It is widely accepted that the world’s two most prestigious scientific journals are Nature and Science. (The less narrowly focussed a journal’s title, the more prestigious it tends to be.) Nature is a UK operation based in London, while Science is the American equivalent. Every researcher wants to publish in these two journals, or better yet both.
We have covered Nature’s descent into woke activism here at the Daily Sceptic, the latest example being an article that suggests fat people contribute to “diversity”. It now seems that Science is going the same way.
On August 18th, an article appeared in the ‘Careers’ section of that publication, with the title ‘How astrophysics helped me embrace my nonbinary gender identity—in all its complexity’. (Remember: this is the journal that published Einstein’s papers on gravitational lensing.)
The author recounts that she first became interested in astrophysics after picking up a copy of Stephen Hawking’s The Grand Design in a bookshop. The book introduced her to a “new kind of physics” that “doesn’t have all the answers” and even “disagrees with itself”. Over the next few years, she learned about subjects like quantum mechanics, where “anything can happen”.
The author goes on to explain that she only felt truly “at home” when she discovered the label “non-binary”, with its “fluidity and disavowal of the traditional two-gender system”. It was then she realised, “I am a photon—possessing qualities inherent to either side of the binary, but ultimately belonging to neither.”
And in her concluding paragraph, she claims, “Physics is always evolving, and gender is, too”.
Commenting on Twitter, physicist Laurence Krauss said “the few meager descriptions of physics” in the article “don’t seem accurate”. In any case, you can see what the author’s trying to do: establish a parallel between the ‘counter-intuitive’ nature of physics and the ‘counter-intuitive’ nature of gender.
The only problem is: there isn’t any such parallel. Gender is not “evolving”, and whatever identity an individual may create for themselves, “non-binary” is a made-up term. Of course, the author might argue that sex and gender are different things, and someone’s gender need not align with their sex.
To which I would respond: okay, can we do the same thing for other traits? Can I be ‘non-numeric’ with respect to age? Can I say that I feel like a 32-year-old today, but yesterday I felt like a 28-year-old, and tomorrow I’ll feel like a 36-year-old?
Even if one were to grant that gender is something distinct from sex, why am I reading about this in Science? If members of a particular sub-culture want to label themselves “non-binary”, and say this is their gender, they should be free to do so. But what does it have to do with the empirical study of nature?
My questions is, of course, rhetorical. We know the answer: because people who should know better have allowed once-great scientific journals to become a platform for woke activism.
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‘Wokeism’ gets more attention from the media, so go woke if you want your article to be seen, it used to be called jumping on the bandwagon
If I choose to identify as a quark, can the government still tax me? Will their ministers and experts leave me and my family alone?
Or are these privileges reserved only for the more elusive Higgs Boson?
Someone in (I think) the Netherlands was prevented from changing his legal age.
Apparently people are the average of the five people they spend most time with, so maybe I should identify as a cat… One does wonder where it will all end.
If you identified as quark I assume the government would encourage you to transition to cheese.
A key goal of the left is the abolition of both history and the scientific method. Wrt to carbon alarmism this is particularly important, since anyone aware of the geologic record or say the 1930s dust bowl will instantly question the narrative. The scientific method allied to redacted/adjusted history has been abolished in favour of politically motivated mathematical modelling, this new “science” underpins alarmism over viruses and co2.
Agreed, though it might also be accurate to say that ideologues have perverted both history and science beyond recognition (effectively the same as abolition) to serve their political needs.
The horrifying thing isn’t so much that this has happened (there will always be psychopaths and fraudsters, and they will always be attracted to ideological spheres as they hold the more potential for maximising influence while minimising work); more that governments, institutions and the public have just sat back and let it happen under their noses for decades.
Eisenhower raised concerns about the possibility, and Feynman commented on its development in the mid 1970’s. Then in the 1990’s, scientific fraud was legitimised under the banner of ‘post-normal science’ – science where cause and effect could be reversed, where logical fallacy, particularly post-hoc reasoning, was no longer an impediment to laying claim to validity.
The incentives for academia to participate in this murder of the scientific method have always been clear: if you remove the messy, complicated process of searching for truth through hypothesis and experimentation, you can make the whole process faster and cheaper, and you can easily deliver results that tell your paymasters the things they want to hear.
