A critique of Scientific American

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

In an abysmal article, Nautilus dismisses the importance of genes

This is one of the worst papers on genetics I’ve seen in the last 15 years, and although it’s from 2019, this same kind of palaver keeps coming around again and again, and in exactly the same form. And so when a reader sent me the link, I reacted instinctively. The laws of physics mandated that, like a starving leopard encountering an antelope, I must fall on it and rip it to pieces.  So here goes. (Yes, Carole Hooven is right: males tend to have the killer instinct more than do females!)

The piece is intended not for professionals but for laypeople, and appeared in Nautilus, a quarterly magazine on science and its relationship to and implications for society. Founded by a big grant from the John Templeton Foundation, it does publish solid science articles, but sometimes the Foundation’s purpose (to find evidence of God in science) shines through. This occurs through promoting bizarre science, like panpsychism, or touting dubious reconciliations between religion and science. This paper falls into a third class: doing down “modern” genetics to imply that there’s something terribly wrong with our modern paradigm. (Evolution is a related and favorite target.)

The author, Ken Richardson, seems to have derived most of his genetics from fringe figures like Denis Noble and James Shapiro, with the result that the casual, non-geneticist reader will buy what these people are selling: genes are of only minor significance in both development and evolution.

Richardson is listed in the article as “formerly Senior Lecturer in Human Development at the Open University (U.K.). He is the author of Genes, Brains and Human Potential: The Science and Ideology of Intelligence.”

Read it by clicking below, or find the article archived here.

I was torn between ignoring this paper—for the author deserves no attention—or taking it apart. I decided on a compromise: to show some of the statements it makes that are either flat wrong or deeply misguided. Richardson’s quotes are indented, and my take is flush left. Here’s how he starts:

The preferred dogma started to appear in different versions in the 1920s. It was aptly summarized by renowned physicist Erwin Schrödinger in a famous lecture in Dublin in 1943. He told his audience that chromosomes “contain, in some kind of code-script, the entire pattern of the individual’s future development and of its functioning in the mature state.”

Around that image of the code a whole world order of rank and privilege soon became reinforced. These genes, we were told, come in different “strengths,” different permutations forming ranks that determine the worth of different “races” and of different classes in a class-structured society. A whole intelligence testing movement was built around that preconception, with the tests constructed accordingly.

The image fostered the eugenics and Nazi movements of the 1930s, with tragic consequences. Governments followed a famous 1938 United Kingdom education commission in decreeing that, “The facts of genetic inequality are something that we cannot escape,” and that, “different children … require types of education varying in certain important respects.”

The “strengths” and “permutations of genes” was not widely viewed as the underpinnings of different races. Yes, racial hierarchies were constructed based on supposed genetic constitution, but not the image of the “code script”.  It was the claim that racial differences were inherited, regardless how inheritance worked—much less the unproved notion of “code script”—that buttressed the Nazis’ eugenics program.  But somehow Richardson manages to connect the Nazis with the genetic code at the very beginning of his paper. But this is a minor quibble compared to what follows.

Richardson then uses what he sees as the disappointing performance of the GWAS (Genome-wide Association Studies) method (used to locate, from population surveys, regions of the genome responsible for various traits, which helps narrow down the location of “candidate genes”):

Now, in low-cost, highly mechanized procedures, the search has become even easier. The DNA components—the letters in the words—that can vary from person to person are called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. The genetic search for our human definition boiled down to looking for statistical associations between such variations and differences in IQ, education, disease, or whatever.

For years, disappointment followed: Only a few extremely weak associations between SNPs and observable human characteristics could be found. Then another stroke of imagination. Why not just add the strongest weak associations together until a statistically significant association with individual differences is obtained? It is such “polygenic scores,” combining hundreds or thousands of SNPs, varying from person to person, and correlating (albeit weakly) with trait scores such as IQ or educational scores, that form the grounds for the vaulting claims we now witness.

Today, 1930s-style policy implications are being drawn once again. Proposals include gene-testing at birth for educational intervention, embryo selection for desired traits, identifying which classes or “races” are fitter than others, and so on. And clever marketizing now sees millions of people scampering to learn their genetic horoscopes in DNA self-testing kits.

So the hype now pouring out of the mass media is popularizing what has been lurking in the science all along: a gene-god as an entity with almost supernatural powers. Today it’s the gene that, in the words of the Anglican hymn, “makes us high and lowly and orders our estate.”

Although GWAS studies are hard and require big samples, and give genomic regions rather than genes there have been some notable successes in both medical genetics and agriculture, as one would expect in the past five years (see this Twitter thread for some examples).  The implication throughout the paper is that the failure of GWAS to locate individual genes responsible for traits shows that the variation of genes themselves aren’t responsible for the variation in traits. There must be something else!

But that’s completely wrong. We already have a way to judge the influence of genetic variation on trait variation, and that is heritability analysis. Heritabilities (symbolized as h²) range between 0 and 1, and are a measure of the proportion of variation for a trait in a given population caused by the variation among the genes in that population (the rest is due to environmental variation, interactions between genes and environments, and other arcane factors). But the point is that heritabilities calculated from our earlier crude methods are nearly always higher than heritabilities estimated from GWAS analysis, simply because GWAS (but not h²) misses a lot of variable gene sites that have small effects, and isn’t good at detecting effects of rare alleles. But the more we use GWAS, the more variation we find, and, for well studied traits like height, heritabilities estimated from traditional methods are now converging with heritabilities estimated from GWAS.

And heritabilities of most traits, which are most extensively studied in humans, are often quite high. Have a look at this list, for example, which includes cognitive traits, behavioral traits, and physical traits. Most heritabilities range between 0.2 and 0.8, which means that for a typical trait, between 20% and 80% of the inter-individual variation in a population is due to variation of genes. When asked to guess the heritability of an unknown trait, I’d usually say, “well, probably about 50%”.  That seems, for example, to be close to the heritability of IQ in a population.

This shows that genes are highly important in explaining human variation, just as they are variation in animals and plants. This phenomenon was well known ages ago. If genes weren’t important in variation, selective breeding of dogs, plants, pigeons, and so on would be almost useless. Here’s a famous quote from Darwin’s in The Origin:

“Breeders habitually speak of an animal’s organization as something quite plastic, which they can model almost as they please.”

If genes weren’t important in variation, animals (and plants, which of course have been bred out the wazoo) wouldn’t be so plastic. Ergo genetic variation is important in explaining the variation of organisms.

Despite this, Richardson makes the following statement, which would astound most geneticists:

. . . . it is now well known that a group of genetically identical individuals, reared in identical environments—as in pure-bred laboratory animals—do not become identical adults. Rather, they develop to exhibit the full range of bodily and functional variations found in normal, genetically-variable, groups. In a report in Science in 2013, Julia Fruend and colleagues observed this effect in differences in developing brain structures.

Full range? Really? Yes, there is still variation among clonal individuals raised in identical environments, but not nearly as much as among genetically variable individuals raised in different environments! Clonal populations show a heritability of zero (they have no genetic variation among them), so there is less phenotypic variation among the individuals.  As for the Fruend paper, it shows plasticity of brain development, because of course learning is a form of adaptive plasticity that can change the brain. But that by no means says that genes aren’t an important source of variation.

I could go on and on about how Richardson claims that genes aren’t important, all the while showing that they are. Here’s a good example:

First, laboratory experiments have shown how living forms probably flourished as “molecular soups” long before genes existed. They self-organized, synthesized polymers (like RNA and DNA), adapted, and reproduced through interactions among hundreds of components. That means they followed “instructions” arising from relations between components, according to current conditions, with no overall controller: compositional information, as the geneticist Doron Lancet calls it.

In this perspective, the genes evolved later, as products of prior systems, not as the original designers and controllers of them. More likely as templates for components as and when needed: a kind of facility for “just in time” supply of parts needed on a recurring basis.

So what? There were primitive replicators first, which might as well be called genes, but the modern system of sophisticated gene action, often involving introns, splicing, transcription factors, and so on, is what we know about now, and what Richardson says about early organisms is irrelevant.  But wait! There’s more!

Then it was slowly appreciated that we inherit just such dynamical systems from our parents, not only our genes. Eggs and sperm contain a vast variety of factors: enzymes and other proteins; amino acids; vitamins, minerals; fats; RNAs (nucleic acids other than DNA); hundreds of cell signalling factors; and other products of the parents’ genes, other than genes themselves.

Where does Richardson think that those enzymes and proteins come from, which are often used to manufacture vitamins and amino acids? Where do the cell signalling factors come from? They all come from genes! The “dynamical systems” that he touts so highly come largely from genes, and without genes we would have no organisms and no evolution. Yes, environmental factors are important in controlling the timing and action of genes, but often those “environmental factors”, like signals in different organs that lead to differential development, are themselves derived from genes. And the sequestration and use of externally derived chemicals, like some amino acids and vitamins, are also controlled by genes.

I can barely go on, and if I continue this would last forever. Just one or two more pieces of stupidity:

Accordingly, even single cells change their metabolic pathways, and the way they use their genes to suit those patterns. That is, they “learn,” and create instructions on the hoof. Genes are used as templates for making vital resources, of course. But directions and outcomes of the system are not controlled by genes. Like colonies of ants or bees, there are deeper dynamical laws at work in the development of forms and variations.

