Category: wokeness

Meanwhile at the Democratic National Convention. . .

August 22, 2024 • 9:00 am

I’m off to the Blyde River Canyon today and most of tomorrow, so posts will be nonexistent or thin for a few days—save for Matthew’s postings of the Hili Dialogues.  I’ve largely avoided reading the news, as I find it depressing and not conducive to a relaxing vacation, but two readers sent me stuff about the Democratic National Convention that is taking place in Chicago.  I’m glad I’m not there.

Here’s one item that epitomizes the wokeness I fear is metastasizing in the body of the Democratic Party: a land acknowledgement to open the convention. I was sent a link to the video below, which YouTube describes as follows:

Two citizens of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation — Zach Pahmahmie, tribal council vice chair and Lorrie Melchior, tribal council secretary — gave the land acknowledgement Monday at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Kamala Harris will step into the spotlight not as a running mate but at the top of the ticket.

And the video:

My response to these things is always the same: they are performative gestures signaling the virtue of the organization, but accomplish nothing. If the Democratic Party really does acknowledge that the lands on which the convention is taking place was stolen from Native Americans, why don’t they try to compensate the Potawatomi Nation for the theft? (Land in Chicago is expensive!)

Granted the speaker notes that the Interior Department placed some of their tribal lands into a trust, making the Potawatomie “the only federally recognized tribal nation in Illinois in 175 years.” But did any individual get land or cash?

And there are the expected pro-Palestinian protests. Here’s one where an American flag gets burned (legal speech), but a guy who tries to put it out gets jumped on and pushed away.

This shows the divisiveness that plagues America, and that I fear will appear again on campus this fall.

I can’t find an article someone sent me relating that the Convention has given pro-Palestinian protestors far more space than pro-Israeli demonstrators, who have apparently been pushed far away from the site, but I do remember reading that somewhere. In the meantime, the Washington Post reports this:

. . . pro-Palestinian activists have won small but notable concessions at the Democratic National Convention that, three days into the event, have largely headed off any major eruptions of anger or division. Organizers have provided space for a panel to discuss Israeli-Palestinian conflict and for a vigil for Palestinians killed in Gaza [was there a vigil for the dead Israelis, including now six more hostages?], and several high-profile speakers have demanded an end to the war from the stage.

Those concessions have helped defuse the issue, but most critical has been the emergence of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. Harris, in her public comments, has emphasized Palestinian suffering notably more than President Joe Biden has and held Israel more directly responsible for the high civilian death toll and the slow pace of humanitarian aid. In addition, her campaign has ramped up its efforts to engage with those calling for a change in U.S. policy.

This wokeness and anti-Israeli sentiment does of course worry me about Harris and the election, to the point where I’ve been contemplating not voting for President at all (there’s no question of me voting for Trump, who I think is unstable and dangerous). But make no mistake about it: if Harris wins, Israel is in for a hard time, with some Israelis even regarding Harris as an existential threat to their country. I’m hoping that they’re unjustly worried.

And I’m hoping the centrist Democrats will push back on the party’s new cooling toward Israel.  Above all, Democrats have to realize that a permanent cease-fire now is a victory for Hamas, and that the IDF has been more careful than any army in history in trying to reduce civilian casualities. Blame the deaths of Palestinian civilians not on Israel, as have Harris and Biden, but on Hamas, which actually wants the deaths of its own civilians as part of its strategy to win the world’s favor. And Hamas seems to be succeeding, even among Democrats.]

Finally, I wish that Harris would have some interviews or press conferences before the election; it’s surprising to me that’s she’s had exactly none. We all know why that is, of course, but Democrats resolved to support her will find some reasons why no such events are required.

If Democrats share “the contagious power of hope,” as Michelle Obama said in her speech, then my hope is that the Democratic party stops its movement towards its “progressive” wing.

Anyway, these are some early-morning thoughts before I take off to see the wonders of nature. Please discuss them but, as always, be civil to your fellow commenters and to your host. Debate is fine; insults are not.

More on the decline and fall of science education in New Zealand

August 21, 2024 • 11:15 am

Skip this if you don’t care about science education in New Zealand, but plenty of scientists there are worried about it. And it’s a harbinger of what may happen to science education in the U.S. as science courses add requirements to teach indigenous “ways of knowing” and the curriculum itself pushes out traditional material to make way for content that aligns with ideological and political objectives.

Each faculty at the University of Auckland, for instance, has to have one of these mandatory courses tailored to ideological ends.  The one below, for instance, is being created on a trial basis as a requirement for all science majors. I believe I’ve discussed it before, so click on the headline below to see what’s on tap in science education.

Here is the course overview and the course goals (“learning outcomes”):

Course overview:

Contemporary science is deeply entwined with place, knowledge systems and ethics. This course examines these concepts through the lens of sustainability to demonstrate how they shape research agendas, methodologies, and applications of contemporary science. To address the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability, science must recognise and navigate the complexities of these interrelated concepts.

Explore the role of place-based knowledge, the importance of embracing diverse knowledge systems for science and the ethical responsibilities inherent in contemporary science in Aotearoa New Zealand. This interdisciplinary course will challenge you to think critically, fostering an awareness of the intricate relationships between science and its broader context, including Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Learning outcomes:

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

    1. Demonstrate how place, and an understanding of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, are significant to your field of study
    2. Critically and constructively engage with knowledge systems, practices and positionality
    3. Employ a reciprocal, values-based approach to collaborating
    4. Communicate ideas clearly, effectively and respectfully
    5. Reflexively engage with the question of ethics in academic practice
    6. Demonstrate a critical understanding of sustainability

Note the worshipful discussion of “Te Tiriti o Waitangi”, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi that is nearly sacred and almost serves as a constitution for New Zealand, though some of its interpretations are questionable and it was not signed by many Māori leaders on the South Island.  It’s not even a document with hard legal status.