There is also no incentive for serious examination when it’s hard to see what has been lost, and when questioning politically motivated orthodoxy becomes akin to biting the hand that feeds you. You can even participate in mock soul-searching regarding elements of corruption that don’t directly affect you in order to whitewash your own complicity – hence the decay in the initially promising sceptical movement.
Stuart Ritchie in his book ‘Science Fictions’ identifies, with an abundance of clear evidence, and in an accessible manner, the decline of honesty in science and academia in favour of bias, grant-chasing and often outright fraud. Yet amongst the many examples, he gives the most rotten of all scientific fields – climate science – a completely free pass, barely mentioning it once. Whether or not you believe mankind has the potential for catastrophically altering the earth’s temperature through CO2 emissions, this field is riddled with every example of bad science that Ritchie draws attention to; a sea of assertion, cherry picking, statistical manipulation, endless retractions and embarrassments despite being supposedly ‘settled’, science by press release, conclusions failing to match data, reliance on sophistry and circular reasoning – the whole lot.
So when even serious investigations fall prey to an institutionalised blindness to corruption, there seems little hope for redemption, and it’s open day for the circus (as seen in this article).
Perhaps this is just the direction things naturally head when there is no real incentive to practice science; to find the truth behind reality – when the people in charge can just buy the answers that suit their deception (including self-deception) using other people’s money. Perhaps this will change if or when civilisation collapses as a result of a descent into narcissistic madness and corruption, when bridges collapse and planes fall out of the sky, and there is once again an incentive for objectivity in order to rebuild something from the ashes.
Excellent comment. Thank you.
The obvious fact to draw these idiot’s attention to is that the non-binary, wave-particle duality only lasts until the thing is actually observed. At which moment the thing collapses into one or other. I’m no astrophysicist but that’s the deal isn’t it? The special snowflake only exists in private. Once out in public, in society, there’s obligations, duties, destinies.
This is what happens now the Enlightenment and Age of Reason have ended and faded into history, faded from most people’s memories and their remains condemned as ‘white supremacist’ or whatever is today’s trendy slogan.
Postmodernists who don’t believe in objective reality now control the levers of power. They believe reality is whatever they want it to be. If you can prove something is objectively true, people can now subjectively deny it if they don’t like it and accuse you of being an ‘istaphobe’ of some description.
Science took longer to fall than the humanities, but the climate religion – a hoax which offered communist scientists an opportunity to take power – and gender ideology, which is the apotheosis of reality denial, have sealed mainstream science’s fate. We’re back to the Galileo situation, where the authorities can deny science that they don’t like.
When I look at the stars, I’m awestruck by the beauty and complexity of the universe. When I see photos of the Earth taken from the Moon, I’m awestruck by the abilities of the human race. It seems the lunar landings provoked two distinct reactions among people. One lot looked at the Earth and saw us as fragile and tiny and in need of hard, even population control, and the other, which has been losing the argument, sat there in awe of human achievement to be able to leave the Earth, go to another body in space and return. I fall into the latter camp. Sadly, it seems most people fall into the former…
A great comment that deserves to be pinned to the homepage of this site..
Seconded.
One example Feynmann used in his junk science lecture was that of an astrophysicist trying to come up with ways to sex up his field of study to make the public more willing to pay for it. His opinion on that was If the public doesn’t want to pay for it because it has no useful, practical applications, that’s just how it is, ie, that this doesn’t justify lying to the public about it. Presumably, this is such an attempt. The message to take away from this is that astrophysics and gender studies are structurally similar and equally useless.
I see that images from the new James Webb space telescope have thrown the scientific community into chaos, as they appear to directly contradict the “Big Bang” theory of how the universe was created. Apparently, the pictures from the dawn of time show an enormous middle aged white man, with a beard and long hair, laughing his socks off.
I am sure one of the priests, whoops scientists of The Science, will pop along shortly to provide a pontifical determination.
Wokeism is used conciously or unconciously to drive wedges between normal people in society.
That is why China and Russia have used the internet and social media to create troll accounts that preach, or discount wokeism, hoping to causean inbalance, and a conflict within the west, thus weakening it.
We MUST not let that happen.
Although how we do it, is beyond me!
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