Some have likened the process to an orchestra without a conductor. Physiologist Denis Noble has described it as Dancing to the Tune of Life (the title of his recent book). It is most stunningly displayed in early development. Within hours, the fertilized egg becomes a ball of identical cells—all with the same genome, of course. But the cells are already talking to each other with storms of chemical signals. Through the statistical patterns within the storms, instructions are, again, created de novo. The cells, all with the same genes, multiply into hundreds of starkly different types, moving in a glorious ballet to find just the right places at the right times. That could not have been specified in the fixed linear strings of DNA.

My answer is “yes it could have, and it is”. Those “chemical systems” that cause an organism to develop come from genes, which have changed over evolutionary time in a way that leads to adaptations, including proper development. By and large, genes control development, particularly early development.  Organisms with pretty much the same genes (members of the same species, for example) always turn out pretty much alike, with similar behaviors and appearances. Further, the more closely related species are, the more similar they tend to be. This reflects genetic similiarity, not some nebulous similarity in “dynamical systems,” whatever those are.

One more:

But it’s not so simple. Consider Mendel’s sweet peas. Some flowers were either purple or white, and patterns of inheritance seemed to reflect variation in a single “hereditary unit,” as mentioned above. It is not dependent on a single gene, however. The statistical relation obscures several streams of chemical synthesis of the dye (anthocyanin), controlled and regulated by the cell as a whole, including the products of many genes. A tiny alteration in one component (a “transcription factor”) disrupts this orchestration. In its absence the flower is white.

This is a good illustration of what Noble calls “passive causation.” A similar perspective applies to many “genetic diseases,” as well as what runs in families. But more evolved functions—and associated diseases—depend upon the vast regulatory networks mentioned above, and thousands of genes. Far from acting as single-minded executives, genes are typically flanked, on the DNA sequence, by a dozen or more “regulatory” sequences used by wider cell signals and their dynamics to control genetic transcription.

“Statistical relation”? What is described in peas is a direct causal relation: a mutation, acting through pathways, is responsible for changing flower color. If you flip a light switch, the light goes on. If you have the right mutation, the flower is white. What’s the big deal? Further, “transcription factors” are coded in the DNA; they are proteins that regulate the transcripotion of other genes: how those genes make messenger RNA.

And the ultimate dissing of genes:

We have reached peak gene, and passed it.

Finally, because GWAS studies aren’t yet developed to the point where they always can pick out important genes (remember, variation in most traits is due to variation in many genes, with the variants having small effects, and GWAS misses rare genes), Richardson says this:

The startling implication is that the gene as popularly conceived—a blueprint on a strand of DNA, determining development and its variations—does not really exist.

Well, as Dawkins has pointed out, genes are more like “recipes” than blueprints, but this isn’t what Richardson is saying here. What he is saying is that genes play at best only a small role in development.  He is both wrong and muddled.

It is this kind of popular science that I most despise, because it dissimulates, misleads, and even fibs about the state of modern science. By misleading the public about genetics, it affects not only their understanding of science, but, when shown up to be nonsense, as I and other have done, erodes public trust in science.

If you want to read this piece, be my guest, but if you know anything about genetics, keep a big glass of Pepto-Bismol at hand.

 

h/t: the always helpful Luana

Censorship in science: a new paper and analysis

Well, a paper criticizing the “woke” aspects of science has finally appeared in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, though peer-reviewed critiques of scientific censorship or ideological pressure have appeared in the Journal of Controversial Ideas (a push for judging science on merit rather than ideology), and in the Skeptical Inquirer (an explication of how evolutionary biology is being distorted by ideology). I was an author of both of those papers (the second was reviewed, but not by a group of scientists in the field), but I’m not on the present one (I wish I were!).

The article below, which just came out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a prestigious journal, has a panoply of authors, many of whom you will recognize.  It was certainly peer-reviewed, and its topic is the censorship of scientific papers, defined as “actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific quality.”  It presents the problem, shows who the censors are, gives examples of censorship and studies of the problem as a whole, analyzes the motives of censors, explains why censorship is bad for both science and society, and suggests some fixes that might reduce censorship.

Click below to see the paper, and then below that to see an article about the paper, written by two of its authors, in The Chronicle of Higher Education. If you want just a quick take, read the Chronicle article, but the PNAS one is accessible to the nonscientific reader.

The two main conclusions of the PNAS paper are these:

a. Censorship of papers is increasing rapidly, and often takes the form of “soft” censorship, which is censorship based on social opprobrium, rather than outright banning by authorities (“hard censorship”)

b. The censors are usually fellow scientists, and usually act not out of malicious motives, but out of “prosocial ones”; that is, they try to keep stuff out of the literature because they think it’s harmful for society.

The diagram below, from the paper, is really a summary of its points—except for fixes of the problem.

As I said, most censorship is soft; as the paper notes:

Contemporary scientific censorship is typically the soft variety, which can be difficult to distinguish from legitimate scientific rejection. Science advances through robust criticism and rejection of ideas that have been scrutinized and contradicted by evidence. Papers rejected for failing to meet conventional standards have not been censored. However, many criteria that influence scientific decision-making, including novelty, interest, “fit”, and even quality are often ambiguous and subjective, which enables scholars to exaggerate flaws or make unreasonable demands to justify rejection of unpalatable findings.

And it’s also prosocial: meant to prevent the “harm” that we so often see claimed to occur when one’s own ideology is violated:

But censorship can be prosocially motivated. Censorious scholars often worry that research may be appropriated by malevolent actors to support harmful policies and attitudes. Both scholars and laypersons report that some scholarship is too dangerous to pursue, and much contemporary scientific censorship aims to protect vulnerable groups. Perceived harmfulness of information increases censoriousness among the public, harm concerns are a central focus of content moderation on social media , and the more people overestimate harmful reactions to science, the more they support scientific censorship. People are especially censorious when they view others as susceptible to potentially harmful information  In some contemporary Western societies, many people object to information that portrays historically disadvantaged groups unfavorably and academia is increasingly concerned about historically disadvantaged groups Harm concerns may even cause perceptions of errors where none exist.

Prosocial motives for censorship may explain four observations: 1) widespread public availability of scholarship coupled with expanding definitions of harm has coincided with growing academic censorship; 2) women, who are more harm-averse and more protective of the vulnerable than men, are more censorious; 3) although progressives are often less censorious than conservatives, egalitarian progressives are more censorious of information perceived to threaten historically marginalized groups; and 4) academics in the social sciences and humanities (disciplines especially relevant to humans and social policy) are more censorious and more censored than those in STEM .

Now the data adduced in the paper largely involve not censorship of papers, but censorship of academics, expecially that compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).  These cases are not censorship in the strict sense used by the authors (scientific papers), but are still attempts to keep academics’ ideas in all areas from reaching the public. The caption for the three plots given below (the paper has three more) is “Characteristics of higher education scholars targeted for their pedagogy and/or critical inquiry between 2000 and June, 2023 (n = 486) and characteristics of their targeters.”

The figures beow are FIRE’s data on not just science, but all form of scholarship:

First, the rise in censorship; the figures for this year are incomplete, and there was a drop between 2021 and 2022.  But look at the increase since 2000:

Below: which disciplines are targeted (blue means the targeted scholar was attacked by someone from his/her left, and red denotes attacks from his/her right. Overall, and as I’ve noted often, most attacks came from the left. Note too that the humanities experience more targeting incidents than does science.

Finally, the topics targeted for censorship. As you might expect, race and gender are the top two, though institutional policy is a close third.  As race and gender are closely connected with claims of oppression, it’s not surprising that prosocially-motivated attacks on scholarship involve trying to prevent harm to minorities.

The diagrem below, taking into account all attempts at censorship, show that most come from the left of the attacker (blue) compared to the right.  (Gray is either unknown or “neither”).  This again is no surprise; the right is not only less often represented in colleges, but is also less likely to engage in prosocially motivated censorship::

The PNAS article is copiously documented (there are 130 references), and I like it. But there are two problems that I think slightly reduce its effectiveness.  The first is that the article lacks tangible examples of how odious this kind of censorship can be. Examples really hit home, especially when you see how hypocritical and sneaky authors and journals can be, even when acting prosocially. In fact, only one case is described in both the paper and the Chronicle article below, but it’s a doozy, well known among many of us. This was an article which was retracted not because it had scientific problems, but because its conclusions violated what gender ideologues want to see. It also led to a shameful call for censorship in general of articles that might be “harmful”.

The Chronicle summary (click to read):

Both the paper and the Chronicle article have nearly word-for-word identical descriptions of the incident (this, by the way, is self-plagiarism), but the Chronicle piece has links, so I’ll excerpt that one:

Moral motives have long influenced scientific decision-making. What’s new is that journals are now explicitly endorsing moral concerns as legitimate reasons to suppress science. Following the publication (and retraction) of an article reporting that the mentees of male mentors, on average, had more scholarly success than did the mentees of female mentors, Nature Communications released an editorial promising increased attention to potential harms. A subsequent Nature editorial stated that authors, reviewers, and editors must consider the potentially harmful implications of research, and a Nature Human Behaviour editorial declared the publication might reject or retract articles that have the potential to undermine the dignity of particular groups of people. In effect, editors are granting themselves vast leeway to censor high-quality research that offends their own moral sensibilities, or those of their most sensitive readers.