The Treaty did assure the Māori that they’d have the same rights as British citizens and would keep control of their lands and properties, and was written to bring New Zealand into being as a British colony. That means that today Europeans are seen as oppressive “colonizers”. The treaty is now used as a rationale to ensure that Māori or those of Māori ancestry are given equity (not just equal opportunity) in admissions, grants, and so on. The Treaty is also the rationale for the current change in curricula, meant to effect “decolonization,” which in my view means changing modern education to one infused with traditional Māori “ways of knowing.”

The course outline and objectives above are ideological in this way, involving not science per se but a postmodern philosophy of science in which reality is shaped by the scientist and the place where he/she came from.

The emphasis on “ethics” doesn’t belong in a mandatory science course, and I think will serve only to confuse students.

Finally there’s this:

“the importance of embracing diverse knowledge systems for science and the ethical responsibilities inherent in contemporary science in Aotearoa New Zealand”

and this:

“This interdisciplinary course will challenge you to think critically, fostering an awareness of the intricate relationships between science and its broader context, including Te Tiriti o Waitangi.”

I’d be delighted if someone would explain to me why the Treaty of Waitangi should be explicitly discussed in a required science course. Note the emphasis on “diverse knowledge systems”.  I can only guess what that means, but it’s pretty clear.

Now here’s a new course that isn’t required for science majors, but still counts as a science course. Click on the headline below for the course description, even more risible than the one above,

Here is the course prescription, the course overview, and the learning outcomes. Remember, this is a course for which students get science credit:

Course Prescription

Mātauranga is central to the future practice of science in Aotearoa New Zealand. Explores foundational understandings of mātauranga Māori and Kaupapa Māori for scientists. Students will meaningfully and respectfully engage with te ao Māori through place-based relational learning and case studies grounded in whanaungatanga. Students will experience Māori ways of being, knowing, and doing.
Course Overview
This course welcomes all students who wish to engage with mātauranga in relation to scientific place-based knowledge. Engagement with Indigenous knowledge, including mātauranga, is increasingly important to the practice of science in Aotearoa [New Zealand] and beyond. Pūtaiao, meaning science curriculum that includes mātauranga, is well established in primary and secondary education. This course will further develop the learning of pūtaiao [pūtaiao] into tertiary science education and scientific research. Enhancing understandings of mātauranga and Kaupapa Māori [Māori practice] for scientists will develop skills in critical thinking, reflective and relational practice, and the application of Kaupapa Māori in science.

Learning Outcomes:

By the end of this course, students will be able to:
    1. Compare articulations of Kaupapa Māori, mātauranga and science.
    2. Recognise strategies that support, protect, and empower mātauranga in science and the relevance to whānau, hapū and iwi.
    3. Critically explain and communicate understandings of the relationship between Kaupapa Māori, mātauranga and science.
    4. Describe the history of Pūtaiao in science education and relate the development of Pūtaiao to the practice of science in Aotearoa.
    5. Work effectively in a team to develop research skills, including the ability to meaningfully and respectfully engage with te ao Māori.

Note that Kaupapa Māori means the practices of the indigenous people and  Mātauranga Māori comprises Māori “ways of knowing”, including some empirical knowledge gained by trial and error (MM isn’t hypothesis-based), as well as a bunch of superstition, ethics, tradition, myths, lore, legend, and religion.

This course appears one designed to demonstrate that indigenous ways of knowing are not only vital to modern science, but nearly coequal to it, something “central to the future practice of science in Aotearoa New Zealand.”

My answer to that last quote is simply “no it isn’t.” In science classes what should be taught is modern science: the general body of knowledge and tools for knowing as practiced throughout the world today.  Indigenous knowledge may be a part of that, but only a very small one, and likely could be omitted without loss.  If traditional lore and knowledge about when to collect eels or berries is to be taught, it should be in anthropology or sociology class, not a class that gives you science credit.

This course shows that the new curriculum in NZ simply has lost sight of the distinction between science and non-science, and is blurring the boundaries between naturalistic modern science, social science, and ideology.

Note in particular this bit from the second course: “Students will meaningfully and respectfully engage with te ao Māori”. (Te ao Māori is the specifically Māori worldview.) What would people make of the phrase “meaningful and respectful engagement” if used in a science course, where students are encouraged to question everything? What this shows is data being replaced by motivated reasoning that aligns with social justice principles.

If you think this is irrelevant to America, think again. What we’re seeing is fast-forward time travel of DEI carried to its logical limits, with the sacralization of everything indigenous.  While I don’t think for a moment that we’ll have Native American science courses pervading American universities, American teaching of science is becoming increasingly infected with principles of social justice. I’ve gone into this issue many times before and won’t repeat my thoughts, but do spare a thought for the poor science teachers in New Zealand who have to spoon this stuff into the mouths of their students, impeding what should be a real education in science.

Richard Dawkins interviews John McWhorter on linguistics and “woke racism”

June 9, 2024 • 12:15 pm

Here Richard Dawkins interviews linguist and author John McWhorter, a person familiar to readers of this site. And most of the 54-minute discussion is about linguistics.

It’s refreshing to hear McWhorter’s enthusiasm for linguistics, and this bit of the discussion goes from the start of the interview until about 37 minutes in. It’s sad that McWhorter has, by his own admission, been more or less drummed out of the fraternity of academic linguists because of his heterodox views on racism. I’m sure, based on this interview alone, that he was a terrific teacher.

At any rate, McWhorter explains why he began studying linguistics (it involves Hebrew), how many times he thinks language originated (McWhorter thinks just once, though he’s not convinced that this is supported by the existence of a “universal grammar” or universal “recursion”: subordinate phrases embedded within phrases). Rather, McWhorter is convinced of a single origin of language by parsimony alone. As to when it originated, McWhorter makes rather unconvincing arguments (criticized by Richard) that Homo erectus could use syntactic language; he’s on more solid ground when he thinks that Africans, because of evidence of their mental sophistication, used language around 300,000 years ago.

