Wokeness Poisons Science
Part II of my series on why I am no longer woke
In Part I of this series, Why I Am No Longer Woke, I considered the woke vision of human nature as a blank slate and made the case that this worldview is contrary to the scientific evidence on human thought and behavior. This flawed vision of human nature leads to the transformation of the long-standing societal goal of equal opportunities for all people, to one of equal outcomes for all groups. As a result, such specious objectives have generated equally fallacious (and ultimately failed) political and economic policies:
Underlying the political policy of equal outcomes is the blank slate model of human nature, which holds that since people are inherently equal any inequalities in education, health, wealth, income, housing, home ownership, employment, and the like, can only be the result of societal, political, and economic discrimination, rather than inequalities in cognitive intelligence, emotional intelligence, creativity, drive and ambition, personal responsibility and volitional choices, and of course luck, good and bad. Once such discriminatory policies are eliminated, woke blank slaters believe, then such outcome inequalities should disappear.
This erroneous vision has led to mistaken social policies related to race and gender, suppressed free speech in academia, led to cancel culture and general censoriousness for ideas contrary to the woke agenda, and wasted billions of dollars and countless hours in academic and corporate training programs in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—meant to erase every last trace of discrimination purported to exist as an explanation for the still unequal outcomes observed in society. Part II of this series below looks at how wokeness poisons science.
Image by Grok prompt “create an image of how wokeness poisons science”
The infiltration of wokeness into the sciences is now well documented, from the hiring practices of academic science departments based on a bingo-card of intersecting identities (race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc.) to granting agencies demanding statements explaining how the proposed research project will be supportive of or sensitive to oppressed minorities—even for scientific fields that have nothing to do with the woke focus on politics, economics, and social policies, such as astrophysics. Case in point: the German physicist Sabine Hössenfelder went out to her Twitter/X followers in 2022 to inquire what woke formulaic language she should plug into her grant proposal for studying black holes:
I wrote a research proposal about inflation (in the early universe, not in your supermarket) and it bounced back because I didn’t explain its relevance to “sex, gender, and diversity.” I need to add a paragraph on this. Anyone has an idea what to write?
The pushback she experienced in the comments section of the post led her to delete the tweet, as apparently even asking the question challenged the woke agenda, which must never be allowed.1 Another physicist and cosmologist, Lawrence Krauss, has carefully documented the extensive politicization of the sciences, for example a Physical Review Physics Education Research paper titled “Observing Whiteness in Introductory Physics: A Case Study,” that includes an objection to the use of “whiteboards” in classrooms because:
Though whiteboards have been shown to have a number of affordances when they are used as a collaborative tool that all members have access to, in this episode, they also play a role in reconstituting whiteness as social organization. In particular, whiteboards display written information for public consumption; they draw attention to themselves and in this case support the centering of an abstract representation and the person standing next to it, presenting. They collaborate with white organizational culture, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.2
One wonders what the authors make of “blackboards”.
America’s largest funder of science, the Energy Department’s Office of Science, now requires all grant proposals to include a PIER plan (Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research) to “describe the activities and strategies of the applicant to promote equity and inclusion as an intrinsic element to advancing scientific excellence.” Upon reading this new requirement, Krauss wondered what his last grant proposal involving the exploration of gravitational waves, the early universe, neutrino cosmology, dark-matter detection, and black-hole physics has to do with diversity and inclusion, concluding “nothing.”3
Understandably, most astronomers unversed in woke literature have no idea what sort of quagmire they are wading into with such terms as black holes, white holes, dark energy, and dark matter, but the astronomy department at Cornell University can help them sort it out in their course Astro 2034: Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos, in which students are introduced “to the fundamentals of astronomy concepts through readings in Black Studies.” Astronomy professor Nicholas Battaglia and comparative literature professor Parisa Vaziri “use astronomy concepts like ‘black holes’ and ‘event horizons’ to interpret the history of race in creative ways, while artists and musicians conjure blackness through cosmological themes and images.” Lest you think I’m trying to pull off a literary hoax pace Alan Sokal or Pete Boghossian, here is a screen shot of the course:
Perhaps a 2025 update to the course might include a discussion of the Big Bang as a reference to Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s parties.
Examples of such woke corruption of science are now legion. The Russian-born chemist Anna Krylov, the USC Associates Chair in Natural Sciences and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Southern California in the field of theoretical and computational quantum chemistry, explained the problem in a keynote address—“Merit-Based Science is Effective and Fair: How Such a Banal Idea Has Become Controversial”—at a retreat of her department in November of 2024.4 Critical Social Justice, she summarizes, insists that…
everything (including science) is racist, sexist, colonial. Existing social inequalities and unequal representation are due to systemic racism and sexism. Everything (including academia) is about power struggle between the oppressors and oppressed. Everything (including science and education) needs to be dismantled and rebuilt to ensure Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. “Those who are not with us are against us” and must be punished.
Examples of how wokeness poisons science could be ripped from the headlines of The Onion or BabylonBee:
A collection of 67 papers published in the Journal of Chemical Education include “Decolonizing the Undergraduate Chemistry Curriculum.” “Chemistry and Racism.” “Integrating Antiracism, Social Justice and Equity Themes in a Biochemistry Class.”
A module in a chemistry class at East Carolina University explores “the development and interrelationship between quantum mechanics, Marxist materialism, Afro-futurism/pessimism, and postcolonial nationalism.”