The paper, found at the first link (and now retracted) found that in mentor/mentee relationships in science, the quality of the mentor had a positive effect on the career of the mentee, BUT, thethe paper also reported this:

We also find that increasing the proportion of female mentors is associated not only with a reduction in post-mentorship impact of female protégés, but also a reduction in the gain of female mentors. While current diversity policies encourage same-gender mentorships to retain women in academia, our findings raise the possibility that opposite-gender mentorship may actually increase the impact of women who pursue a scientific career. These findings add a new perspective to the policy debate on how to best elevate the status of women in science.

That is, same-sex mentorship of women seemed to be less helpful for their careers than being mentored by a male.  Now this is, of course, ideologically unacceptable, and, though as far as I know the data were sound, it raised a ruckus. As the Nature Communications editors noted when retracting the paper:

They retracted the paper simply because of criticisms that the results weren’t ideologically comfortable, and before the criticisms were considered. Also, have a look at the two editorials, especially the Nature Human Behavior one which became the subject to considerable pushback, including this tweet by Steve Pinker (an author of the present PNAS manuscript); see also my post about the fracas, which contains another long tweet by Michael Shermer.

Journalists & psychologists take note: Nature Human Behavior is no longer a peer-reviewed scientific journal but an enforcer of a political creed. I won't referee, publish, or cite (how do we know articles have been vetted for truth rather than political correctness)? https://t.co/3qXFGizt6h pic.twitter.com/G5BgB2hpqD

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) August 26, 2022

At any rate, I’d like to have seen more examples of censored papers that would drive home the repugnance of censorship and the urgency of fixing it. One that came immediately to mind was James Damore’s firing at Google for suggesting that inequities in representation may be due to preferences rather than bias.  Anna Krylov, one of the authors of the PNAS paper, tells me she’s writing a blog post for the Heterodox STEM site that will give several more examples of censorship, and I’ll highlight them when her piece appears.

Finally, what are the harms of censorship and how can we fix them?  I won’t go into detail about this (the paper does more), except to say that the harms are obvious: censorship keeps the truth hidden, and the truth not only will out, but may be valuable. While it is possible that some solid science should be suppressed if it offends certain groups or leads to “harm”, I can’t think of any scientific result that really should be censored because of its implications. Readers may want to suggest some below.

Second, scientific censorship could harm the public’s trust in the field and the trust of the scientific literature by scientists. As the PNAS paper notes,

Censorship may be particularly likely to erode trust in science in contemporary society because scientists now have other means (besides academic journals) to publicize their findings and claims of censorship. If the public routinely finds quality scholarship on blogs, social media, and online magazines by scientists who claim to have been censored, a redistribution of authority from established scientific outlets to newer, popular ones seems likely. Given the many modes of dissemination and public availability of data, proscribing certain research areas for credentialed scientists may give extremists a monopoly over sensitive research. Scientific censorship may also reduce trust in the scientific literature among scientists, exacerbating hostility and polarization. If particular groups of scholars feel censored by their discipline, they may leave altogether, creating a scientific monoculture that stifles progress.

So what’s to be done? The PNAS article gives a whole laundry list of fixes, nearly all of which are good. They include making reviews of papers, both accepted and rejected, public; third-party audits of scientific journals to measure the quality of their editorial practice, independence of sociopolitical pressures, and so on; and making serious calls for retractions of papers available publicly available to concerned scholars. This is all under the rubric of transparency, and names could be anonymous.

The only “fix” that sounds hard to implement is testing the proposition that some science creates more harm than good. The authors suggest that there might be some way to measure this, but I’m not convinced:

Scholars should empirically test the costs and benefits of censorship against the costs and benefits of alternatives. They could compare the consequences of retracting an inflammatory paper to 1) publishing commentaries and replies, 2) publishing opinion pieces about the possible applications and implications of the findings, or 3) simply allowing it to remain published and letting science carry on. Which approach inspires more and better research? Which approach is more likely to undermine the reputation of science? Which approach minimizes harm and maximizes benefits? Given ongoing controversies surrounding retraction norms, an adversarial collaboration (including both proponents and opponents of harm-based retractions) might be the most productive and persuasive approach to these research questions.

Frankly, I don’t think this is feasible; such controlled tests can’t be done! When Luana Maroja and I wrote our paper on the ideological erosion of science, we discussed whether any solid scientific result should be censored because of its possible harms. After much discussion, we agreed on “no.”

Readers may dissent, and dissent is welcome in the comments.  But the point of this post is that censorship is pervasive in science, in general it’s harmful since, on the grounds of preserving a favored ideology, it prevents the dissemination of truth, and that scientists should stop it.  That, of course, would mean keeping the tentacles of the ideological octopus off of science, but that doesn’t seem to be in the offing. I hope that the new PNAS paper will help keep those suckers out of our field.

The journal Science discusses positionality statements

Science magazine (you can call it a “journal” if you wish) recently published a surprisingly objective article on “positionality statements,” statements about the author’s background, race, gender, and views that are often included these days along with scientific papers. (Science is usually woke and often doesn’t present both sides of an issue.)

Positionality statements are often quite detailed, intended to give readers an idea of where the author is coming from, even though that’s supposed to be irrelevant in judging science. Another reason quoted in the article is that writing such statements somehow makes the author aware of his or her biases or unconscious reasons for doing the work, or to reflect on what future work they should do given their background.  To my mind, that’s weird, as authors should already know that, and there’s no reason to make public your thoughts on these issues.

I’ve written about positionality statements before. Below are three examples I gave, and you’ll also want to read Sally Satel’s article at Persuasion, “Focus on the research, not the researcher.”  There Satel suggests that positionality statements may actually be inimical to science as they may condition editors to accept papers out of sympathy, may themselves be biased, and of course violate the dictum that you judge science by, to quote a famoous man, the content of the paper, not the color of the author’s skin.  However, Satel says that in one restricted area such statements may be justified:

 . . . . positionality statements do make more sense in some narrow contexts. According to Jukka Savolainen, a Professor of Sociology at Wayne State University, positionality statements probably originated in ethnographic research. When we spoke, he told me that “it makes sense to be concerned about the characteristics of individual scholars doing field work when they are the only instrument of data collection and interpretation.”  That is, when a researcher is working alone in a foreign culture, it may be worth illuminating possible sources of inadvertent bias.

But of course such statements are widespread in many fields beyond anthropology. None of the three statements I give below are from such papers:

So, here we go (the posts will lead you to the original papers):

From this post:

I (first author) was raised as a Muslim immigrant-origin girl in a small Iowa town and constantly aware that my family was “different.” Having been an educator in PK-12 contexts, my goal in studying developmental psychology was to make the process easier for other youth who, like myself, were intersectionally minoritized and privileged because of religious, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and/or other identities or experiences. I was unprepared for the microaggressions embedded in developmental scholarship rooted in non-inclusive modes of knowledge production that resisted the nuances of the diverse individuals and groups I sought to better understand. . . . I seek to place myself in relationships and contexts to learn and engage in a co-conspiring, co-liberatory inquiry stance.

From another post, a statement about several authors:

Ash T. Zemenick is a nonbinary trans person who grew up with an economically and academically supportive household to which they attribute many of their opportunities. They are now the manager of the University of California Berkeley’s Sagehen Creek Field Station, in Truckee, California, and are a cofounder and lead director of Project Biodiversify, in the United States. Shaun Turney is a white heterosexual transgender Canadian man who was supported in both his transition and his education by his university-educated parents. He is currently on paternity leave from his work as a non–tenure-track course lecturer in biology. Alex J. Webster is a cis white queer woman who grew up in an economically stable household and is now raising a child in a nontraditional queer family structure. She is a research professor in the University of New Mexico’s Department of Biology, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is a director of Project Biodiversify, in the United States. Sarah C. Jones is a disabled (ADHD) cis white queer woman who grew up in a supportive and economically stable household with two university-educated parents. She is a director of Project Biodiversify, and serves as the education manager for Budburst, a project of the Chicago Botanic Garden, in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. Marjorie G. Weber is a cis white woman who grew up in an economically stable household. She is an assistant professor in Michigan State University’s Plant Biology Department and Program in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, in East Lansing, Michigan, and is a cofounder and director of Project Biodiversify, in the United States.

And one given by Sally Satel in her article below:

Consider the positionality statement by the authors of “Low-income Black mothers parenting adolescents in the mass incarceration era: The long reach of criminalization,” which appeared in the American Sociological Review in in 2019:

“Both authors are middle-to upper-middle-class white women—one is a mother, the other is not. A commitment to antiracist, intersectional, and feminist principles guides our research efforts, and we conducted this work with an awareness of the politics, dangers, and limitations of affluent white academics writing about the lives of low-income Black Americans.”

So what we see above is both self-flagellation and virtue signaling, but does it help you assess the science? Not to my mind.  The papers are already of a woke tenor, and to learn that the authors are themselves engaged in confessional identitarianism doesn’t help you judge them better. All you can say is, “Yes, the authors are minoritized or aware of their status as outsiders,” but does that help you judge the results?  Nope.  Maybe it helps the authors to examine their own viewpoints, as the Science article below avers, but they can do that on their own time. It needn’t be splashed all over a paper. As Sally noted:

Currently, only one journal I could find—the Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering—requires positionality statements. Others, like the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, “encourage” but don’t require them.