They discuss evidence that the FOXP2 gene was implicated in origin of language, and McWhorter is accurate in saying that this theory hasn’t worked out, though he believes, along with Steve Pinker, that the ability to use syntactic language is encoded in our genome.

The discussion of “woke racism” (the title of McWhorter’s well known book, which was originally “The Elect”) begins at 36:40.  Dawkins moves the discussion into why McWhorter considers woke racism a “religion”, even though there are no supernatural beings involved. I’m not particularly concerned whether one conceives of progressive racial activism as an ideology or a religion, for it seems a semantic question. To me the more interesting questions are the characteristics of the movement (Does it promote irrationality? Is it disconnected from reality? Does it promote “safe spaces”, which McWhorter sees as a religious concept?)

The discussion moves to the question of why you are considered black (or claim you are black) if you have any black ancestors, which leads to McWhorter’s assertion that we have to go beyond race as a personal identity.

The discussion finishes with McWhorter pushing back on the “defenestration” of figures like Thomas Jefferson because they were either slaveholders or didn’t denigrate slavery. He sees this demonization as “pernicious for education”, although he agrees that some extreme versions of racism (e.g., Woodrow Wilson) warrants taking down statues or erasing names. And what, he muses, will demonize us to our descendants.

It’s a very good discussion, I think, and shows McWhorter’s passion, eloquence, and thoughtfulness.

Since McWhorter mentions Jamaican patois as a form of English that isn’t recognizable as English, I wanted to hear some of it, so I’ve put the video showing such patois below.

h/t: Williams Garcia

Teachers’ union in Portland pushes pro-Palestinian propaganda on pupils

June 6, 2024 • 11:10 am

 

Here’s another instance of a teachers’ union imposing its political values on students.  And course it comes from Portland, Oregon. You have to remember that teachers’ unions don’t exist for the benefit of the students, but for the teachers themselves. As the Daily Signal reported in 2011:

As former American Federation of Teachers president Al Shanker infamously quipped: “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.”

And here we have a paradigmatic case of where interests of teachers and students don’t coincide, or rather, when teachers appear so “progressive” that their unions urge teachers to propagandize students in favor of Palestine.  The two articles below documenting this are both conservative—the National Review and The City Journal—but just check the sources and judge for yourself. Christopher Rufo, for example, is widely demonized, but mainly because he’s a Republican who advised Ron DeSantis. In fact, I think his exposing DEI stuff and showing its weaknesses have been salubrious. And so is this exposé. But again, read and judge.

I have to emphasize that these are lesson plans made by the Portland Association of Teachers, and it’s not clear whether any of this material has yet been foisted on students.

Click on the two headlines below to read, or check out this series of tweets by Rufo documenting the teaching material.

From the National Review, by Ryan Mills:

And the City Journal piece by Rufo:

From the National Review Piece:

Jewish leaders and concerned parents in Portland, Oregon are accusing the local teachers’ union of indoctrinating students with anti-Israel messages and engaging in one-sided, pro-Palestinian activism as the war in Gaza continues to rage.

The 32-page guide, “Know Your Rights! Teaching & Organizing for Palestine within Portland Public Schools,” was published last month by the Oregon Educators for Palestine in collaboration with the teachers’ union. It offers legal advice to educators “teaching about the genocide in Palestine,” and advice on how to teach about the ongoing conflict.

The fact that parents and Jewish leaders say that the teachers’ union is actually “indoctrinating students” implies that this material is being taught, but it’s not clear. However, the guide seems to have disappeared, as the link above goes nowhere. Never mind; you can find the link below.

There’s more:

The teaching guide does not mention that Gaza is governed by Hamas, which the U.S. designated as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997. And critics note that while it focuses on the plight of Palestinians, it makes no mention of Hamas’ terrorist attack on October 7, which killed about 1,200 innocent people, mostly Israeli civilians, and led to the war.

The guide accuses Israel of engaging in “settler colonialism” and says that the “Zionist settler colonization of Palestine has been widely compared to settler colonialism in the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere.”

. . .For younger students, the guide recommends lessons, books, and videos from various far-left education outfits, including Woke Kindergarten, the Palestinian Feminist Collective, and Social Justice Books. It includes a visual guide titled “So You Made it to a Protest!” and “Lil Comrade Convos,” which urges young kids to discuss “power.”

Older students are directed to lessons on “Renewable Energy in occupied Palestine,” “Unions,” “Genocide of Palestinians,” “Queer Voices From the Fight For Palestine Liberation,” and “No Freedom Without Reproductive Freedom for Palestinian Women.”

What can you say except “Oy vey!” (if you’re a Zionist). But Rufo has more evidence in a working link and some tweets, so I’ll quote the second article as well. And the link in the first sentence, to the “Teach Palestine” resources, is working, though I don’t see how to download it.

I have obtained a collection of publicly accessible documents produced by the Portland Association of Teachers, an affiliate of the state teachers’ union that encourages its more than 4,500 members to “Teach Palestine!” (The union did not respond to a request for comment.)

The lesson plans are steeped in radicalism, and they begin teaching the principles of “decolonization” to students as young as four and five years old. For prekindergarten kids, the union promotes a workbook from the Palestinian Feminist Collective, which tells the story of a fictional Palestinian boy named Handala. “When I was only ten years old, I had to flee my home in Palestine,” the boy tells readers. “A group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people.” Students are encouraged to come up with a slogan that they can chant at a protest and complete a maze so that Handala can “get back home to Palestine”—represented as a map of Israel.

Other pre-K resources include a video that repeats left-wing mantras, including “I feel safe when there are no police,” and a slideshow that glorifies the Palestinian intifada, or violent resistance against Israel. The recommended resource list also includes a “sensory guide for kids” on attending protests. It teaches children what they might see, hear, taste, touch, and smell at protests, and promotes photographs of slogans such as “Abolish Prisons” and “From the River to the Sea.”

