Ideology is Hollowing-Out Academic Biology

At Skeptical Inquirer, Jerry A. Coyne and Luana S. Maroja have written about the damage ideology is doing to the field of biology. Like many well-written articles today by people with their eyes open, this is not fun to read. It is never easy to read about the ideological capture of universities or the corruption of entire fields of study or the fact that numerous intelligent good-hearted people are increasingly afraid to speak up. I had the same reaction when viewing this 2022 video by Lawrence Krauss: "Is Woke Science the Only Science Allowed in Academia?"

Here is the Summary of the new article by Coyne and Maroja, "The Ideological Subversion of Biology."

Previous research indicated that corrective information can sometimes provoke a so-called “backfire effect” in which respondents more strongly endorsed a misperception about a controversial political or scientific issue when their beliefs or predispositions were challenged. I show how subsequent research and media coverage seized on this finding, distorting its generality and exaggerating its role relative to other factors in explaining the durability of political misperceptions. To the contrary, an emerging research consensus finds that corrective information is typically at least somewhat effective at increasing belief accuracy when received by respondents. However, the research that I review suggests that the accuracy-increasing effects of corrective information like fact checks often do not last or accumulate; instead, they frequently seem to decay or be overwhelmed by cues from elites and the media promoting more congenial but less accurate claims.

Here is an excerpt from the introduction:

Here we give six examples of how our own field—evolutionary and organismal biology—has been impeded or misrepresented by ideology. Each example involves a misstatement spread by ideologues, followed by a brief explanation of why each statement is wrong. Finally, we give what we see as the ideology behind each misstatement and then assess its damage to scientific research, teaching, and the popular understanding of science. Our ultimate concern is biology research—the discovery of new facts—but research isn’t free from social influence; it goes hand in hand with teaching and the public acceptance of biological facts. If certain areas of research are stigmatized by the media, for example, public understanding will suffer, and there will follow a loss of interest in teaching as well as in research in these areas. By cutting off or impeding interest in biology, the misrepresentation or stigmatization by the media ultimately deprives us of opportunities to understand the world.

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Following the Science

Was it illegal to say "We don't know" when public health officials didn't know? Instead, they showed hubris when they should have admitted ignorance, hurting millions of people, killing some of them and setting children backwards in their education, by imposing a nationwide lockdown. Here's an example of how they "followed the science."

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The Transgender Religion

In his 2021 book, Woke Racism, John McWhorter made the strong claim that Wokism is a religion. Not like a religion. It was literally a religion. At pages 23-24 he writes:

Something must be understood: I do not mean that these people’s ideology is “like” a religion. I seek no rhetorical snap in the comparison. I mean that it actually is a religion. An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism. Language is always imprecise, and thus we have traditionally restricted the word religion to certain ideologies founded in creation myths, guided by ancient texts, and requiring that one subscribe to certain beliefs beyond the reach of empirical experience. This, however, is an accident, just as it is that we call tomatoes vegetables rather than fruits. If we rolled the tape again, the word religion could easily apply as well to more recently emerged ways of thinking within which there is no explicit requirement to subscribe to unempirical beliefs, even if the school of thought does reveal itself to entail such beliefs upon analysis. One of them is this extremist version of antiracism today. ... Early Christians did not think of themselves as “a religion,” either. They thought of themselves as bearers of truth, in contrast to all other belief systems, whatever they chose to call themselves. In addition, in our times, it will feel unwelcome to the Elect to be deemed a religion, because they do not bill themselves as such and often associate devout religiosity with backwardness. It also implies that they are not thinking for themselves. ... To make sense of it, we must understand them—partly out of compassion and partly in order to keep them from destroying our own lives. This can happen only if we process them not as crazed, but as parishioners.

Abigail Shrier, is the unfairly attacked author of Irreversible Damage (2021), has stated that gender ideology (which many people consider to be part of the Woke movement) should also be considered to be a religion. Not like a religion, but an actual religion. Shrier sets forth her reasons at her Substack, in an article titled: "Little Miss Trouble Why I’m Not Waiting for the Gender ‘Pendulum’ to Swing Back."

Gender Ideology is not a pendulum, and it will not swing back with a little help from inertia. Gender Ideology is a fundamentalist religion—intolerant, demanding strict adherence to doctrine, hell-bent on gathering proselytes. I do not here use the term “religion” metaphorically or lightly. Induction into this religion begins with a baptism: the selection of pronouns and often a new name, greeted with all the celebration (and more) of a conversion. It evangelizes aggressively: through social media influencers, who claim to know a teen’s truest self better than her parents and to love that teen so much more than they ever could. Therapists, teachers, and school counselors play evangelist to numberless kids at American school. There’s no physical evidence that any of us possesses an ethereal gender identity, of course.

Because it is a religion, gender ideology "is not a tide, and it will not turn with the gravitational pull of the moon." According to Shrier, the very occasional sparkles of honesty we have seen in the corporate media were "pawn sacrifices" by the movement. It is her opinion that the ground-swell of Believers filling our sense-making institutions will not give any real ground until forced to do so.

So no, I don’t love the sensation of young people screaming in my face. But there is something I fear more than the furor of hundreds of zealots, blaring horns and banging bass drums: the world they aim to create, where truth finds no foothold and fairness, no purchase.

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The Four Principles of Why Sex is Binary

In order to deal with any controversy, including biology, it's important to get the facts right first. Only after we understand the basic facts can we discuss the ramifications of those facts, including the politics and morality. At the Paradox Institute, Zach Elliot has created memes and videos setting forth the fundamental principles of the biology of sex, a topic that was completely uncontroversial until three years ago, when ideologists reverse-engineered the "facts" based on political preferences.

Zach Elliot of the Paradox Institute has created this easy to understand chart:

For the full collection of short information videos regarding the biology of sex, visit Paradox Institute. For instance, see this video on "The Biology of Sex."

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Meaningful Discussions of Contentious Topics

The first question we must ask regarding EVERY controversy is whether one side is disproportionately well-funded, institutionally-fortified and ill-motivated (by $, power or ideology) and thus able to manufacture a false consensus. If so, meaningful discussion is impossible.

Excellent analysis of the problem with most transgender discussions by Geoffrey Miller here:

Miller Tweets:

Good thread, in principle. But in practice, the woke left has captured most of the biomedical scientific institutions. If we want studies challenging their narrative, who gives the research grants? Which academics would have the guts to run the studies, knowing it would nuke their careers? Who else is willing to collaborate on the studies? Which journals would even consider them? Who would review them objectively? How would journals withstand woke pressure to retract 'transphobic' studies? Which media would cover the results, rather than ignoring them? These problems seem very severe... and probably explain why we haven't already seen countervailing studies.

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