Click on the screenshot below to access the Science article, which you can also find archived here:

 

Here are the “pros” as quoted in the article,:

“It’s an invitation to think more broadly about what your role as a researcher is in the work that you’re trying to understand,” says Alejandra Núñez-de la Mora, a biological anthropologist at the University of Veracruz. She published a 2021 paper in the American Journal of Human Biology arguing that reflecting on one’s positionality can pay off in future work, helping researchers address inequities such as “parachute research,” unchecked power dynamics, and gaps in inclusivity. If you’re an astronomer, for example, think about where your telescope is, she says. “Are you part of that community? Is that telescope put there with knowledge of the people who call that place their land?”

To that I’d say, “okay, fine: keep it to yourself and, if you need to say it, publish it elsewhere”. This isn’t anywhere near Satel’s exception above, as your positionality doesn’t affect your astronomical results.

Another:

Positionality statements also benefit readers, supporters say, peeling back the curtain on researchers’ decisions that would otherwise remain invisible—from what questions they pursue to how they interpret their data. “It’s not just that we want to know about people’s socially constructed identities. That’s not the point,” says Julie Martin, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, which has required positionality statements since July 2020. “The point is how do those and your worldview affect the decisions you make in the research?”

Again, this has nothing to do with the published research itself, which reflects what’s done after the author has winnowed down the questions. And really, is the author the person to judge this question? Doesn’t a therapist need to help with this? At any rate, let those authors ponder it on their own, for this is a subjective reflection on behavior, not science.

Please, sir, can I have one more?:

As for [Genevieve] Wojcik, she says reflecting on her positionality has helped her realize her identity is inextricably linked with her work, enriching it and shaping the directions it takes—including, for example, her work to design genetics studies to be more inclusive of multiracial individuals. “I’ve sort of come into the notion that who I am can actually make my work better and lead me to question things that hadn’t been questioned before.”

Here’s Wojcik’s positionality statement:

Genevieve L. Wojcik (she/her): I am unsure as to how I identify, as my experience as a biracial individual in the USA has largely been defined by what I am not, instead of what I am. My mother immigrated here from Taiwan and my father’s parents from France and Poland. My research interests in genetic epidemiology for diverse, and specifically admixed, populations have been partially motivated by my background to ensure that discoveries will also benefit my loved ones, whether family or friends, with increased urgency for my multiracial children.

This is again a statement about motivation that, while perhaps Wojcik was insufficiently reflective to know this stuff before she wrote it out, has no bearing on the paper.

And the cons:

But others question the statements’ value. “I find it amazing that [publishing positionality statements] is becoming so widespread without any evidence that it actually achieves what it sets out to achieve,” says Patricia Nayna Schwerdtle, who studies global public health at Heidelberg University and coauthored a February critique of the practice in Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Indeed. And it might even be counterproductive, as Satel notes above. One of the worst effects of this tsunami of wokeness is that it encourages one to judge science by immutable characteristics of people or their irrelevant views on politics or ideology. Below you can see a study in progress that’s designed to find out whether positionality statement achieve what they’re designed to do, which is almost invariably to increase the diversity of scientists or encourage new ideas. But that study seems to have serious problems.

From my friend Anna, quoting a paper on which there were many coauthors, including me:

But some researchers think airing this information in the literature violates a central tenet of science: that a researcher’s work should be judged independently of who they are. Spotlighting a scientist’s identity represents a “bizarre turn back to [the] Dark Ages,” says Anna Krylov, a chemist at the University of Southern California who wrote an April critique alongside 28 co-authors in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. “It was not a good time when people were treated by their attributes and not by their achievements, not by their merit,” Krylov adds.

Some of the many authors of our paper have discussed positionality statements via email, and I have to say that there was no sentiment in favor of them. But what do you expect from a group of authors making the case that science should be judged by its merit alone?  Some of us amused ourselves by confecting positionality statements that we would have appended to our own JCI paper. Here’s mine:

“Jerry A. Coyne is a lugubrious old white Jewish male, descended from Ashkenazi ancestors, who doesn’t think this paper has a chance of being published.”

Positionality statements encourage readers to judge papers not by their merit alone, but by characteristics that distort your judgements about the merit of the research, and that merit is really the way science should be judged.  Even if your astronomical results come from using a telescope that indigenous people claim sits on their land, this affects the scienfitic results not one whit. Issues like politics, indigenous rights, and so on, can be argued out in other places, but shouldn’t pollute the scientific literature, since they’re ideological and political questions.

Another “con”:

Another concern is that positionality statements serve only as virtue signaling and gloss over deeper issues, such as the reproducibility crisis in science. They seem like a “last ditch effort before you publish your paper,” Nayna Schwerdtle says. Instead, researchers should strengthen upstream solutions, such as open science and participatory research, she argues.

Well, the reproducibility crisis is not something that needs addressing in a given paper, since whether or not a paper’s results are reproducible depends on other papers yet to be published, or on a literature review.

One of the biggest arguments against positionality statements is that there’s no evidence that they accomplish anything save for the authors’ statement that it made them reflect their motivations, something I largely doubt. Here’s what the new article says:

At least one team of researchers is studying whether these statements have their intended effect. Rose Oronje, a researcher at the African Institute for Development Policy, and her colleagues at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine are evaluating the results of publishing reflexivity statements—a similar practice that encourages researchers engaged in global collaborations to consider how their work acknowledges the communities involved.

The team is reviewing published statements in global health journals and interviewing authors and journal editors to gauge whether this measure at the time of publication has the power to shift researchers’ mindsets and lead to more equitable practices. Publication guidelines can provide powerful incentives for scientists to effect systemic change, Oronje says. “When you start there, it becomes very easy for us to want to do it, because we want to publish.”

Now tell me, given that this involves self-report about whether one’s mindset shifts in result to woke and subjective statements, whether there can be any result other than “yes, these statements work!”? Given the history of research that goes against what “progressives” want, like the retraction of a Nature Communications paper showing that female-female mentorships may actually hurt women’s scientific careers, I’m not optimistic.  And how can you judge whether positionality statements create more equitable practices given that the Zeitgeist itself is pushing “more equitable practices”.  There’s a correlation/causation issue here that will be almost impossible to resolve. How do you separate the temporally increasing trend towards practices that progressives consider “equitable” from the effect of  positionality statements? I don’t see how.

In the end, science should be judged by merit alone, not by race, gender, politics, ancestry, sexuality, or family history of the scientist. In a few cases, which fall under the Satel Exception, as when you’re doing work that could be thought exploitative, as in anthropology or collecting organisms in other countries, it may be useful (and sometimes required) to show how you complied with required or recommended practices. And maybe—just maybe—you can mention inadvertent biases or problems with the research.  But those are very restricted, much less subjective, and often aren’t even positionality statements!

Positionality statements are likely to be biased and self-serving. I have to say that if they’re of any value to me in science, it’s that when I see them I tend to avoid reading the paper. If you want to indulge in narcissism or self-flagellation, leave it out of your paper, and do it on your own time!

But kudos to Science for publishing a pretty objective article on this issue.

Once again, Scientific American screws up an article claiming that the binary definition of sex is harmful and limiting

Scientific American just can’t help itself; it has to keep pounding away at the biological definition of sex, which is based on differential gamete size. Just the other day they published a full article in the “evolution” category, arguing that women hunted just as much as men in ancient times (and in hunter/gatherer societies today), but part of that article claimed that sex and gender were both “spectrums”. To quote from my post on this execrable and tendentious piece (my bold):

For the purpose of describing anatomical and physiological evidence, most of the literature uses “female” and “male,” so we use those words here when discussing the results of such studies. For ethnographic and archaeological evidence, we are attempting to reconstruct social roles, for which the terms “woman” and “man” are usually used. Unfortunately, both these word sets assume a binary, which does not exist biologically, psychologically or socially. Sex and gender both exist as a spectrum, but when citing the work of others, it is difficult to add that nuance.

Now the magazine has a new op-ed arguing the same thing: a binary view of sex is not only wrong, but constricts us; is also harmful to people who don’t see themselves as “male” or “females”, like transsexuals (who do in fact see themselves as members of their non-natal sex); and doesn’t work for people who don’t produce gametes (note: postmenopausal women aren’t female under this criterion). But I digress. This piece is short, but is full of distortions and mistakes. Also, one of the authors (Cara Ocobock) also coauthored the article on hunting mentioned above. She gets a lot of space to propound her views, while the magazine prohibits me from writing an op-ed.that contradicts some claims of other op-eds. It is in effect a journalistic dictatorship that prohibits dissent.

 

I’ll put the authors’ claims in bold, and have indented their quotes:

The authors claim that sex is defined by gamete type, but we don’t check people’s gametes when judging their sex.  And people who don’t have gametes are problematic.

When we ask, “How many sexes are there in humans?” we can confidently answer “two,” right? Many people think sex should be defined by a strict gamete binary in which a person’s sex is determined by whether their body produces or could produce eggs or sperm. But when you are out and about in the human social world, are you checking everyone’s gametes? And what of the substantial number of people who do not produce or carry gametes?

