Jerry A. Coyne and Luana S. Maroja
The six examples:SUMMARY: Biology faces a grave threat from “progressive” politics that are changing the way our work is done, delimiting areas of biology that are taboo and will not be funded by the government or published in scientific journals, stipulating what words biologists must avoid in their writing, and decreeing how biology is taught to students and communicated to other scientists and the public through the technical and popular press. We wrote this article not to argue that biology is dead, but to show how ideology is poisoning it. The science that has brought us so much progress and understanding—from the structure of DNA to the green revolution and the design of COVID-19 vaccines—is endangered by political dogma strangling our essential tradition of open research and scientific communication. And because much of what we discuss occurs within academic science, where many scientists are too cowed to speak their minds, the public is largely unfamiliar with these issues. Sadly, by the time they become apparent to everyone, it might be too late.
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We’re all familiar with the culture wars that pit progressive Leftists against centrists and those on the Right. In the past, those skirmishes dealt with politics and sociocultural issues and in academia were restricted largely to the humanities. But—apart from the “sociobiology wars” of the seventies and our perennial battles against creationism—we biologists always thought that our field would avoid such struggles. After all, scientific truth would surely be immune to attack or distortion by political ideology, and most of us were too busy working in the lab to engage in partisan squabbles.
We were wrong. Scientists both inside and outside the academy were among the first to begin politically purging their fields by misrepresenting or even lying about inconvenient truths. Campaigns were launched to strip scientific jargon of words deemed offensive, to ensure that results that could “harm” people seen as oppressed were removed from research manuscripts, and to tilt the funding of science away from research and toward social reform. The American government even refused to make genetic data—collected with taxpayer dollars—publicly available if analysis of that data could be considered “stigmatizing.” In other words, science—and here we are speaking of all STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)—has become heavily tainted with politics, as “progressive social justice” elbows aside our real job: finding truth.
In biology, these changes have been a disaster. By diluting our ability to investigate what we find intriguing or important, withholding research support, controlling the political tone of manuscripts, and demonizing research areas and researchers themselves, ideologues have cut off whole lines of inquiry. This will decrease human wellbeing, for, as all scientists understand—and as the connection between heat-resistant bacteria and PCR tests demonstrates—we never know what benefits can come from research driven by pure curiosity. But nourishing curiosity has a value all its own. After all, it doesn’t make us healthier or wealthier to study black holes or the Big Bang, but it certainly enriches our lives to know about such things. Thus, the erosion of academic freedom in science by progressive ideology hurts us both intellectually and materially.
Although biology has clashed with ideology at other times and places (e.g., the Soviet Lysenko affair, creationism, and the anti-vax movement), the present situation is worse, for it affects all scientific fields. What’s equally unfortunate is that scientists themselves—helped along by university administrators—have become complicit in their own muzzling.
Here we give six examples of how our own field—evolutionary and organismal biology—has been impeded or misrepresented by ideology. Each example involves a misstatement spread by ideologues, followed by a brief explanation of why each statement is wrong. Finally, we give what we see as the ideology behind each misstatement and then assess its damage to scientific research, teaching, and the popular understanding of science. Our ultimate concern is biology research—the discovery of new facts—but research isn’t free from social influence; it goes hand in hand with teaching and the public acceptance of biological facts. If certain areas of research are stigmatized by the media, for example, public understanding will suffer, and there will follow a loss of interest in teaching as well as in research in these areas. By cutting off or impeding interest in biology, the misrepresentation or stigmatization by the media ultimately deprives us of opportunities to understand the world.
We concentrate on our own field of evolutionary biology because it’s what we feel most compelled to defend, but we add that related ideological conflicts are common in sciences such as chemistry, physics, math, and even computer science. In these other areas, however, the clashes involve less denial of scientific facts and more effort toward purifying language, devaluing traditional measures of merit, changing the demographics of scientists, drastically altering how science is taught, and “decolonizing” science. Evolutionary biology has been especially susceptible to attacks on scientific truth because it deals with the most fraught topic of all: the origin and nature of Homo sapiens. We begin with a misconception about our species that’s become quite common.
1. Sex in humans is not a discrete and binary distribution of males and females but a spectrum.
2. All behavioral and psychological differences between human males and females are due to socialization.
3. Evolutionary psychology, the study of the evolutionary roots of human behavior, is a bogus field based on false assumptions.
4. We should avoid studying genetic differences in behavior between individuals.
5. “Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.”
6. Indigenous “ways of knowing” are equivalent to modern science and should be respected and taught as such.
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/t ... f-biology/
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