The woke capture of science and its subordination to fashionable political ideology continues apace. The latest victim is the journal Nature Human Behaviour, which in a recent editorial announced a new policy of rejecting and retracting research which may potentially harm (even inadvertently) individuals or groups most vulnerable to “racism, sexism, ableism, or homophobia”. Bo Winegard in Quillette is not impressed.
An editorial in Nature Human Behaviour provides the most recent indication of just how bad things are becoming. It begins, like so many essays of its kind, by announcing that, “Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded.” When the invocation of a fundamental freedom in one clause is immediately undermined in the next, we should be sceptical of whatever follows. But in this case, the authors are taking issue with a view very few people actually hold. At minimum, most academics will readily accept that scientific curiosity should be constrained by ethical concerns about research participants.
Unfortunately, the authors then announce that they also wish to apply these “well-established ethics frameworks” to “humans who do not participate directly in the research”. They are especially concerned that “people can be harmed indirectly” by research that “inadvertently… stigmatises individuals or human groups”. Such research “may be discriminatory, racist, sexist, ableist, or homophobic” and “may provide justification for undermining the rights of specific groups, simply because of their social characteristics”. Because of these concerns, the Springer Nature community has worked up a new set of research guidelines intended to “address these potential harms”, explicitly applying ethics frameworks for research with human participations to “any academic publication”.
In plain language, this means that from now on, the journal will reject articles that might potentially harm (even “inadvertently”) those individuals or groups most vulnerable to “racism, sexism, ableism, or homophobia”. Since it is already standard practice to reject false or poorly argued work, it is safe to assume that these new guidelines have been designed to reject any article deemed to pose a threat to disadvantaged groups, irrespective of whether or not its central claims are true, or at least well-supported. Within a few sentences, we have moved from a banal statement of the obvious to draconian and censorious editorial discretion. Editors will now enjoy unprecedented power to reject articles on the basis of nebulous moral concerns and anticipated harms.
Imagine for a moment that this editorial were written, not by political progressives, but by conservative Catholics, who announced that any research promoting (even “inadvertently”) promiscuous sex, the breakdown of the nuclear family, agnosticism and atheism, or the decline of the nation state would be suppressed or rejected lest it inflict unspecified “harm” on vaguely defined groups or individuals. Many of those presently nodding along with Nature’s editors would have no difficulty identifying the subordination of science to a political agenda. One need not argue that opposing racism or promoting the nuclear family are dubious goals in order to also worry about elevating them over free inquiry and the dispassionate pursuit of understanding.
Suppose someone discovers that men are more likely than women to be represented at the tail end of the mathematical ability distribution and therefore more likely to be engineers or physics professors. Does such a finding constitute sexism, if only by implication? Does it stigmatise or help to negatively stereotype women? Are the authors of the editorial contending that journals should not publish an article that contains these data or makes such an argument? The very vagueness of these new guidelines allows – or rather requires – the political biases of editors and reviewers to intrude into the publishing process.
As the editorial proceeds, it becomes steadily more alarming and more explicitly political. “Advancing knowledge and understanding,” the authors declare, is also “a fundamental public good. In some cases, however, potential harms to the populations studied may outweigh the benefit of publication.” Such as? Any material that “undermines” the “dignity or rights of specific groups” or “assumes that a human group is superior or inferior over another simply because of a social characteristic” will be sufficient to “raise ethics concerns that may require revisions or supersede the value of publication”.
But no serious scientist or scholar contends that some groups are superior or inferior to others. Those who write candidly about sex and population differences, such as David Geary or Charles Murray, routinely preface discussion of their findings with the unambiguous declaration that empirical differences do not justify claims of superiority or inferiority. Nevertheless, the editorial is a warrant to attack, silence, and suppress research that finds differences of any social significance between sexes or populations, regardless of whether or not such differences do in fact exist. The empirical claim that “men are overrepresented vis-à-vis women at the extreme right tail of the distribution of mathematical ability” can therefore be rejected on the basis that it may be understood to imply a claim of male superiority even if no such claim is made, and even if it is explicitly disavowed.
How can we stop science being captured and undermined by partisan, anti-intellectual ideologues? That’s the question no one is sure how to answer right now.