Well, yes, in public we judge people’s sex by characters correlated with sex: appearance, including size, shape, presence of breasts, vocal timbre, and so on. So what? When doctors diagnose jaundice, they first look at the patient’s color, and then examine the underlying condition: liver function. There is no problem here; the idea of secondary sex characters, imperfectly but highly correlated with biological sex, is well ensconced in the literature. That doesn’t affect the definition, which is there because it clearly shows the binary and leads to many interesting lines of research.

And the claim that people who don’t produce gametes—sterile males, postmenopausal females, castrati, and so on—these pose no problem. They are male or female. Postmenopausal women should be furious at the implication that they are not biological women.

The authors raise the old, tired, and refuted “clownfish fallacy”. Clownfish switch sexes: when the sole alpha female in a group dies, a male fish changes sex to take over as the boss female. But there are still only two sexes. The article confuses the reader by bringing up other aspects of sex that involve how it’s determined.

The vast majority of life-forms—including bacteria and archaea—do not reproduce sexually. But if the question concerned the number of animal sexes present in a given tide pool or backyard garden, the answer would need to account for organisms that switch sexes, sometimes mate with themselves or switch back and forth between sexual and asexual reproduction.

. . . We have to appeal to a multiplicity of binaries, however, because sexual reproduction has evolved many times and in many different ways across the living world. Reproductive capacities in birds and mammals largely involve inheritance of different combinations of sex chromosomes, whereas in many reptiles, sex is determined based on environmental cues such as temperature.

Yes, but again, all animals have two sexes. They can arrive at that binary using temperature, chromosomes, environment, and other cues, but in all cases they wind up with two sexes. (And that binary hasn’t blinded us to working out how it’s attained in organisms like reptiles!).  The ubiquitous binary is scientifically useful because it raises the question, first raised by evolutionists Ronald Fisher, of “why are the sexes only two?”.  And we think we know the answer now. As I’ve said, there are many paths to sex but only two destinations: males and females.

The authors claim that defining sex is a bottom-up project and we should arrive at our definition from the “top down”: by asking questions.

We think the ongoing discussion about sex might benefit from a fundamental change in approach by turning the question around such that we ask, “If ‘sex’ is the answer, what was the question?”

They have a point here, and have used, as have I and others, a comparison with the definition of biological species. The species definition is fundamental because it explains an observation of and question about nature: “Why, in one area, do animals and plants come in neat packages, like the birds in my backyard. Why isn’t nature a spectrum rather than comprising discrete groups?”

The value of this [“questions first”] approach becomes clear when you consider the long-running debate in biology over how to define species. One definition, the biological species concept, posits that species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding organisms capable of producing fertile offspring. It is not universally applicable because, as noted earlier, most organisms do not reproduce sexually. It does, however, provide a framework for asking questions about how sexually reproducing organisms can evolve ways to avoid mating with organisms distinct enough that their offspring’s survivability or fertility would be compromised. This framework has led to a bounty of work demonstrating that speciation in organisms living in the same area is rare and that physical separation among groups appears to be a key component of evolving reproductive barriers.

We can extend this “ask questions first” framework to concepts about sex.

What the authors don’t seem to realize here is that the Biological Species Concept, based on reproductive barriers between groups, itself started with a question: “Why is nature discontinuous?” And that question led to the definition of species.  The discreteness of species in sexually reproducing creatures living in the same area is based on reproductive barriers.

Likewise, the definition of sex, based on equipment to produce one of two types of gametes, is also based on a question derived from observation: “Why do there seem to be two classes of organisms in animals, classes that have different reproductive roles and (usually) different appearances?”  Once we arrive at a gamete-based species definition, that helps us answer all sorts of questions, most notably ones involving sexual dimorphism and sexual selection.

So the top-down, question-asking method succeeded for both sex and species. The authors are kvetching about nothing.

Other aspects of organisms don’t adhere to a strict binary.

Binaries start to fail us once we move into questions about how organisms live out their lives. This can be seen in the example of transgender athletes. Arguments revolving around including or excluding trans athletes often rest on notions of strict binary differences in hormone type and concentration that associate female individuals with estrogen and male ones with testosterone. This assumes testosterone is at the root of athletic performance. These hormones do not hew to a strict binary, however. Female and male people need both estrogen and testosterone to function, and they overlap in their hormone concentrations. If we are interested in how estrogen and testosterone affect athletic performance, then we need to examine these respective hormone levels and how they correlate with athletic outcomes. We cannot rely on gross average differences between the sexes as evidence for differential athletic success. Adherence to a sex binary can lead us astray in this domain of inquiry.

My response is basically “This is irrelevant to whether sex itself is a binary.”  It also shows the ideological motivation of the paper, which is the usual motivation for denying the sex binary: “If sex is binary, then that erases people, like people of dual gender or trans people, who don’t feel that they belong to one of the two sexes.”  Well, that’s not true, as many trans people do feel they belong to one of the two sexes; they just feel they were born in the wrong one. But the biological definition of sex is irrelevant to the moral and legal rights of people of nonstandard gender, and, as I’ve always said, these folks should be treated with the respect and dignity their beliefs afford.

As for hormones not being in a strict binary, testosterone, for example, forms nearly a completely disjunct distribution in males and females, so the overlap is virtually nil.Below is a graph of hormone titers given by Carole Hooven in her book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. The distributions are bimodal and almost nonoverlapping (a tiny bit of overlap, from people with sex disorders, isn’t shown because of the scale), with men at the higher mode and females at the other (h/t Robert):

But this is irrelevant, for, many sex-related characters, like height and strength, also show more overlap. The question is whether sex itself is bimodal, not sex-related traits.  And we know plenty about overlap in those traits, so the sex binary has not impeded us from studying things that overlap!

Further, people are already examining how hormone levels affect athletics-related traits.

Importantly, the fact that the Olympics and other groups used to use a hormone cutoff between athletes allowed to compete in “male” versus “female” categories has nothing to do with the sex binary. This is an artificial classification binary imposed on people for allowing them to compete in the two classes. (And it didn’t work.)  The authors are deliberately conflating two distinct issues here: the binary of sex and an artificial binary subjectively imposed by athletic organizations.

Other species, say the authors, don’t hew to a sex binary. 

Further problems arise when we compare humans to other species. Some organisms are incapable of reproducing. Some that are capable may end up not reproducing. Others may alternate between reproducing asexually and sexually, and still others may switch sexes. Such organisms provide fascinating insights into the diversity of life. But when we refer to clown fish changing sex to emphasize the diversity of ways in which sexual beings move through the world, we risk losing sight of the issues of consent, autonomy, well-being and self-determination that form the bedrock of all dimensions of human health, sexual or otherwise.

Every animal we know of has two, and only two, sexes, though sometimes they reproduce asexually. Alternation of sexes still leaves two sexes; like clownfish, organisms can change from one to the other —but there are no cases involving three or more sexes.

And what on earth do “consent, autonomy, well-being, and self determination” have to do with the sex binary? These are social issues that have nothing to do with how many sexes we have.  The authors are committing a form of the appeal to nature here, saying that because human sexuality is complicated by our social system, there must not be two sexes in nature!

This paper is deeply misguided, and its aim is to cast doubt on the utility of the sex binary because it distracts us from other stuff.  But the other stuff they mention has already been investigated and discussed extensively. In the end, I can conclude only that this is part of Scientific American‘s continuing “progressive” effort to convince us that there are more than two sexes in humans.  (For articles other than the two mentioned here, see here, here, and here). They won’t succeed, for Nature can’t be fooled. It’s infuriating that a science magazine repeatedly tries to deny empirical fact to serve a political agenda.

Yes, there may be good article in Scientific American, but there are also abysmal articles and op-eds, and I lay these at the door of the editor.

_________

For more kvetching about the magazine, see “The Fall of Scientific American” in Spiked, published two days ago.

My letter to the Washington Post on race

About a week ago, the Washington Post published, starting on its front page, a long article arguing that race is a purely social construct without reality or utility, and thus should be eliminated. The author Sydney Trent, is a science journalist who covers social issues, and that may explain why the article was replete with scientific problems, among them the neglect of existing research on ethnic groups (my preferred term for “race”). You can see the article by clicking on the headline below. Since it’ll probably be paywalled if you subscribe, I found the whole article archived here.

Leaving aside the misleading “science says” (science doesn’t say anything, scientists do; and not all scientists agree that race isn’t real), I’ll show you three small excerpts of Trent’s piece:

Yet unlike in decades past, more ordinary Americans are coming to see “race” for what it is, [Carlos] Hoyt maintains. In interviews he conducted for his doctoral thesis and book, these people describe gradually awakening to the idea — through traumatic personal experiences with discrimination, through foreign travel or something they read — that they had been sold a bill of goods. “Race,” they decided, does not exist.

. . . The truth, [Adrian] Lyles, 37, said, is that “race has no quantifiable metric,” like socioeconomic status, for example, he said. “Where you have unreliable input, your data is trash.”

. . . In 2003, the completion of the Human Genome Project — which found that humans globally share 99.9 percent of their DNA — gave waste to the notion of “race” among the vast majority of scientists. But the public appears barely to have noticed. The idea still lives everywhere — in discrimination and criminal profiling, in the rise in hate speech and acts, in the recent Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action in college admissions, in the rhetoric of social justice advocates and the new capitalization of Black and White in the media. Racial categorization persists on job applications, medical forms, and most critically to Hoyt due to its high visibility, the Census.