In kindergarten through second grade, the ideologies intensify. The teachers’ union recommends a lesson, “Art and Action for Palestine,” that teaches students that Israel, like America, is an oppressor. The objective is to “connect histories of settler colonialism from Palestine to the United States” and to “celebrate Palestinian culture and resistance throughout history and in the present, with a focus on Palestinian children’s resistance.”

The lesson suggests that teachers should gather the kindergarteners into a circle and teach them a history of Palestine: “75 years ago, a lot of decision makers around the world decided to take away Palestinian land to make a country called Israel. Israel would be a country where rules were mostly fair for Jewish people with White skin,” the lesson reads. “There’s a BIG word for when Indigenous land gets taken away to make a country, that’s called settler colonialism.”

Before snack time, the teacher is encouraged to share “keffiyehs, flags, and protest signs” with the children, and have them create their own agitprop material, with slogans such as “FREE PALESTINE, LET GAZA LIVE, [and] PALESTINE WILL BE FREE.” The intention, according to the lesson, is to move students toward “taking collective action in support of Palestinian liberation.”

I can’t stop quoting!

. . . .The recommended curriculum also includes a pamphlet titled “All Out for Palestine.” The pamphlet is explicitly political, with a sub-headline blaring in all capital letters: “STOP THE GENOCIDE! END U.S. AID TO IRSAEL! [sic] FREE PALESTINE!” The authors denounce “Zionism’s long genocidal war on Palestinian life” and encourage students to support “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” policies against Israel.

You can peruse the teaching guide, and I’ll put up a few tweets by Rufo demonstrating what’s in it. It starts with lessons from kindergarten through grade 2 (roughly ages 5-7).

Here’s one I found from high school plans; click to read the whole lesson plan:

What the hell is going on here? This is blatant political propagandizing of the type that UNRWA foists on kids in Gaza, but it’s in AMERICA. Of course whether you consider Portland “America” is a matter of taste these days, but I don’t think any parent save someone blatantly pro-Hamas would want their kids fed one-sided propaganda these days. Particularly Jewish parents!

All I can say is that the parents of Portland should nip this nonsense in the bud, pronto.

Teachers’ unions of course have often taken stands inimical to the well-being of their charges: they are notoriously loath to fire teachers who are incompetent or even drunk, they are often pro-DEI, and they pushed schools to close down during the pandemic, a move that now, I think, is seen as deeply unwise, having set children’s education back by a long spell without really conferring much benefit to health.  And this post is one more example of how a teachers’ union, apparently besotted by Palestine and rife with anti-Zionism, is not teaching but propagandizing.

 

h/t: Luana, Rosemary

The Lancet, apparently off its meds, takes the position that sex is non-binary and that it can change within an individual

June 4, 2024 • 11:45 am

Among all scientific or medical journals, The Lancet is the most woke, and I’ve written about it several times before, once calling it the “medical Scientific American“. For a fuller account of its wokeness, which seems to be entirely the doing of editor Richard Horton, see this piece from the site The Daily Skeptic, which summarizes a lot of craziness in the journal.  The latest mishigass is the long (11-page set of “author guidelines” that you can read by clicking on the link below:

And right near the beginning, on page 2, you read the guidelines for using the terms “sex and gender”.  The bolding of the headers is theirs (I’ve put these in caps), but I’ve taken the liberty of putting in bold several select sections of the text.

REPORTING SEX-BASED AND GENDER-BASED ANALYSES 

Reporting guidance

For research involving or pertaining to humans, animals, model organisms, or eukaryotic cells, investigators should integrate sex-based and gender-based analyses into their research design according to evolving funder/sponsor requirements and best practices within a field. Authors should address their research’s sex and/or gender dimensions in their manuscript. In cases where they cannot, they should discuss this as a limitation to their research’s generalisability. With research involving cells and model organisms, researchers should use the term “sex”. With research involving humans, researchers should consider which terms best describe their data (see Definitions section below). Authors can refer to the Sex and Gender Equity in Research (SAGER) Guidelines and the SAGER guidelines checklist. They offer systematic approaches to the use and editorial review of sex and gender information in study design, data analysis, outcome reporting, and research interpretation. However, there is no single, universally agreed-upon set of guidelines for defining sex and gender or reporting sex-based and gender-based analyses.

DEFINITIONS

In human research, the term “sex” carries multiple definitions. It often refers to an umbrella term for a set of biological attributes associated with physical and physiological features (eg, chromosomal genotype, hormonal levels, internal and external anatomy). It can also signify a sex categorisation, most often designated at birth (“sex assigned at birth”) based on a newborn’s visible external anatomy. The term “gender” generally refers to socially constructed roles, behaviours, and identities of women, men, and gender-diverse people that occur in a historical and cultural context, and might vary across societies and over time. Gender influences how people view themselves and each other, how they behave and interact, and how power is distributed in society. Sex and gender are often incorrectly portrayed as binary (female/male or woman/man), concordant, and static. However, these constructs exist along a spectrum that includes additional sex categorisations and gender identities, such as people who are intersex/have differences of sex development (DSD), or identify as non-binary. In any given person, sex and gender might not align, and both can change. Sex and gender are not entirely discrete concepts and their definitions continue to evolve. Biology and society influence both, and many languages do not distinguish between them. Since the terms “sex” and “gender” can be ambiguous, authors should describe the methods they use to gather and report sex-related and/or gender-related data (eg, self-report or physician-report, specific biological attributes, current sex/gender, sex assigned at birth, etc) and discuss the potential limitations of those methods. This will enhance the research’s precision, rigor, and reproducibility, and avoid ambiguity or conflation of terms and the constructs to which they refer. Authors should use the term “sex assigned at birth” rather than “biological sex”, “birth sex” or “natal sex” as it is more accurate and inclusive. When ascertaining gender and sex, researchers should use a two-step process: (1) ask for gender identity allowing for multiple options and (2) if relevant to the research question, ask for sex assigned at birth. In addition to this defining guidance and the SAGER guidelines, you can find further information about reporting sex and gender in research studies on Elsevier’s diversity, equity, and inclusion in the publishing author guide available here.

