five years ago, and the perps are in jail. But it tells you the kind of things that can happen. Here are the first two tweets, apparently both from 2013.  But as the article above notes, this is still going on,

A quote from the Free Press piece:

The grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls by men of mostly Pakistani Muslim background over several decades is the biggest peacetime crime in the history of modern Europe. It went on for many years. It is still going on. And there has been no justice for the vast majority of the victims.

British governments, both Conservative and Labour, hoped that they had buried the story after a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s. And it looked like they had succeeded—until Elon Musk read some of the court papers and tweeted his disgust and bafflement on X over the new year.

Britain now stands shamed before the world. The public’s suppressed wrath is bubbling to the surface in petitions, calls for a public inquiry, and demands for accountability.

The scandal is already reshaping British politics. It’s not just about the heinous nature of the crimes. It’s that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.

Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia. The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.

They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation. They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. They did this because Britain’s traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.

All of which is why no one knows precisely how many thousands of young girls were raped in how many towns across Britain since the 1970s.

Although some have said that this is no longer a problem, and the perps are all in jail, that’s simply not true. The first link above goes to a UK government site about the Grooming Gangs Taskforce, and was published in May of last year:

In the last 12 months the crack team of expert investigators and analysts has helped police forces arrest over 550 suspects, identify and protect over 4,000 victims, and build up robust cases to get justice for these appalling crimes.

Established by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in April 2023, the Grooming Gangs Taskforce of specialist officers has worked with all 43 police forces in England and Wales to support child sexual exploitation and grooming investigations.

Led by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and supported by the National Crime Agency, the taskforce is a full time, operational police unit funded by the Home Office to improve how the police investigate grooming gangs and identify and protect children from abuse. It is staffed by experienced and qualified officers and data analysts who have long-term, practical on-the-ground experience of undertaking investigations into grooming gangs.

Finally, from Unherd, an article about how the cops are complicit in not going after grooming gangs. It’s written by a former detective :


The answer is pretty much what you would expect: going after grooming gangs that largely comprise people of color is seen as racist, and you know how the British cops are with “hate speech”:

The statistics behind the rape gang scandal — let’s banish the wholly inadequate word “grooming” — are staggering. For over 25 years, networks of men, predominantly from Pakistani Muslim backgrounds, abused young white girls from Yeovil to London to Glasgow. The victims’ accounts are beyond depravity, unthinkable in a supposedly advanced Western democracy.

That, of course, immediately raises a simple, shocking question: why did British police services turn a blind eye to the gang rape of tens of thousands of young girls? I should have a fair idea. I was a police officer for 25 years, including five as a detective in the Met’s anticorruption command. Working on sensitive investigations into police wrongdoing, I saw first-hand how law enforcement responds to scandals and crises. I’ve watched senior officers, faced with uncomfortable truths, wriggle like greased piglets. I’ve witnessed logic-defying decisions for nakedly political reasons. I am firmly of the view, then, that the whole scandal has unambiguously revealed rank cowardice by constabularies across the UK, where the most senior whistleblower in the entire country was a lowly detective constable.

The answer, in the end, is simple. Racism, for police services from Chester to Penzance, remains the original sin. From the Scarman Report to the Macpherson Inquiry, the police have long served as Britain’s sin-eaters, devouring social problems on our behalf. As former Met Commissioner Sir Robert Mark famously wrote: “The police are the anvil on which society beats out the problems and abrasions of social inequality, racial prejudice, weak laws and ineffective legislation.” That was over 40 years ago, and little has changed since. This institutional reticence over race goes beyond the police themselves: even the Independent Office for Police Conduct’s (IOPC) review of the rape gang scandal tiptoed around the heritage and religion of offenders.