Implicit in Trent’s effort to dethrone the term is the misguided idea that if you think “races” have any biological reality, then that buttresses racism.  That need not be true, but, historically, belief in races has been associated with the idea of a racial hierarchy in various traits (most often intelligence), and so I prefer to use “populations” or “ethnicity”, which doesn’t carry that historical taint.

Trent concludes that racial categories should be eliminated everywhere, especially on the census. The problem is that from the DNA figures above, she concludes that “racial categories”—the half-dozen or so “races” recognized in the past (white, black, Asian, and so on)—have no biological significance.  But she conflates “racial categories”, the named “boxes” above, with “race”, which I take to mean “a population that is genetically distinguishable from other populations of our species”.

Classical “races” were assumed to be absolutely demarcated geographically and morphologically, and to be separated by substantial genetic differences.  We know now that this conception of “race” isn’t true. There are no absolutely clear-cut categories into which everyone fits, genetic differences between even the “classical” races are not large, and there are “races within races”: populations that can be distinguished genetically from other populations often put into the same classical race. Again, that’s why I use “ethnicity”  or “population” to refer to such groups.

But there is no doubt that ethnicity, and even the “old fashioned” races, carry meaningful biological information and are genetically differentiable. If they weren’t, then you wouldn’t be able to pay companies like 23andMe to suss out your ancestry, or to trace the history of human migration by using genetic differences between populations. (23andMe told me from my DNA that I am 97.2% Ashkenazi Jew and 2.8% Eastern European, which matches perfectly with what I know from my family history.)

Ethnicity reflects evolutionary history, and if you use thousands of DNA sites (as you see in my letter below, even 99.6% identity between people—not 99.9% as Trent wrote—still leaves, in a genome of 3 billion base pairs, at least 12 million variable nucleotides. That variation is largely correlated with ancestry and geography, so that, for example, the DNA of most Europeans allows you to identify their birthplace to within 500 miles. Luana Maroja and I described the real situation in our recent paper (“The ideological subversion of biology“) in Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine published by the Center for Inquiry. (The race material is under point #5 of the paper.)

And, as I say in my published letter, one study showed that if you ask people to self-identify their “old fashioned” race (they used 3,636 Americans who self identified as either African American, white, East Asian, or Hispanic), and then independently look at their DNA in a blind study, you find that when you compare the DNA with the self-identification, you find a 99.84 percent match! That means that even the widely-reviled “classical” races are genetically differentiable using cluster analysis.  This is not surprising because these groups evolved in different parts of the world, and for much of their history they evolved in semi-isolation, leading to the accumulation of differences in the DNA by either genetic drift or natural selection.

At any rate, the Post‘s article was scientifically misleading, and so I set out to correct it by writing a letter to the paper. Mirabile dictu, they published it, and you can find it by either clicking on the screenshot or by simply reading my letter reproduced below the headline.

They edited it fairly heavily for length, so I had to leave out stuff like locating someone’s birthplace from their genes. Still, I think I did make the point that there is substantial genetic variation among people and diagnostic genetic variation among ethnic groups, and that this variation is useful in several ways.  If I could make one change, it would be to re-insert something that was cut and that I missed when I reviewed the edits: I would have inserted “large differences in” at the point where I put an asterisk in the letter below.

If you get the paper version of the Post, the letter is on page A27; if you have an online subscription, it’s here (or see my letter and another one by clicking the headline below). They changed the title of Trent’s article after the online version was published to what you see above.

The letter:

The Oct. 19 front-page article “A categorical no to the concept of race” argued that human “race” is a social construct without biological meaning. But there is important scientific data showing that race is indeed associated with diagnostic and useful biological differences.

Scientists have long rejected the simplistic view of races as groups distinguishable by appearance, geographic origin and * genes. But rejecting this view of “racial categories” and arguing that humans “share 99.9 percent of their DNA,” misses important genetic differences between populations. In fact, while humans share 99.6 percent of their genome, our genome has more than 3 billion base pairs, leaving more than 12 million DNA sites that vary among people.

This variation is correlated with ancestry and geography. It is used, for example, by genealogy services to tell people about their ancestry. In forensics, it’s used to identify criminals and bodies. And DNA variation is used to map the location of genes causing disease, an effort with great medical promise because the frequency of genetic diseases such as schizophrenia varies among populations.

Even the old-fashioned concept of race shows that it is not just a social construct. A large sample of Americans who self-identified as African American, White, East Asian or Hispanic was subject to blind analysis of their DNA. The subjects fell into four genetic clusters, revealing a 99.8 percent match between self-identification and DNA classification. Clearly, even old views of race involve meaningful genetic differences reflecting the evolutionary history of our species.

Jerry A. Coyne, Chicago
The writer is emeritus professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago.

There was also another letter making a different point about racial designations, and I’ll add that, too:

The front-page article “A categorical no to the concept of race” explained how treating race as objective rather than socially constructed has led to demographic confusion while shoehorning people into categories at variance with how they view themselves. As an example, the article mentioned the recent custom of uppercasing “Black” and “White” in American news media. The Post ought to champion a more nuanced standard, perhaps by using lowercase for how people (whose self-identification might be unknown) are viewed by others and uppercase for how they view themselves. The majuscule would then carry the same connotation of intentional membership as it does in the distinction between “Republican” and “republican” or between “Deaf” and “deaf.”

Charles H. Bennett, Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Thanks to a reader who encouraged me to write my letter.

Scientific American on a philosophical grift: panpsychism

Well, Scientific American has published an article that, while on a subject of questionable interest, is at least neither woke nor wrong. The topic is panpsychism, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines this way:

Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. The view has a long and venerable history in philosophical traditions of both East and West, and has recently enjoyed a revival in analytic philosophy.

The old and new forms of panpsychism were advanced because of our present failure to completely understand where consciousness comes from. Thus panpsychism offers an easy way out: we’re conscious because everything is conscious.  That, of course, doesn’t solve the “hard problem” of how a brain-carrying organism can be conscious. Our failure to completely understand where consciousness comes from, say the panpsychics, is because we’re working on the wrong level: we just need to show that all bits of the universe are inherently conscious. Problem solved!

No, not solved!

First, a failure to understand something doesn’t mean that we’re taking the wrong approach; it could just mean that the problem is a difficult one. We don’t know where and how the first self-replicating organism evolved, but we don’t say that every bit of the universe has a form of replication, and thus the problem is solved.

In the “revival” forms of panpsychism (about which I’ve written many posts), promulgated most vociferously by Philip Goff, the claim is that every bit of the universe has some form of consciousness, however rudimentary.  This includes particles like electrons.  (They never specify the form of consciousness enjoyed by, say, electrons.) When the particles, though evolution, are assembled into a creature like a human, this assembly somehow makes the entire creature “conscious” in the way we think of (go here for a discussion of what consciousness is; I’m just referring to the common construal: self-awareness and the ability to perceive sensations).

But there has been no progress in understanding whether panpsychism could be true since it was proposed a long time ago, and that’s for several reasons:

1.  We know no way of demonstrating that inanimate objects, like rocks and neutrons, have some form of consciousness.
2. We know no way of showing that the combination of rudimentary consciousnesses, as in the constituent particle of our brain, will somehow, when assembled in an organism, make it conscious. This is called the “combination problem.”
3. As far as we know, consciousness requires a complex nervous system in a living organism, which isn’t present in inanimate constituents of the universe or in dead individuals.
4. We are making progress in the conventional view of consciousness, e.g, it’s either a byproduct of having a sufficiently complex nervous system or an evolved condition in which the brain was selected to create the phenomenon. (In both cases it’s a material phenomenon connected with how neurons are arranged.) We can change consciousness with brain stimulation, use psychological tricks to fool people into thinking they’re doing something consciously when they’re not, or vice versa, and we can take away or restore consciousness with drugs (e.g., anesthesia).

It’s because of these issues that panpsychism has made no scientific progress while the “materialistic” view of consciousness, the one that doesn’t assume that particles themselves are conscious, has made progress. Panpsychism, in my view, is promulgated by philosophical grifters, who crave the attention they get from propounding novel and counterintuitive theories. And surely on some level they must realize that there’s no way to go any further with their scientific program. They keep singing the same old tune without adding any words, i.e., evidence.

At any rate, the Sci Am piece below, by science journalist Dan Falk, gives an account of the arguments in favor of and against panpsychism made at a recent meeting at Marist College, a college founded as a Catholic school (but now denying any religious affiliation) in Poughkeepsie, New York. The meeting was organized by panpsychist proselytizer Philip Goff, who found it all too easy to get funding from the John Templeton Foundation, which loves stuff like panpsychism because it’s anti-materialistic and conjures up the numinous (“an electron is conscious?. Weird!”)

Goff, of the University of Durham in England, organized the recent event along with Marist philosopher Andrei Buckareff, [JAC: he seems to be a philosopher of religion as well as religious] and it was funded through a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. In a small lecture hall with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hudson River, roughly two dozen scholars probed the possibility that perhaps it’s consciousness all the way down.