Note that everything referred to here deals with HUMANS, as this is a medical journal. Note that the editors specify that “sex” has multiple definitions, but in so doing mix up the way sex is determined in humans (chromosomes carrying sex-determining genes), the way it is observed at birth (usually via genitalia), and the way it is defined (whether an individual has the apparatus for producing big, immobile gametes (“females”) or small, mobile gametes (“males”).

Biologists agree about the gametic definition of sex, which produces the sex binary that I’ve discussed so often, and that definition is not ambiguous. (Note that there are no cases of hermaphrodites in humans that are functional as both males and females, so even if you considere hermaphrodites to be members of a “third sex”, and I don’t, they don’t exist in our species.)

The editors also state twice that sex is “not static” and can change, but biological sex cannot change. What can change is gender—unless you use a hormonally-based definition of sex, which is not tenable and was used only to determine which group someone could compete in athletically. (The Olympics has now abandoned that approach.)

Finally, note that The Lancet recommends the term “sex assigned at birth,” which is simply wrong. Sex is not ASSIGNED at birth, it is observed at birth, but observed using characters like genitalia that are almost always concordant with biological sex but may not be infallible indicators of biological sex.  But regardless, sex is never “assigned” but exists.  The exceptions to the sex binary—individuals who are truly intersex—comprise about 0.018% of people, or about 1 in 5600. As I always say, “that’s as close to binary as you can come.”

Finally, why do the editorial guidelines imply that sex is not “static”?  There is only one reason I can think of, and that’s trying to push on the journal’s readers a gender-activist ideology.  If you truly believe that a transwoman is a woman in terms of biological sex, or a transman is a man in terms of biological sex, then yes, you can say that sex is malleable. But this is not accurate, for using the biological definitions of sex, a transwoman remains a biological man and a transman remains a biological women. (This of course is not to demean them or say that they’re somehow morally unequal to the rest of us; it’s just biology.) In the end, biological sex is not malleable but static.

As the Daily Skeptic notes at the end of its piece:

The Lancet’s guidelines on sex conclude by explicitly telling authors to use the term “sex assigned at birth” because it is “more accurate and inclusive”. I’m imagining a future Lancet article on Elizabeth Garrett Anderson: “She was the first person who’d been assigned ‘female’ at birth to qualify as a doctor in Britain, and she went on to found the first medical school to train people who’d been assigned ‘female’ at birth. All in all, she was a truly remarkable person who’d been assigned ‘female’ at birth.”

If this were some obscure Gender Studies periodical, it wouldn’t really matter. But we’re talking about the world’s second most cited medical journal. It’s read by doctors, surgeons, researchers and all the people to whom we’ve entrusted our health. How can they maintain our trust when they can’t seem to tell the difference between a man and a woman?

Indeed!

h/t: Luana

A critique of Scientific American

May 8, 2024 • 10:00 am

If you’ve read this site for a while, you’ll know that I’ve documented the decline and fall of the magazine Scientific American (see all my posts here). Under the editorship of Laura Helmuth, the magazine has become increasingly woke. And by “woke”, I mean “neglecting science in favor of pushing a progressive ideology.”  One of the classic examples of this decline is a hit job that the magazine published on E. O. Wilson, accusing him of racism—along with other scientists like Charles Darwin and yes—wait for it—Gregor Mendel. A quote:

Wilson was hardly alone in his problematic beliefs. His predecessors—mathematician Karl Pearson, anthropologist Francis Galton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel and others—also published works and spoke of theories fraught with racist ideas about distributions of health and illness in populations without any attention to the context in which these distributions occur.

Darwin, of course was an abolitionist, though he did share the view of his time that white people were in general superior. But the article doesn’t mention that, for it violates the dprogressive tendency to indict people of the past for not conforming to today’s beliefs. And if Gregor Mendel ever wrote a racist word, I don’t know about it!

The author, Monica McLemore, also took it upon herself to “problematize” the normal distribution of statistics. Check out the first two sentences, which are totally bogus:

First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against. The fact that we don’t adequately take into account differences between experimental and reference group determinants of risk and resilience, particularly in the health sciences, has been a hallmark of inadequate scientific methods based on theoretical underpinnings of a superior subject and an inferior one.

Oy! Several of us, all scientists, sent a defense of Wilson to the magazine as a response to McLemore’s piece, but our defense was summarily rejected.  There’s no “search for truth” in this magazine if your views contravene progressive “presentism”.

And here’s a list of ten articles pushing progressive ideology published within the single year of 2021 (if the links to the stories aren’t visible in the posts, click on the icon anyway). The first one is a gem:

1.) Bizarre acronym pecksniffery in Scientific American.Title: “Why the term ‘JEDI’ is problematic for describing programs that promote justice, diversity, equity, and Inclusion.”

2.) More bias in Scientific American, this time in a “news” article. Title: “New math research group reflects a schism in the field.”

3.) Scientific American again posting non-scientific political editorials.Title: “The anti-critical race theory movement will profoundly effect public education.“

4.) Scientific American (and math) go full woke.  Title: “Modern mathematics confronts its white, patriarchal past.”

5.) Scientific American: Denying evolution is white supremacy. Title: “Denial of evolution is a form of white supremacy.”

6.) Scientific American publishes misleading and distorted op-ed lauding Palestine and demonizing Israel, accompanied by a pro-Palestinian petition. Title: “Health care workers call for support of Palestinians.” (The title is still up but see #7 below)

7.) Scientific American withdraws anti-Semitic op-ed. Title of original article is above, but now a withdrawal appears (they vanished the text): “Editor’s Note: This article fell outside the scope of Scientific American and has been removed.”   Now, apparently, nothing falls outside the scope of the magazine!