The second reason why race is a third rail issue for police? Public order. The raison d’etre of British policing, imprinted into its DNA, is Keeping the King’s Peace. And as we saw in Southport and elsewhere last summer, austerity-ravaged services are ill-equipped to deal with large-scale disorder. Riots, especially those with a racial element, are the ultimate manifestation of police failure, even as forces like Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire are petrified of seeing a repeat of the 2001 disturbances in Oldham. I suspect, then, that chief constables were inclined to see the rape gang scandal as another intractable problem, confined to a marginalised section of the white underclass. To pick at that particular scab might risk public disorder. Better to speak to “community leaders” — to keep the peace, even at the price of allowing organised paedophile networks to operate in plain sight.

It is incomprehensible to me how the police, government, and general public prefer to brush this issue under the rug: it’s pedophilia, for crying out loud, and the abuse is both horrible and pervasive. But I’ll close with the observation that again we see a clash of two opposing views: one in which people of color should be treated fairly, which is good, and the other in which children should not be sexually abused, completely incontestable.  But when people of color begin mass sexual abuse of children, and those children appear to be mostly white, you can see how it poses a conflict for the woke. Yet it should not be a conflict, for no matter what color the abusers and rapists are, they are violating the law big time and should be taken off the streets. That has happened to some extent, but not nearly to the extent that should be the case.

h/t: Luana

Simon Fraser University tries to decolonize and indigenize STEM

December 18, 2024 • 9:40 am

UPDATE: The site to which I refer below disappeared for a while this morning, and then reappeared.  So the post right below still links to the right places:

Simon Fraser University in British Columbia recently adopted a policy of institutional neutrality.  But its latest endeavor shows that it’s still in the thrall of wokeness, for it’s launched a policy of “decolonizing and indigenizing” STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).  Nothing good can come of their effort, for, as you see, it can mean only the adoption of indigenous “ways of knowing” in the sciences.  There are several pages on the site, which was sent to me by a member of the Simon Fraser community. Click on the screenshot below to go to the “welcome” page and its links.  The small print in the headline says this:

Welcome to the Decolonizing and Indigenizing STEM (DISTEM) Website, dedicated to decolonizing and Indigenizing STEM at Simon Fraser University (SFU)!

This website, originally designed to support STEM faculty, is a valuable tool for anyone committed to the decolonization of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to decolonize and indigenize our teaching. Click the link to go to the web site. Most of the pages are just a bit of text and links to other sites or to the home pages of the authors.

The endeavor seems serious, for this is part of the rationale:

To understand the importance of such systems in the decolonization of library classification, it is essential to explore Ashley’s work with the Indigenous Curriculum Resource Centre (ICRC) and her adaptation of the Brian Deer Classification System (BDCS). Most importantly, classification and categorization systems need to shift away from Western-European knowledge systems to prioritizing Indigenous ways of knowing and being, which are community focused. For example, a shift in language from “Indigenous Peoples – History and Culture” to “Indigenous Peoples – Communities,” moves the narrative away from historicizing Indigenous peoples toward their power, knowledge, and contemporary contributions. Not only does this shift place Indigenous Peoples and communities at the centre, but all other surrounding categories move outward to reflect their relationality to these communities and Indigenous knowledge. Such shifts in thinking and doing are crucial for STEM faculty and students to learn and apply. We strongly encourage you to follow the links provided above to gain a deeper understanding of these vital concepts and how we can all further decolonize our minds.

Note that the program is not designed to bring more indigenous people into science—though that may be one of its aims—but to CENTER the contributions “Indigenous Peoples and Communities” in teaching the content of science, at the same time “moving all other surrounding categories outward.”

Some of the aims from the Project History:

One of the major concerns faculty shared was that they lack the time and resources necessary to learn about and then implement these processes, both personally and professionally. This issue was exasperated because information and resources related to decolonizing and Indigenizing STEM, as well as teaching and learning, are dispersed and disconnected both online and off, which can be overwhelming for faculty, particularly those just beginning their decolonizing journeys. Thus, the DISTEM Website originally aimed to meet faculty needs by creating a central online living archive of relevant and varied resources focused on decolonizing and Indigenizing STEM, both generally and regarding teaching and learning, in postsecondary institutions.