You can read the article for free, though if you know about panpsychism, you don’t need to. But if you don’t know about it, it gives a good summary of the arguments against it (there are no arguments for it except its claim that everything is conscious).  As usual, physicist Sean Carroll injects some sense into the discussion; he also had a big debate with Goff, as he has several times before (see below):

The crazy part of this all is that a lot of philosophers accept panpsychism, despite its numerous problems and scientific intractability. From the article (my emphasis):

Yet panpsychism runs counter to the majority view in both the physical sciences and in philosophy that treats consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, something that arises in certain complex systems, such as human brains. In this view, individual neurons are not conscious, but thanks to the collective properties of some 86 billion neurons and their interactions—which, admittedly, are still only poorly understood—brains (along with bodies, perhaps) are conscious. Surveys suggest that slightly more than half of academic philosophers hold this view, known as “physicalism” or “emergentism,” whereas about one third reject physicalism and lean toward some alternative, of which panpsychism is one of several possibilities.

How can philosophers fall for a panpsychic grift? I suppose it’s because they don’t really understand science, want to do down science (yes, some philosophers have that motivation), or apprehend the value of evidence in supporting or weakening a theory.  Here’s more (my bolding):

Many philosophers at the meeting appeared to share Goff’s concern that physicalism falters when it comes to consciousness. “If you know every last detail about my brain processes, you still wouldn’t know what it’s like to be me,” says Hedda Hassel Mørch, a philosopher at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. “There is a clear explanatory gap between the physical and the mental.” Consider, for example, the difficulty of trying to describe color to someone who has only seen the world in black and white. Yanssel Garcia, a philosopher at the University of Nebraska Omaha, believes that physical facts alone are inadequate for such a task. “There is nothing of a physical sort that you could provide [a person who sees only in shades of gray] in order to have them understand what color experience is like; [they] would need to experience it themselves,” he says. “Physical science is, in principle, incapable of telling us the complete story.” Of the various alternatives that have been put forward, he says that “panpsychism is our best bet.”

First of all, those philosophers seem to be ignorant about how real scientists (as opposed to philosophers) are attacking the problem of consciousness and understanding its physical basis. More important, I think Goff would (and believe has) said that panpsychism is a physicalist theory. We just don’t know, physically, how the consciousness of electrons works. If it’s not physicalist, then it’s supernatural. But if you claim it’s an inherent property of matter, that’s a physicalist assertion, for one then needs to show how it’s an inherent property of matter. If you can’t, find another line of work.

Here’s some critique of the theory from the article (there’s no evidence offered in support of the theory except that it sounds good):

But panpsychism attracts many critics as well. Some point out that it doesn’t explain how small bits of consciousness come together to form more substantive conscious entities. Detractors say that this puzzle, known as the “combination problem,” amounts to panpsychism’s own version of the hard problem. The combination problem “is the serious challenge for the panpsychist position,” Goff admits. “And it’s where most of our energies are going.”

Others question panpsychism’s explanatory power. In his 2021 book Being You, neuroscientist Anil Seth wrote that the main problems with panpsychism are that “it doesn’t really explain anything and that it doesn’t lead to testable hypotheses. It’s an easy get-out to the apparent mystery posed by the hard problem.”

. . . During a well-attended public debate between Goff and Carroll, the divergence of their worldviews quickly became apparent. Goff said that physicalism has led “precisely nowhere,” and suggested that the very idea of trying to explain consciousness in physical terms was incoherent. Carroll argued that physicalism is actually doing quite well and that although consciousness is one of many phenomena that can’t be inferred from the goings-on at the microscopic level, it is nonetheless a real, emergent feature of the macroscopic world. He offered the physics of gases as a parallel example. At the micro level, one talks of atoms, molecules and forces; at the macro level, one speaks of pressure, volume and temperature. These are two kinds of explanations, depending on the “level” being studied—but present no great mystery and are not a failure on the part of physics.

Bringing up the gas laws was a smart thing to do, showing emergent physical properties that do not demonstrate a failure of physicalism. The gas laws may not be predictable from the laws of physics, but are consistent with the laws of physics. One more critique:

Seth, the neuroscientist, was not at the workshop—but I asked him where he stands in the debate over physicalism and its various alternatives. Physicalism, he says, still offers more “empirical grip” than its competitors—and he laments what he sees as excessive hand-wringing over its alleged failures, including the supposed hardness of the hard problem. “Critiquing physicalism on the basis that it has ‘failed’ is willful mischaracterization,” he says. “It’s doing just fine, as progress in consciousness science readily attests.” In a recently published article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Seth adds: “Asserting that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous does nothing to shed light on the way an experience of blueness is the way it is, and not some other way. Nor does it explain anything about the possible functions of consciousness, nor why consciousness is lost in states such as dreamless sleep, general anaesthesia, and coma.”

It’s clear that I think panpsychism is a big philosophical grift, and although I could be more charitable, I get angry when a philosophical equivalent of creationism, which is what panpsychism is, gets popular. Perhaps Goff and his colleagues really believe it, but unless they’re thick-headed they surely realize that there is no evidence in its favor and they haven’t offered a solution to the most crucial part of their theory: the combination problem. I predict with some confidence that panpsychism will go nowhere. As the Encyclopedia notes, the theory has a “long and venerable history”.  I’d disagree with the “venerable” part, but the fact that its history is long, but yet no progress has been made in documenting or understanding it, shows that it’s an intellectual dead end.

Here’s a three-year old video, which I believe I put up before, giving an audio debate between Carroll and Goff.  There’s no doubt that the physicist is the winner; Goff comes out licking his wounds.

For another video dismantling of panpsychism by Carroll, go here, and you can also see a paper by Carroll on the phenomenon here.

When I first read the Sci Am piece, I had the following email conversation with Matthew, also a critic of panpsychism:

Me: Why not a symposium on flat-earthism?
Matthew: I bet Templeton funded it.  Good guess. I mean, it’s right up their street. Imagine the real good they could do with all their dosh if they funded sensible things!

I hadn’t read the article when I had this exchange, but, sure enough, Matthew was right: the sticky fingers of Templeton are all over this symposium. To wit:

But I’ve had some second thoughts about Sci Am publishing this article, and don’t oppose it now. Panpsychism is not precisely equivalent to “flat earthism”, but only because a lot of people still believe in panpsychism, and if you pay attention to intellectual currents you’ll have heard about it. In my view, though panpsychism is nearly as scientifically worthless as flat earth theory or the “Loch Ness Monster” hypothesis, the public needs a place to understand what panpsychism is. Author Falk fills that bill, also showing (necessarily) panpsychism’s profound weaknesses. In that sense, Falk has done a good job, and I can’t fault Scientific American for publishing his piece.

Once again, ideology distorts science: the editor-in-chief of Scientific American flubs big time, wrongly asserting that sparrows have four sexes.

This is a sad story: sad for biology, sad for science communication, and perhaps saddest for Laura Helmuth, editor-in-chief of Scientific American. Over the past few years, Helmuth has injected a hefty dose of authoritarian progressive ideology into her magazine (see here for some of my posts on the issue). It’s gotten worse and worse, even though the readers, and her followers on Twitter, have repeatedly urged her to back off the ideology and restore the magazine to its former glory as the nation’s premier venue for popular science.  But Helmuth is woke, and, being religious in that sense, simply can’t keep the ideology out of the science, just as an evangelist can’t help asking you if you’ve heard the good news about Jesus.

The tweet Helmuth put up this week (shown below) is a prime example, and it’s pretty dire because it distorts biology—in particular the work of scientists who spent years studying the genetics and mating behavior of white-throated sparrows (Zonotrichia albicollis).  This is an interesting bird because both males and females show two forms (this is a “polymorphism”), with one form having a tan crown stripe and the other a white crown stripe.  Here is a picture of the two forms from a PNAS paper.

The forms also differ in their parental behavior and courtship.  I think you can get the differences by looking at the abstract of a paper by Elaina Tuttle, given below. Tuttle was an accomplished ornithological behaviorist who did part of her postdoc in Steve Pruett-Jones’s lab upstairs from me. It was her work that called attention to the involvement of inversions in the mating system of white-throated sparrows. Sadly, Tuttle died at only 52 of breast cancer.

Here’s a 2003 paper by Elaina on the species (found in North America) and its mating system (click to go to screenshot, and you can find the pdf here).

Her summary is below, showing that the two forms (“morphs’) mate disassortatively—that is, tan males prefer to mate with white females and vice versa.  There is also a difference in their behavior, with white males and females being more aggressive during the mating and breeding season:

Organisms exhibiting genetic polymorphism often also exhibit true alternative life-history strategies in which behavioral tactics are genetically fixed. Such systems are ideal for the study of the evolution of life histories because the consequences of selective episodes can be more easily identified. Here I report an interesting and classic example of a species exhibiting true alternative strategies. Due to a chromosomal inversion, male and female white-throated sparrows (Zonotrichia albicollis) occur as two distinct morphs, tan or white. Tan and white morphs mate disassortatively, and this mating pattern maintains the polymorphism in relatively equal proportions within the population. In comparison with tan males, white males are more aggressive, frequently intrude into neighboring territories, spend less time guarding their mates, occasionally attempt polygyny, and provide less parental care. White females are also more aggressive and solicit copulation from their mates twice as often as tan females.

