Daily Sceptic contributor Noah Carl has written a must-read piece for UnHerd about the decline and fall of Nature, once the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. Here are the first three paragraphs:
Nature is a revered name in academic publishing. The journal was founded in London in 1869, and has since become one of the two main titles (the other being Science) that every academic wants to publish in. Having just one “Nature paper” on your CV can be enough to land a tenure-track job at a top department.
It’s all the more concerning then, that in the last few years, Nature has handed over an increasing amount of editorial space to social justice activism. In February of 2019, Jordan Peterson remarked that a once-great publication was going “farther down the social constructionist rabbit hole”.
The latest example comes in the form of a piece titled “Anti-racist interventions to transform ecology, evolution and conservation biology departments”, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. No less than twenty-six authors are listed under the title, suggesting this was not some trivial undertaking. It includes charts, tables and even a glossary of key terms (with entries such as “racial microaggressions” and “white privilege”).
Worth reading in full.