As I always say, if there is indigenous knowledge that is part of STEM, then by all means incorporate it into STEM, for I seriously doubt that there is enough empirical knowledge in American northwest tribes to constitute a substantial moiety of modern science. Like the indigenous “knowledge” of New Zealand, it will consist largely of trial-and-error methods that the locals developed for subsistence: how, when, and where to catch fish, collect berries, build canoes, and the like.  Indigenous knowledge is not a toolkit like modern science—a toolkit for finding answers that incorporates hypothesis-testing, experiments, statistics, blind testing, pervasive doubt, and so out. Rather, indigenous knowledge is a set of facts acquired independently of that tookit. But yes, there may be some indigenous knowledge there, but seriously, why would Simon Fraser make a whole program out of centering science on it.

You know why: they are displaying their virtue by sacralizing the practices of the indigenous people.  But those people descended from other people who crossed over the Bering Strait about 15,000 years ago, and those people had their own knowledge. It’s bizarre to center the “knowledge” of tribes who flourished before modern science began, but again, that’s what you have to do if you want to show your virtue. And it’s too bad for science—and for Simon Fraser.

If you have any interest in scrolling around these pages, the person who sent this to me says this:
The “Prototype” page is the resource. The coloured circles and the orbiting dots are links – click one to make the dots stand still and get a pop-up with some text and a link to a resource. They are amazingly bad. I picked one from “Animals” and one from “Creation Stories”, and got links to old essays by the queer theorist Kim Tallbear. Not a scientist, and not writing about or engaging with science. The “Creation Stories” link is full of old tropes about the racism of human population genetics research. Ho hum.
Here’s what the prototype page looks like (click to go to it). The rings are labeled, from the outside in, “Indigenous Influence/Contributions to Non-Indigenous Society,” “Elders,” “Family Life and Parenting,” “Sexuality and Relationships,” “Gender Roles and Gender Identity,” “Children and Youth,” “Social Structures—Kinship, Clans, Families,” “Indigenous Identity”, and, in the center, “Roles and Relationships.” You know already that this is a sociological resource having almost nothing to do with STEM.

If you click on the green dot in the “Gender Roles and Gender Identity” site, for instance, you get one reference and its summary:

Two Spirit
Garrett, M. T., & Barret, B. (2003). Two Spirit: Counseling Native American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual People. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 31(2), 131–142. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2161-1912.2003.tb00538.x

The cultural world of the Two Spirit, the traditional role of Native individuals believed to possess both male and female spirit, is explored in both “old ways” and current-day experiences. Cultural beliefs and meanings around sexual identity are discussed from a Native perspective with recommendations for counseling Two Spirit clients.  (A Spanish translation follows.)

This has nothing to do with STEM.

In one respect this seems harmless, because there’s no way in tarnation for this stuff to really make its way into STEM. But in other ways it’s not harmless, as it warps scholarship, pretends that sociology or ideology is hard science, and makes a mockery of true STEM.

Poor Simon Fraser. In the end they are not decolonizing of indigenizing science, but sacralizing Native Americans.

More censorship of science by political correctness: cousin marriage becomes a taboo topic in the UK

December 16, 2024 • 9:30 am

This new Times of London piece by writer (and former table tennis champion) Matthew Syed describes a new form of “taboo science” that, although normally a topic of discourse and treaching in genetics, has become verboten to discuss: cousin marriage. This is because of wokeness. Click on the screenshot below to see the piece (or find it archived here). I’ll quote it after I explain a bit of genetics.

