The Ideological Subversion of Biology

A new article by Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja takes aim at the current culture war attack on biology, and hits a bullseye.

The Skeptical Inquirer Magazine has had a noble history since it was founded in 1976, and while I think it probably lost some of its focus while ago, this week it redeemed itself by publishing a fantastic article by biologists Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja, entitled The Ideological Subversion of Biology. The summary of the article is given below.

SUMMARY: Biology faces a grave threat from “progressive” politics that are changing the way our work is done, delimiting areas of biology that are taboo and will not be funded by the government or published in scientific journals, stipulating what words biologists must avoid in their writing, and decreeing how biology is taught to students and communicated to other scientists and the public through the technical and popular press. We wrote this article not to argue that biology is dead, but to show how ideology is poisoning it. The science that has brought us so much progress and understanding—from the structure of DNA to the green revolution and the design of COVID-19 vaccines—is endangered by political dogma strangling our essential tradition of open research and scientific communication. And because much of what we discuss occurs within academic science, where many scientists are too cowed to speak their minds, the public is largely unfamiliar with these issues. Sadly, by the time they become apparent to everyone, it might be too late.

The thrust of the article is to dispel a variety of myths, promoted in the midst of current culture wars surrounding biology, sex, gender, race, and indigenous knowledge, which are prevalent in the current literature. As they describe it

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.

Here are the six examples of misconceptions they focus on:

1. Sex in humans is not a discrete and binary distribution of males and females but a spectrum.

2. All behavioral and psychological differences between human males and females are due to socialization.

3. Evolutionary psychology, the study of the evolutionary roots of human behavior, is a bogus field based on false assumptions.

4. We should avoid studying genetic differences in behavior between individuals.

5. “Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.”

6. Indigenous “ways of knowing” are equivalent to modern science and should be respected and taught as such.

The article provides excellent information that others can use when discussing these misconceptions with people who have been seduced by the unfortunate notion that promoting equality and fairness demands that one ignore or distort science. In this regard, they quote the famous biologist Ernst Mayr:

Equality in spite of evident non-identity is a somewhat sophisticated concept and requires a moral stature of which many individuals seem to be incapable. They rather deny human variability and equate equality with identity. Or they claim that the human species is exceptional in the organic world in that only morphological characters are controlled by genes and all other traits of the mind or character are due to “conditioning” or other non-genetic factors. … An ideology based on such obviously wrong premises can only lead to disaster. Its championship of human equality is based on a claim of identity. As soon as it is proved that the latter does not exist, the support of equality is likewise lost. (Mayr 1963)

The authors recognize that this article will not end efforts to inject ideology into science, something that I have written about at length, but they do point out the need for scientists to speak out.

We aren’t under the illusion that calling attention to these points, and emphasizing the fallacy of the reverse appeal to nature, will push ideology completely out of science. 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.

I hope their work encourages other scientists to actively defend the integrity of science, and the scientific method, for the good of everyone, and also provides fodder for respectful and informed conversation more generally.