National Review
Leading Science Journal Will Now Reject Inconvenient Scientific Truths
By ANDREW FOLLETT
September 21, 2022 6:30 AM
Nature demands that only science compatible with an ideologically fashionable worldview be published.
What is arguably the world’s most influential scientific journal is strangling academic freedom and science itself with the hands of far-left ideology.
“Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded,” a recent volume of Nature Human Behavior reads. “For example, research may — inadvertently — stigmatize individuals or human groups.” And in a Nature news feature last week, the author worried that “a new ultraconservative supermajority on the United States’ top court is undermining science’s role in informing public policy. . . . Scholars fear the results could be disastrous for public health, justice and democracy itself.”
First published in 1869, Nature bills itself as “the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journal.” It is certainly among the most read, cited, and prestigious academic journals, which makes its apparent fall to the lows of “woke” gatekeeping and outright advocacy — demanding that science be compatible with an ideologically fashionable worldview — all the more distressing.
“Science has for too long been complicit in perpetuating structural inequalities and discrimination in society,” the recent issue of Nature Human Behavior continues. Nature’s editors have now made “woke” identity politics an essential element of editorial policy, explicitly stating that they will reject, retract, and repudiate any research that “promotes privileged, exclusionary perspectives.” This description can be made to fit anything that left-wing institutions might consider offensive, helpful to their political adversaries, or otherwise inconvenient to their worldview — regardless of its truth. As social psychologist Bo Winegard points out in Quillette, “These new guidelines have been designed to reject any article deemed to pose a threat to disadvantaged groups, irrespective of whether or not its central claims are true, or at least well-supported.”
Scientists will be the first to suffer the consequences. Journals such as Nature play an incredibly important role in scientists’ careers, distinguishing important research and offering — by the act of publishing a study — their approval of that study’s rigor and its introduction into the marketplace of ideas. Until recently, journals like Nature aspired to be politically and ideologically neutral to prevent editors’ views from impeding the scientific quest for truth. Now that quality controls have been replaced with political checkpoints, writing true but insufficiently progressive statements in a scientific paper could trigger potentially career-ending retractions in one of the academy’s leading journals. Consider the argument of American political scientist Wilfred Reilly that the “pay gaps” between large groups all but vanish when certain variables other than race and sex (such as age and career field) are taken into account. Would such research, that calls into question the pervasiveness of certain systemic injustices, be deemed too offensive or unorthodox for publication?
But the kind of academic debate that sparks scientific revolutions, such as the debate between “mobilists” and “fixists” in my own field of geology, which led to the theory of plate tectonics, is necessarily unorthodox and would simply not be possible if one side won’t permit the other to publish. Such an environment doesn’t lead to scientific truth but to progressively extreme group-think echo chambers.
Perhaps the most disturbing feature of Nature’s new editorial guidelines is the broadened definition of research-related “harm,” which researchers must prevent, to now include negative social consequences for studied groups. Currently, scientific ethics is concerned with preventing harm to individual research subjects, with rules set up in the aftermath of human experiments performed by the Nazis and Imperial Japan. Even such well-intentioned policies have created an infamously bureaucratic nightmare where most experiments are regulated by institutional-review boards and grant agencies, requiring scientists to fill out mountains of paperwork that many universities, companies, and researchers pay private companies to handle. If even the most benevolent of intentions can have such profoundly negative gatekeeping effects on science, what barriers and costs is this radically expansive and ideologically shaped definition of “harm” going to impose on the average researcher? This comes at a time when left-wing academics are redefining academic freedom, such that “ some ideas don’t deserve a hearing,” and it’s part of a growing trend: Many other scientific journals and funding agencies are adjusting research policies to favor progressive views.
California’s state-run community-college system orders its faculty to directly and actively contribute “to DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] and anti-racism research and scholarship,” in violation of academic freedom and the U.S. Constitution. And the phenomenon is international: The Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the federal agency that funds the majority of Canada’s health research with about $1 billion per year, recently committed to using DEI to make research-funding decisions to further an objective of “transformative change” in society. Such policies won’t just create mountains of paperwork. They’ll be used to prevent researchers from pursuing valid lines of inquiry, or exposing flawed research, while regurgitating debunked junk in the service of a perceived harm-free utopia.
This isn’t the first time the Left has openly attempted to ban scientific thought.
“Science was not spared from this strict ideological control,” Anna Krylov, a professor of chemistry at the University of Southern California, noted in a letter to the Journal of Physical Chemistry that described scientists’ experience in the Soviet Union. “Entire disciplines were declared ideologically impure, reactionary, and hostile to the cause of working-class dominance and the World Revolution. Notable examples of ‘bourgeois pseudo-science’ included genetics and cybernetics. Quantum mechanics and general relativity were also criticized for insufficient alignment with dialectic materialism.” In Krylov’s view, the Left is politicizing science, even “hard science” fields such as chemistry, to pursue an agenda based on what feels good rather than what’s true, fundamentally undermining scientific knowledge. She fears this could potentially trigger a slide toward a pseudoscientific dark age akin to the quasi-religious Lysenkoism once promoted by the Soviet Union, from which Russian biology has yet to fully recover:
The Cold War is a distant memory and the country shown on my birth certificate and school and university diplomas, the USSR, is no longer on the map. . . . But I find myself experiencing its legacy some thousands of miles to the west, as if I am living in an Orwellian twilight zone. I witness ever-increasing attempts to subject science and education to ideological control and censorship. Just as in Soviet times, the censorship is being justified by the greater good. Whereas in 1950, the greater good was advancing the World Revolution (in the USSR; in the USA the greater good meant fighting Communism), in 2021 the greater good is ‘Social Justice’ (the capitalization is important: ‘Social Justice’ is a specific ideology, with goals that have little in common with what lower-case “social justice” means in plain English). As in the USSR, the censorship is enthusiastically imposed also from the bottom, by members of the scientific community, whose motives vary from naive idealism to cynical power-grabbing.
While many young, grievance-studies departments at universities have successfully demanded explicitly political and racially biased processes of tenure and grant application, academic freedom is now also besieged by long-standing institutions such as Nature, enamored with DEI statements, publishing bias, and, now, politicized “ethics guidelines.” President Eisenhower warned in his farewell address that “the prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.” The real harm won’t come from allowing free inquiry; it will come from sanitizing science.
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