I’m sure you’ve heard that marriage among relatives is not a good thing, and that the closer the relatedness, the worse it can be. The reason is that relatives carry identical gene forms, and the closer you’re related to your mate, the more identical genes you share.  For instance, my sister and I share half our genes, which means that if you single out one of the two gene copies I have at a given DNA site (“locus”), the chance that my sister has that identical copy is 1/2, or 50%.  This is expressed as a “coefficient of relatedness,” which in this case is 0.5. It’s the same for me and either of my parents, or any of my offspring (if I had any). Identical twins, being genetically the same at every locus, have a coefficient of relatedness of one.

Because of the dilution effect of marrying someone unrelated, my coefficient of relatedness to any of my grandparents is 0.25, and you can probably figure out that my coefficient of relatedness to any of my first cousins (say the daughter of my mother’s brother) is 1/8, or 0.125. That’s because I carry half the genes of my mother, a quarter of the genes of my mother’s brother, and thus an eighth of the genes of my mother’s brother’s offspring.

What this means for medical genetics is that because each human carries a certain proportion of deleterious recessive genes (that is, genes that have a very bad effect, but only when an individual carries two copies), there is a chance that such genes might come together in those two copies when relatives marry.  Because nearly all these genes are normally present in only one copy, we don’t get the genetic disease, but if two copies appear in a mating between relatives, that offspring will show the bad trait. (An example of such genes are sickle-cell anemia or Tay-Sachs disease, the former more common in West African blacks, the latter in Ashkenazi Jews. But there are many, many deleterious recessive genes, whose frequencies are kept low by natural selection against the few people unlucky enough to get two copies.)

Since most of us carry some really bad disease-causing genes, but in single copies (the average number is 1-2), if we marry a relative the chances that those genes can appear in two copies, producing a sick or dead offspring, increases. For example, if I carry a gene for Tay-Sachs disease, the chance that my sister would have the gene copy would be 50%, and if that were to be the case, if we mated the chance that the offspring would get both copies of the gene would be 1/4.  Thus for every bad recessive gene a person has (and most of us have one or two) incest with a sibling would give a probability of 12.5% that our offspring would get the genetic disease. This is why incest is prohibited: it produces an inordinately high proportion of offspring with genetic diseases or homozygosity for rare genes that have milder deleterious conditions.

The chances are lower for first-cousin marriages because first cousins share fewer gene copies in general.  Although it’s generally seen as bad to marry a first cousin, if the practice hasn’t been going on in your lineage for a long time, the harmfulness of such marriages isn’t so great. To quote Wikipedia:

Opinions vary widely as to the merits of the practice. Children of first-cousin marriages have a 4-6% risk of autosomal recessive genetic disorders compared to the 3% of the children of totally unrelated parents. A study indicated that between 1800 and 1965 in Iceland, more children and grandchildren were produced from marriages between third or fourth cousins (people with common great-great- or great-great-great-grandparents) than from other degrees of separation. [JAC: Thus not just child mortality can be lowered, but also fertility, perhaps because of early miscarriages.]

. . . . In April 2002, the Journal of Genetic Counseling released a report which estimated the average risk of birth defects in a child born of first cousins at 1.1–2.0 percentage points above the average base risk for non-cousin couples of 3%, or about the same as that of any woman over age 40. In terms of mortality, a 1994 study found a mean excess pre-reproductive mortality rate of 4.4%,  while another study published in 2009 suggests the rate may be closer to 3.5%.  Put differently, a single first-cousin marriage entails a similar increased risk of birth defects and mortality as a woman faces when she gives birth at age 41 rather than at 30.

This is still stuff you need to know if you’re contemplating marrying a cousin, especially if you’re in an ethnic group with a high frequency of certain genetic diseases. That’s why we have genetic counseling. First cousins still need to know that the risk of having a genetically diseased child could be 50-100% greater than for nonrelated couples.  It’s still low, but could affect one’s decision  And if you are, for example, an Ashkenazi Jew, it’s best for both partners to get genetically tested, for if neither carries the Tay-Sachs gene, they can go ahead and reproduce like rabbits. If only one carries the gene, they can still go ahead without worry, though that gene will still be passed on in single form to half their offspring, who will be “carriers.”