8.) Scientific American: Religious or “spiritual” treatment of mental illness produces better outcomes. Title: “Psychiatry needs to get right with God.”

9.)  Scientific American: Transgender girls belong on girl’s sports teams. Title:  “Trans girls belong on girls’ sports teams.”

and one more for an even ten, as I’m not going to spend another minute doing this:

10.) Former Scientific American editor, writing in the magazine, suggests that science may find evidence for God using telescopes and other instruments. Title: “Can science rule out God?“

But I digress. The topic here is a long article published in the City Journal by James Meigs, documenting the downfall of the magazine as one example of a general degeneration of science journalism. Click to read:

Meigs begins with how Michael Shermer wrote a monthly “Skeptic” column in Sci Am for seventeen years, but they gave him his pink slip after he started criticizing the claim that abused children tend to grow up to become abusers themselves. Shermer then argued, unforgivably, that there’s been progress in racial relations, and in eliminating pollution and poverty, reprising the theme of several recent books by Steven Pinker. Apparently progressives frown on the idea that there’s been progress in anything.

Shermer tells his story in a Skeptic column called “Scientific American goes woke.” As he said,

My revised December column, titled “Kids These Days,” focused on the growing concern over Gen Z kids having significantly higher rates of depression and anxiety, which Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt attribute to “coddling” by helicopter parenting and the larger culture of safetyism.

Shortly after the December 2018 column I was given my walking papers, but was allowed one more farewell column in January, 2019. In it I noted that in accordance with (Herb) Stein’s Law—“Things that can’t go on forever won’t”—closed out my streak at 214 consecutive essays, my dream deferred to another day, which has now come in accordance to Davies’ Corollary to Stein’s Law—“Things that can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think.”

Back to Meigs, who notes the decline of science journalism and its infusion with au courant ideology:

American journalism has never been very good at covering science. In fact, the mainstream press is generally a cheap date when it comes to stories about alternative medicine, UFO sightings, pop psychology, or various forms of junk science. For many years, that was one factor that made Scientific American’s rigorous reporting so vital. The New York Times, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and a few other mainstream publications also produced top-notch science coverage. Peer-reviewed academic journals aimed at specialists met a higher standard still. But over the past decade or so, the quality of science journalism—even at the top publications—has declined in a new and alarming way. Today’s journalistic failings don’t owe simply to lazy reporting or a weakness for sensationalism but to a sweeping and increasingly pervasive worldview.

This dogma sees Western values, and the United States in particular, as uniquely pernicious forces in world history. And, as exemplified by the anticapitalist tirades of climate activist Greta Thunberg, the movement features a deep eco-pessimism buoyed only by the distant hope of a collectivist green utopia.

Meigs indicts intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, queer studies, and postmodern notions of truth as factors in this decline.  Here are a few areas where Meigs argues that Scientific American failed after Laura Helmuth, who had sterling credentials, became editor of Sci Am in April, 2020.

Covid

 . . .  those difficult times represented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for an ambitious science editor. Rarely in the magazine’s history had so many Americans urgently needed timely, sensible science reporting: Where did Covid come from? How is it transmitted? Was shutting down schools and businesses scientifically justified? What do we know about vaccines?

Scientific American did examine Covid from various angles, including an informative July 2020 cover story diagramming how the SARS-CoV-2 virus “sneaks inside human cells.” But the publication didn’t break much new ground in covering the pandemic. When it came to assessing growing evidence that Covid might have escaped from a laboratory, for example, SciAm got scooped by New York and Vanity Fair, publications known more for their coverage of politics and entertainment than of science.

The magazine apparently had no patience with the “lab leak” theory for the origin of the virus:

During the first two years of the pandemic, most mainstream media outlets barely mentioned the lab-leak debate. And when they did, they generally savaged both the idea and anyone who took it seriously. In March 2021, long after credible evidence emerged hinting at a laboratory origin for the virus, Scientific American published an article, “Lab-Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth.” The piece compared the theory to the KGB’s disinformation campaign about the origin of HIV/AIDS and blamed lab-leak advocates for creating a poisonous climate around the issue: “The proliferation of xenophobic rhetoric has been linked to a striking increase in anti-Asian hate crimes. It has also led to a vilification of the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] and some of its Western collaborators, as well as partisan attempts to defund certain types of research (such as ‘gain of function’ research).”

The author faults Fauci for repressing information supporting this theory, but my pay grade isn’t high enough to judge whether that’s true.

Social Justice (the “JEDI” article is a gem, and note my self-aggrandizement)

At the same time, SciAm dramatically ramped up its social-justice coverage. The magazine would soon publish a flurry of articles with titles such as “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” and “The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity.” The death of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed biologist was the hook for “The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson,” an opinion piece arguing that Wilson’s work was “based on racist ideas,” without quoting a single line from his large published canon. At least those pieces had some connection to scientific topics, though. In 2021, SciAm published an opinion essay, “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.” The article’s five authors took issue with the effort by some social-justice advocates to create a cute new label while expanding the DEI acronym to include “Justice.” The Jedi knights of the Star Wars movies are “inappropriate mascots for social justice,” the authors argued, because they are “prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic light sabers, gaslighting by means of ‘Jedi mind tricks,’ etc.).” What all this had to do with science was anyone’s guess.

Several prominent scientists took note of SciAm’s shift. “Scientific American is changing from a popular-science magazine into a social-justice-in-science magazine,” Jerry Coyne, a University of Chicago emeritus professor of ecology and evolution, wrote on his popular blog, “Why Evolution Is True.” He asked why the magazine had “changed its mission from publishing decent science pieces to flawed bits of ideology.”