Though before we get carried away, it’s worth being aware that Nature Human Behaviour was only founded in 2017. So let’s hope this is just a local outbreak and the wokery doesn’t spread to other, more consequential journals.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Dr. Noah Carl has written about the new policy on his Substack page, saying he wants to congratulate the editors of Nature Human Behaviour for “being open and honest about a policy that most social science journals already have”.
Stop Press 2: Jerry Coyne, a biology professor at the University of Chicago and a member of the Advisory Council of the US FSU, has weighed in on the issue on his excellent blog Evolution is True.
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Science was always a problem for the left, all that empiricism, rationalism etc. No it had to be abolished and be replaced by computational modelling/meta studies, superstition must win.
Democracy and freedom of speech too.
Hurt feelings trump hard facts.
“How can we stop science being captured and undermined by partisan, anti-intellectual ideologues? That’s the question no one is sure how to answer right now.”
Well, the answer to that is straightforward and simple – don’t support these now pseudo-scientific comics by either reading or purchasing them. When a publication seeks to take science backwards it no longer belongs in the scientific realm.
And I do wish these comics would define “harm.”
‘The Science’ like ‘The Arts’, do they include Real Scientists and Real Artists or just activists.
Covid pandemic of lies was just one example of the death of science. Covid folly and evil was extreme manifestation of long term wrong direction in a number of areas.
It’s a function of who is participating. Academics fight tooth and nail for figurative scraps from the table, whether that’s their first assistant professorship, the chance at tenure or research grants. They will set aside any more noble goals in order to get ahead, so they are easy marks for this kind of toxic and manipulative ideology.
Authoritarian societies are very similar. Only a select few can be the party officials, so people will readily debase themselves for a seat at the table.
The dogma the journal defends is that there’s no structure to society or to human nature that’s immutable and innate. The ultra-individualist dogma. Anything that threatens this is intolerable. Science takes apart, never leaves intact. Everything must be reduced to atoms.
If this is so, suppressing counter facts is a good thing. The article puts a counter example: the family is a good thing. If it is, research showing otherwise is morally and factually wrong. As CSLewis said, If witches exist, they ought to be put to death.
That’s a step in the right direction. Things could be further improved by refusing to publish any Correlation in infinitesimally small group detected! science babble, regardless of who is conjectured to profit politically from it.
Hey, did you know that monkeypox is spread almost exclusively by — oh wait a minute, completing that sentence might bring harm to a marginalized community. Never mind.
Very good.
Not really. For one, this statement isn’t really true. Monkeypox isn’t almost exclusively spread through gay sex orgies in general but through so-called prolonged, closed contact with an infected person. It’s just that there’s currently a monkeypox outbreak mostly among the members of the group of people partaking in such orgies because the virus is spreading among them and due to their shared hobbies, they’re happily infecting each other and there’s little risk that people not belonging to this particular group will ever get infected with it.
Then, this is about sociological junk science of the kind where a so-called researcher arbitrarly splits a small population in two (or more) groups using a predetermined criterion, say, sex or skin colour, and then determines the distribution of some property among members of each group. Invariably, there’s going to be some difference which is then reported as research result, usually based on the claim that the relative frequency of the property in each group would really be the probability of the property occurring in the much larger group of all people on this planet who would have been in research groups blah (eg, women or men, black or white people) had they been part of the experiment.
Whoever came up with editorial policy probably very well knows that all of this, no matter what it claims to show, is junk science. Henceforth, the editors will only accept junk studies if the outcome is compatible with their political preferences. That’s a step in the right direction because it tacitly implies that the scientific value of all of these studies is zero. A subset of them can be selected for publication for political convenience without this selection process causing harm to anyon but the political faction whose junk science is being censored.
Prolonged close contact and broken skin, as I remember (and of course if you have this prolonged contact with broken skin with several different people, you increase you chance of infection). Remind you of anything (and I’ve heard about some of the injuries in these hospitals)?
And no offence intended…
What I was trying to get at is that monkeypox isn’t technically a STD but that this particular outbreak is socially self-limiting (+/-) because the virus is circulating among the people frequenting dark rooms where it can spread much more easily than in other social situations.
Global health emergency it ain’t, I suspect.
People with a fashionable psychological disorder indulging in related behaviour who mustn’t have their feelings hurt?
I understand these journals already do something similar with research that may inadvertently be pro-life. Such is the state of “the science”. Trouble is, people tend not to do anything until it is them that is affected.