Given the low relative risk of having kids with your first cousin, it’s still curious that such marriages are widely prohibited. Again from Wikipedia:

In some jurisdictions, cousin marriage is legally prohibited: for example, first-cousin marriage in China, North Korea, South Korea, the Philippines, for Hindus in some jurisdictions of India, some countries in the Balkans, and 30 out of the 50 U.S. states. It is criminalized in 8 states in the US, the only jurisdictions in the world to do so. The laws of many jurisdictions set out the degree of consanguinity prohibited among sexual relations and marriage parties. Supporters of cousin marriage where it is banned may view the prohibition as discrimination, while opponents may appeal to moral or other arguments.

There’s a reason to prohibit first-cousin marriages in some groups, though, and I’ll explain this below.

This kind of stuff has been taught for decades in genetics classes.  There should be no taboo about talking about why brother-sister or first-cousin matings are frowned upon. But it has recently become taboo to discuss, as you can see from the article above. The reason is that some communities keep mating with their relatives generation after generation, and that considerably increases the chances that two relatives who mate within that community will have a genetically diseased offspring (this “inbreeding” raises the frequency of some genes that cause genetic disease, which is why the Amish and Ashlenazi Jews happen to have high frequencies of different genetic diseases.  Here’s one more paragraph from the Wikipedia article on “cousin marriage”:

After repeated generations of cousin marriage the actual genetic relationship between two people is closer than the most immediate relationship would suggest. In Pakistan, where there has been cousin marriage for generations and the current rate may exceed 50%, one study estimated infant mortality at 12.7 percent for married double first cousins, 7.9 percent for first cousins, 9.2 percent for first cousins once removed/double second cousins, 6.9 percent for second cousins, and 5.1 percent among nonconsanguineous progeny. Among double first cousin progeny, 41.2 percent of prereproductive deaths were associated with the expression of detrimental recessive genes, with equivalent values of 26.0, 14.9, and 8.1 percent for first cousins, first cousins once removed/double second cousins, and second cousins respectively.

The higher the frequency of deleterious recessive genes, the greater the relative risk of first-cousin matings compared to matings between unrelated people, and in the Pakistani community the frequencyu of deleterious recessive genes have been increased by inbreeding (“consanguineous mating”). Sometimes it can be hundreds of times higher!

Thus it becomes even more imperative to discuss the dangers of “consanguineous” matings (matings with relatives) with members of such communities. Sadly, the opposite has occurred. Because one of the communities that do this is in fact Pakistani (I’m not sure if other Muslim national groups do the same), the taboo with dissing people of color has now made it off limits to talk about cousin marriages. I quote from the Times article. Note that Syed’s father was a Pakistani immigrant to the UK.

Let me start by telling you about Dr Patrick Nash, a somewhat shy legal academic who in 2017 came across an intriguing finding. He noticed that much of the “extremism” emanating from Pakistani communities seemed to have a “clan” component. The perpetrators were linked not just through ideology or religion but by family ties stretching through generations. He noticed something else too: these communities were cemented together by cousin marriage, a common practice in Pakistani culture. By marrying within small, tightknit groups, they ensure everything is kept within the baradari, or brotherhood — property, secrets, loyalty — binding them closer together while sequestering them from wider society.

At this point Dr Nash hadn’t come to understand the genetic risks, the patriarchal oppression and the bloc voting, nor the growing evidence that rates of cousin marriage strongly correlate with corruption and poverty, but — like any good scholar — he thought he’d do a bit more digging.

But then something odd happened: several academics invited him to the pub for a “drink and chat”. He thought nothing of it, but it turned out to be an informal tribunal. “It was put to me that I might consider another line of inquiry that would be more ‘culturally sensitive’, less likely to provide ‘ammo for the right’ and less likely to ‘make life more difficult for myself’ as a junior, untenured academic,” he told me. “It was sinister.”