“The old Scientific American that I subscribed to in college was all about the science,” University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller told me. “It was factual reporting on new ideas and findings from physics to psychology, with a clear writing style, excellent illustrations, and no obvious political agenda.” Miller says that he noticed a gradual change about 15 years ago, and then a “woke political bias that got more flagrant and irrational” over recent years. The leading U.S. science journals, Nature and Science, and the U.K.-based New Scientist made a similar pivot, he says. By the time Trump was elected in 2016, he says, “the Scientific American editors seem to have decided that fighting conservatives was more important than reporting on science.”

The magazine also broke with tradition and endorsed Joe Biden for President in 2020 (Nature, Science, and New Scientist did the same). Unless you can make a solid argument that one candidate will damage science more than another, this kind of advocacy violates the kind of “institutional neutrality” that should pervade science journals.

Gender issues  Meigs criticizes the magazine for being gung-ho for “affirmative therapy”:

In such an overheated environment, it would be helpful to have a journalistic outlet advocating a sober, evidence-based approach. In an earlier era, Scientific American might have been that voice. Unfortunately, SciAm today downplays messy debates about gender therapies, while offering sunny platitudes about the “safety and efficacy” of hormone treatments for prepubescent patients. For example, in a 2023 article, “What Are Puberty Blockers, and How Do They Work?,” the magazine repeats the unsubstantiated claim that such treatments are crucial to preventing suicide among gender-dysphoric children. “These medications are well studied and have been used safely since the late 1980s to pause puberty in adolescents with gender dysphoria,” SciAm states.

The independent journalist Jesse Singal, a longtime critic of slipshod science reporting, demolishes these misleading claims in a Substack post. In fact, the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria is a new and barely researched phenomenon, he notes: “[W]e have close to zero studies that have tracked gender dysphoric kids who went on blockers over significant lengths of time to see how they have fared.” Singal finds it especially alarming to see a leading science magazine obscure the uncertainty surrounding these treatments. “I believe that this will go down as a major journalistic blunder that will be looked back upon with embarrassment and regret,” he writes.

The truth will out, but not due to Scientific American!

It’s not just popular magazines about science that have been ideologically colonized, either. Technical cience and medical journals are going the same route; these include Science, Nature, Lancet, JAMA, New Scientist, and PNAS. The same is happening with scientific societies, which increasingly are becoming enclaves of progressive ideology, with keynote speeches, once devoted to science, now devoted to ideology.  This is what Luana Maroja and I meant when we concluded our Skeptical Inquirer paper on the ideological subversion of biology with these words:

Progressive ideology is growing stronger and intruding further into all areas of science. And because it’s “progressive,” and because most scientists are liberals, few of us dare oppose these restrictions on our freedom. Unless there is a change in the Zeitgeist, and unless scientists finally find the courage to speak up against the toxic effects of ideology on their field, in a few decades science will be very different from what it is now. Indeed, it’s doubtful that we’d recognize it as science at all.

When I wrote that last sentence, I thought it might be a wee bit hyperbolic, but now I’m not so sure. When scientists are forced to see nature through the lenses of progressive ideology, indicting Mendel for racism and renaming every animal whose popular name came from a person’s name, it doesn’t fool the public. They know that politics are warping science. The results are that the public loses trust in science—a trust based on the increasingly false assumption that scientists are objective researchers whose job is simply to figure out how nature works, not ideologues bent on twisting science to fit a progressive ideology. As Meigs notes:

 When scientists claim to represent a consensus about ideas that remain in dispute—or avoid certain topics entirely—those decisions filter down through the journalistic food chain. Findings that support the social-justice worldview get amplified in the media, while disapproved topics are excoriated as disinformation. Not only do scientists lose the opportunity to form a clearer picture of the world; the public does, too. At the same time, the public notices when claims made by health officials and other experts prove to be based more on politics than on science. A new Pew Research poll finds that the percentage of Americans who say that they have a “great deal” of trust in scientists has fallen from 39 percent in 2020 to 23 percent today.

That’s a drop in trust of over 40% in just four years.  The way to regain that trust, if it’s even possible now, is to stick to the truth, leaving out your politics.  Unfortunately, Scientific American and many other journals and magazines can’t refrain from injecting ideology into science.

h/t: Simon

The Lancet extols Indigenous Traditional Knowledge

April 25, 2024 • 11:15 am

The British medical journal The Lancet has become infamous for being woke (its editor is beyond redemption), and is most infamous for the cover below.  As I once said, its wokeness makes it the British version of Scientific American, though it deals with original research and is entirely (or supposed to be entirely) medical in nature.

The journal has just become a bit more infamous by publishing a glowing paean to “Indigenous Peoples and their knowledges” (is “knowledge” suppose to be plural here?), seemingly making the knowledge of indigenous people coequal to the knowledge produced by modern science. In other words, it’s adopting what seems to be the national policy of science education in New Zealand.

Click to read; it’s free (the pdf is here). The authors are from Uganda, Canada, Tanzania, New Zealand (of course), the U.S., and Canada:

The main message, besides the boilerplate about oppression, is that indigenous people have knowledge that is essential in helping us solve not only the problem of global warming, but also “health discourse.”

Now you know that’s not really true. While indigenous people may have some observations bearing on the effects of both human health and especially global warming, it’s up to both national politics and international science to address global warming. (I don’t have much confidence they’ll remedy the problem.) And it’s up to modern medicine to deal with health issues. We’re way beyond the days of herbal cures and chanting. To say that indigenous “knowledges” is not only important, but “the optimal way forward” (see below) is to indulge in hyperbolic and performative rhetoric.

But let me give a few quotes.

Indigenous Dene Elder Francois Paulette from northern Canada talked about climate change at the 2015 Parliament of the World Regions and warned “Your way of life is killing my way of life.”
He ended his speech with the words: “Rise! It’s time to stand up for our future.”More than 8 years after this speech, an estimated 68% of the Northwest Territories, Canada, which includes the Dene Peoples territory, was evacuated due to 238 wildfires. Communities lost their homes and hunting and food-foraging areas and were exposed to poor air quality for months on end. Elder Francois’ words still ring true today for many Indigenous Peoples around the globe. We are still far away from the world understanding the impacts of climate change on Indigenous communities and the need to move towards efficient and comprehensive action for planetary health.