Note that they mention just two sexes: males and females, each characterized by their color. Just two sexes!  The genetics of this system is complicated because, the genes causing the different colors and behaviors almost surely reside within a chromosomal inversion (a part of the chromosome that gets broken, turned around, and then reattached).  This makes it hard to do genetic analysis. Tuttle explains this:

. . . . . almost all white birds are heterozygous for the inversion (i.e., 2^m/2, where 2^m represents the inverted chromosome and 2 represents the noninverted form), whereas tan birds are homozygous noncarriers (i.e., 2/2). . .

The disassortative mating and different behavioral strategies have combined to make this variation remain fairly stable in the population, though I’m not sure there’s a population-genetic model showing how this actually. works. (That would be hard, as it would require knowing a number of parameters that are difficult to estimate but are required for a good model.)

Further, the tan and white morphs occasionally mate with their own color (about 4% of the time, probably an underestimate because of sneaky mating). This kind of mating is called assortative—like mates with like. Because of this, the two forms are not reproductively isolated. That’s why they’re not called different species.

Note that there are just two sexes here, as virtually all scientific papers describing this phenomenon realize: males make sperm; females make eggs. Here are two quotes from the Tuttle paper:

This species is polymorphic, and both sexes can be separated into tan and white morphs based on the color of the median crown stripe (Lowther, 1961).

and

White-throated sparrows may be an exception to this rule because, regardless of fitness effects, the genetic alternatives are present in both sexes, there is likely to be evolutionary mechanisms maintaining multiple strategies. . .

Just two sexes, and every ornithologist knows this. Even if each morph mated only with its own kind, so that there was total reproductive isolation between the forms and they would, in effect, be two species, there would still be just two species, with each having two sexes.

Now the popular press has mistaken this system for the phenomenon of “four sexes”, which is just flat wrong. The biological definition of sex involves what kind of gamete you make, and here there are only two.  Females make and lay eggs, males make sperm. For descriptions of this system showing “four sexes”, see here (Nature!), here, and here, among others.

That’s a distortion of the truth, and a misleading one that gender activists co-opt to say that “yes, animal sex is not binary”.  They are wrong. But in fact Laura Helmuth did just that in her tweet, citing a paper from Ken Kaufman’s Notebook in the Audubon News.  Kaufman says this (see more later):

It’s almost as if the White-throated Sparrow has four sexes. That may sound like a joke, but it’s actually a good description of what’s going on.

. . . Many different genes here are tightly linked to form a “supergene,” so that birds of one color morph also inherit a whole range of behaviors. The resulting effect is that the White-throat really does operate as a bird with four sexes. For anyone curious about the scientific background, you can read all the technical details here.

The Current Biology paper that the last link goes to does indeed say that the bird “operates as if it has four sexes”.  And I found a 2020 paper by Maney et al. in Hormones and Behavior called “Inside the supergene of the bird with four sexes.” But while the paper uses “four sexes” in the title, it also notes that that is merely a “nickname” for the species. Maney et al. then correctly refer to “both sexes” throughout.

But if there are four sexes, what are those sexes?  All you could say is “tan male”, :”white male”, “tan female,” and “white female.” But those are not sexes, as they don’t produce four different kinds of gametes. Nor is reproductive isolation between the tan and white morphs complete, so it’s not as if a “white male cannot mate with a white female”, which would be the case if these were four sexes. As I said, assortative (like-type) matings occur at least 4% of the time. Further, the offspring of some of those matings must, by virtue of the chromosomally-based system of mating, be fertile (i.e., if tan birds mate assortatively with tan birds, their offspring will be equivalent to the normal “tan” morph in behavior, appearance, and mating propensity).

If you’re a sane biologist and use the biological definition of sex, we have a species with two sexes, with each sex having two morphs. And the morphs mate disassortatively, but not completely so. It’s surely an interesting system, but deeply misleading to use it as an exception to the sex binary. It makes me angry when people like Helmuth do this, for on some level they must know they’re wrong.

Nevertheless, Helmuth wants to go with the popular press and with woke ideology rather than with science, and declares in the tweet below that the species has “four chromosomally distinct sexes.” (Even that isn’t true, as each morph has the same inversion type.) She underlines her ideology by adding her P.P.S.: “Sex is not binary,” as if this example disproves it.  My P.P.S. is “Yes, sex is binary and you know it.”

Two points here: Helmuth is dead wrong, as biologists working on this system realize. There are not four sexes.

Second, she is being deliberately obtuse because she wants to buttress her view, expressed elsewhere, that “sex is a spectrum.” This, of course, is a trope meant to go along with the view that gender is a spectrum, which gender activists somehow want to read into nature itself, seeing the same spectrum in nature that they see in society. But as Richard Feynman said, “Mother Nature can’t be fooled,” and all animals and vascular plants obstinately show just two sexes.

What is amusing about Helmuth’s tweet is that she was SO wrong that the deluge of critical comments eventually prompted Twitter’s “community notes” program to correct what she said (remember, this is the Editor-in-Chief of Scientific American), and append an “added context” note saying she’s wrong—with the “context” noting that there just two sexes, and each sex comes in two colors.

I don’t know about other scientists or science editors, but if I was publicly spanked on Twitter like Helmuth was below, I’d be hideously embarrassed, and either correct myself (she won’t), or delete the tweet, which conveys scientific misinformation. (Update: She’s cut off the comments on her post, clearly perturbed that there were so many, with the vast majority being critical._

This is what started the Twitter fracas. Note the “added context”, which readers can upvote.

White-throated sparrows have four chromosomally distinct sexes that pair up in fascinating ways
P.S. Nature is amazing
P.P.S. Sex is not binary https://t.co/NJhQI6uC0q via @audubonsociety

— Laura Helmuth (@laurahelmuth) May 17, 2023

And here’s what they call the “ratio” of comments to “likes” on her Tweet. This reflects the fact that the vast majority of people commenting on her tweet were critical. She has been, as the kids say, “ratioed”:

Scientists and informed laypeople immediately began going after this tweet, some polite and correcting it, others calling for Helmuth’s firing (I can understand that sentiment but I would never argue that anyone should be fired). One of the scientists, who had already debunked the sparrows as a violation of the sex binary, was Colin Wright, who wrote this on his website:

The second case study claims to investigate “the evolutionary consequences of more than two sexes.” Perhaps here we will finally be told what these new sexes are! But the first sentence moves the goalpost from “sexes” to “operative sexes,” which they never define.

The example they give of a species “with more than two sexes” is the white-throated sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis). This species has two color morphs, males and females with either white or tan stripes. The more aggressive white stripe morph has a large inversion on chromosome 2, and the species mates disassortatively by color morph, meaning that white stripe morphs tend to mate with tan striped morphs. This chromosome inversion coupled with the disassortative mating by morph has led to a situation where chromosome 2 “behaves like” another sex chromosome.

He adds to that that in a tweet below issued as a comment on Helmuth’s tweet:

From the article:

"It's almost as if the White-throated Sparrow has four sexes."

"Almost as if" means that it's not even "as if," meaning that they in fact do not have four sexes, but rather just two. pic.twitter.com/lG9qEoAR1M

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) May 17, 2023

What happened? Helmuth blocked Wright (that’s what it means in the red rectangle below):

Wright then clarifies the story and calls attention to his being blocked. He’s right: Helmuth couldn’t abide the truth:

A story in 4 images. This is the Editor-in-Chief for @sciam. Truth hurts! pic.twitter.com/a9AHTlRhVg

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) May 17, 2023

Emma Hilton also replied to Helmuth:

 

And Emma got blocked, too:

However, Carole Hooven, another critic of the “non-binary” view of sex, doesn’t seem to have been blocked. Perhaps I’ll be too, but I haven’t been yet.

What’s sad about this is that the reproductive biology here really is unusual and fascinating, but the emphasis is misplaced on support of a particular ideology.

— Carole Hooven (@hoovlet) May 18, 2023

Finally, Agustín Fuentes, the cultural anthropologist from Princeton whom we’ve met before, retweeted Helmuth’s post, for he’s denied the sex binary too, and in Scientific American!). But being thin-skinned, he puts in an addendum saying that the quote he gives is not his own. But he still apparently embraces the idea that there is no sex binary in humans.

to head off all the snarky comments…this is NOT MY QUOTE..it is directly for the author of the essay and in the actual paper referred to. Click the links, do the reading.

— Agustin Fuentes (@Anthrofuentes) May 17, 2023

 

To sum up, Helmuth is tweeting wrong things about biology in the service of her ideology, an ideology that she doesn’t just embrace, but has infused into the magazine she runs. Perhaps Scientific American wants to become Ideological American, but I’m hoping things will turn around. They would if Helmuth could simply adopt the idea that she shouldn’t use the magazine as a mouthpiece for her politics, but she won’t do that. Also, she refuses to engage with scientific criticism, not a good look for an editor. This exchange exemplifies that:

@laurahelmuth why do you block people for pointing out inaccuracies with your claims?

Surely the more intelligent & mature thing to do would be to acknowledge, understand & retract or correct your statement?

— 1122100202100 (@TheyGoneYet) May 18, 2023

And if I were friends with Helmuth, I’d tell her this.

h/t: Steve, Colin