It was not just sinister, but woke, with the wokeness working to silence scientific discourse. And, as Syed discovered, the wokeness spread quickly. I’ve bolded the most arrant example of scientific censorship.

I quickly discovered that researchers wouldn’t return emails or calls. When I got through to one geneticist, he said: “I can’t go there.” It was like hitting a succession of ever-higher brick walls. I then came across evidence that scientists examining the UK Biobank had found that levels of incest (father-daughter, siblings etc) were significantly higher in the British Pakistani community than the wider population. This was a disturbing finding, possibly indicating abuse of a shocking kind. But the paper was never published, disappearing into what I can only describe as an Orwellian memory hole. When I approached the researchers, they were not prepared to talk on the record. One said that he feared he might not be able to bring up his children if he whispered the truth and lost his job as a result. It was like something out of Kafka.

What I hope you are gleaning from all this is how scientific inquiry is being distorted and suppressed out of an almost crippling fear of offending cultural sensitivities; how information vital to the public interest is being censored out of concern that it might be prejudicial to the “customs” of immigrant communities. It is a phenomenon that directly parallels the Rotherham scandal, in which young girls suffering horrific abuse at the hands of mainly Pakistani gangs were betrayed by the police and social services, which refused to investigate for fear of appearing racist.

Finally, there’s this:

But the other striking aspect of the debate was the sinister influence of scientific malpractice. MPs on all sides kept referring to the genetic risks of cousin marriage as “double” those of relationships between unrelated couples. This “fact” is endemic throughout the media, from the BBC to The Telegraph, and for good reason: journalists trust what scientists tell them. But the stat isn’t true — indeed, it’s absurd. When inbreeding persists through generations (when cousins get married who are themselves the children of cousins), the risks are far higher, which is why British Pakistanis account for 3.4 per cent of births nationwide but 30 per cent of recessive gene disorders, consanguineous relationships are the cause of one in five child deaths in Redbridge and the NHS hires staff specifically to deal with these afflictions.

And that, as Syed says, raises the chances of genetic defects in offspring of Pakistani-Pakistani matings far above those of matings of two people from non-Pakistani communities who aren’t part of a group that has mated consanguineously for generations.

What we see here is one more instance of scientific truth (like the sex binary) being suppressed because it supposedly demonizes a minority group.  But no good can come of such taboos. For one thing, the data don’t show that Pakistani people are morally worse than other people; they simply have a cultural custom that results in more child mortality.  Isn’t that worth spreading to both them and to genetic counselors? For another thing, it takes the whole topic of consanguineous matings off the table for discussion, which is both socially and scientifically harmful.  This kind of censorship is not new to me, as there are lots of examples, but Syed just grasped it:

I realised something else too. I was a victim of racism growing up, ostracised for long periods at school for the colour of my skin, which is why I’ve spent my life fighting the bigotry of the hard right. But I now believe the soft bigotry of the left is more insidious. After all, you can see and challenge a thug using the P-word, but how to combat the subtler bias that has seeped into our institutions? Ponder the scientists who, with the terrible certainty of their own virtue, played down the risks of cousin marriage, thereby denying the very community they presume to help crucial information; the researchers who concealed information on incest to “protect” minorities, thereby condemning the most vulnerable to sickening abuse.

The way to combat the bias is to tell the scientific truth and then add that the scientific truth doesn’t carry any moral or ideological implications. The taboo we see comes from bigots: in this case, the bigots of the left who don’t think that people, including Pakistanis, can handle the truth.

In this case there are lives that can be saved by telling the truth, but the “soft bigotry” of the left prevents that. It is, in effect, killing babies.

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A few relevant tweets from Luana Maroja. Note that the first one uses a picture of a family that is NOT Pakistani!

This must be the paper that wasn’t allowed to be published (see above). The tweet has apparently been deleted.