 

Indigenous Peoples have experienced historical and ongoing colonialism, ecocide, epistemicide, racism, and severe marginalisation and are disproportionately affected by poverty and reduced life expectancy.Yet despite these challenges they continue to protect and steward about 80% of all the remaining biodiversity on Earth. For Indigenous Peoples, every day is Earth Day, with the basis of their lives underpinned by a healthy relationship with the planet and extensive Indigenous Traditional Knowledges (ITK) developed over millennia. However, Indigenous leadership within planetary health practice to shape research, policy, and practice is still challenged by a multitude of factors.

It’s simply not true that indigenous people steward 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity. First of all, the reference seems to be talking only about Australia. Second, the reference appears to show that 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity occurs in areas occupied by indigenous people. There’s no evidence I can find that the locals are “stewarding” that biodiversity beyond the statement, “This highlights how indigenous communities have mastered how to live alongside nature in a way that other communities have not.” It seems that living in areas with biodiversity is equivalent to “stewarding” that biodiversity. But we know that’s not true. In many cases indigenous people have destroyed biodiversity, like the extensive burning of natural forest by the Māori or the burning of prairie by Native Americans not to preserve it, but to get food, as well as their mass slaughter of bison by driving them o0ver the cliffs. That killed far more animals than they can use. What kind of “stewarding” is that?

ITK is also extolled for its “practical knowledge”; and indeed, that’s where it excels: understanding the place and rhythm of where food grows, how to catch that food, how to make stuff that one needs to live (knives, baskets, and so on). But ITK is not equivalent to modern science in many ways that are important: ITK is not generally driven by hypothesis testing, double-blind congrolled experiments, statistics, an atmosphere of doubt, and so on. While ITK is a bag of practical observations, modern science is a bag of tools for finding out stuff.

The article also has the obligatory denigration of “western” science, too, and a denial that indigenous “ways of knowing,” contain more than empirical fact. But in fact ITK, like New Zealand’s Mātauranga Māori, comprises far more than practical knowledge, including religion, mythology, traditional stories, superstition, morality, and guidlines for living. My bolding below:

ITK is increasingly informing climate and biodiversity solutions.  Although this is positive for Indigenous recognition, Indigenous Peoples who hold this knowledge are not usually directly involved in leading such efforts due to structural marginalisation. Implementation movements need to ensure that Indigenous Peoples and their rights are platformed first and foremost within any discussion around ITK. Additionally, ITK is often deemed myth or legend, or faces erasure within western-based institutions, despite it being replete with practical understandings of ecology, meteorology, and the relationship to the environmental rhythms gained over generations of observation and experimentation. Scientific disciplines, including within the medical and health sciences fields, therefore continue to largely marginalise ITK and there are expectations that it should conform to a western standard of evidence as the sole grading rubric of validity—a demonstration of the continuing effects of colonisation.

Well, yes, we need to bring as many voices as possible within science, but by “voices,” I don’t mean “ethnic groups”. I mean we should cast the net as wide as possible looking for scientific talent, and if we find a bit of practical indigenous knowledge to help move science forward, well, so much the better. But in the end, the statement in bold gives away the authors’ desire to “decolonize” modern science: “western standards of evidence” are apparently not the only standards of evidence for judging knowledge. But if they aren’t, what other standards should we use?  Tradition, superstition, and so on? Modern science is simply a toolkit of methods used to ascertain what is true. And there are no other ways to find out what’s “valid” beyond that. (I’m using “science” as “science construed broadly” here, as, for example, what a mechanic does to find out where the problem is in a car.) If the authors think there are ways of knowing beyond this, let them tell us. As it is, you won’t find a single example in this article besides the unsubstantiated claim that indigenous people “steward” 80% of the world’s biodiversity.

It’s hard for me to go on, as this article suffers from the diagnostic problem of all such sacralizations of indigenous knowledge: a lack of examples of how indigenous knowledge has contributed to modern knowledge. A few anecdotes will not suffice. After all, the National Science Foundation has just allocated $29 million to establish a “Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS)”, and there had better be substantial payoff to justify that kind of dosh.

The article goes on, but the ideas are familiar: because indigenous people were oppressed and treated badly (often true!), their “knowledges” should be seen as almost sacred, but certainly very valuable, and coequal to “western” science. But if you look at the advances that modern science has made in just 150 years in physics, chemistry, biology, and so on, none of them would even be possible with indigenous knowledge. Yet that knowledge is to be considered highly important, and, without it, say the authors, science is blinkered:

Without meaningful engagement and data representation, Indigenous initiatives are sidelined or neglected. Indigenous Peoples and their knowledges should not just be “considered” within climate change and health discourse and practice, which is typically the case now, but platformed as the optimal way forward.

Platformed as the optimal way forward? What does that mean? Why can’t ITK just be “considered”?  Finally, we hear once again the notion that ITK is one of two essential eyes in science’s way of finding knowledge (I believe this metaphor comes from Canada’s First People):

 Researchers, practitioners, and policy makers need “to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing, and to see from the other eye with the strengths of western ways of knowing, and to use both of these eyes together” for the survival of our planet. We need to understand that Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au (I am the river, and the river is me).

You see how both eyes are considered necessary and coequal to move science forward? I don’t think that’s the case.  Indigenous ways of knowing can, as I’ve said, add practical knowledge to what modern science has found, but it’s by no means a coequal “eye.” And I don’t understand why I have to adopt the mantra that the river is me to study hydrology. After all, I never learned much about genetics from thinking “I am the fruit fly, and the fruit fly is me.”

I’ll regard indigenous knowledge as more important when its promoters start giving us examples—real examples, not anecdotes about catching eels—of how it has made, or can make, important contributions to empirical knowledge.  We shall see what the NSF’s $29 million produces.