An American Chemical Society Inclusivity Style Guide advises scientists to replace phrases such as “obesity is a public health crisis” with “antifat bias and discrimination are public health crises”; replace “cast a dark cloud over the meeting” with “created a tense atmosphere at the meeting”; replace “boring and lame” with “boring and uninteresting”; and so forth.
Rice University now offers a course on “Afrochemistry: The Study of Black-Life Matter.”
BLM. Get it?
As Krylov joked amidst this litany of examples of the woke corruption of science, "If you climb to the top of the chemistry building and jump off, gravity will take you down to the well-defined outcome, regardless of your pronouns."
The biologists Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja co-authored a stunning revelatory article on “The Ideological Subversion of Biology”5 in which they warned:
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.
Coyne and Maroja document six cases of misrepresentation of facts in evolutionary and organismal biology, including:
Sex in humans is not a discrete and binary distribution of males and females but a spectrum.
All behavioral and psychological differences between human males and females are due to socialization.
Evolutionary psychology, the study of the evolutionary roots of human behavior, is a bogus field based on false assumptions.
We should avoid studying genetic differences in behavior between individuals.
Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.
Indigenous “ways of knowing” are equivalent to modern science and should be respected and taught as such.
The final recommendation comes straight out of the new anthropology wars over science and indigenous peoples, most notably in New Zealand, Australia, and North America. The experiences of the San Jose State University (SJSU) archaeologist Elizabeth Weiss are emblematic of the problem, when she was defamed as a “racist” and locked out of her fossil collection for simply opposing the teaching as science Native American creationism myths (that there was no migration of peoples from Asia to the Americas—they were always here) and the repatriation movement that argues Paleo-Indian fossil remains from many thousands of years ago, with little to no genealogical linkage to current Native American tribes, be reburied by whomever claims them—lost to science forever.6
In 2021, for example, Weiss delivered a talk for the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) conference titled “Has Creationism Crept Back into Archaeology?”, in which she “compared creation myths of Native Americans to other creation myths, while pointing out that the SAA has previously taken a stand against the teaching and use of biblical interpretations, such as intelligent design, to understand the past.” Many of the 7,000 members of the SAA objected to the talk even being delivered, and after it was, “the comment box quickly filled up with name-calling and accusations of racism.” Weiss’s talk was promptly removed from the SAA website.
Subsequently, Weiss was told by SJSU Provost Vincent Del Casino that a photograph of her holding the skull of an ancient Native American with the caption “so happy to be back with some old friends” (after the Covid-19 shut down of her campus and absence from her research collection) “has evoked shock and disgust from our Native and Indigenous community on campus and from many people within and outside of SJSU.” This was followed by SJSU President Mary Papazian ordering that she be locked out of the collection (“They literally changed the locks!” she said). Papazian “also stated that no photos were allowed of the Native American collection or even of the boxes that held the bones. One cultural anthropologist asked whether I had written permission from these individuals to take the photos, knowing full well that they had been dead for centuries!”
Left: the image that Provost Del Casino said did “not align with the values of SJSU” and “evoked shock and disgust from our Native and Indigenous community on campus and from many people within and outside of SJSU.” Right: the image that the University used for multiple websites and promotional material. This image was removed from the University website in July 2023. Courtesy of Elizabeth Weiss.
If all this were not enough to convince people to forego joining a Fair Play for Archeological Wokeness committee, Weiss presented a protocol draft that would determine access to archaeological collections that “included a menstruation taboo,” for which the authors, she explained, “couldn’t bring themselves to state that women who are menstruating are not allowed in the curation facility or to handle remains and artifacts; thus, they used the term ‘menstruating personnel,’ to avoid the implication that only females menstruate! Seriously?” Menstruating personnel…if only we had a word for such people.
How did we get into a situation, Weiss wondered…
…in which opposing the reburial of human remains is automatically deemed racist and can derail an anthropologist’s career? It’s about turning anthropology into an ideological battleground weighted in favor of victimhood and (often disproven by evidence) tribal identity—both political and social—rather than a scientific endeavor aimed at better understanding the past for the benefit of all humankind. It doesn’t matter who is correct, it matters who gets to tell the story, with Native American narratives now considered expert testimony that cannot and must not be questioned.
Unquestioned narratives were on full display in my final essays at Scientific American, where I was a monthly columnist for nearly 18 years. I have documented elsewhere how political ideology crept into the magazine,7 culminating in the departure of the deeply-woke Editor-in-Chief, Laura Helmuth, shortly after the 2024 Presidential election when she had a paroxysm over Trump’s victory. Helmuth began by apologizing “to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists,” then upbraided her high-school classmates for celebrating Trump’s win—“fuck them to the moon and back”—and described her home state of Indiana as “racist and sexist.” Shortly after, she resigned “to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching).” Birdwatching? This is not unlike embattled politicians caught in a scandal who announce they want to spend more time with their family. The pretext fools no one, but is plausible enough that the proclaimer hopes readers will believe that other people believe it.
The president of Scientific American, Kimberly Lau, released a statement thanking Helmuth for her leadership and wishing “her well for the future.” In my final analysis of this sad state of affairs documenting the decline of a once storied institution,8 I proposed a counterfactual test that this corruption of the magazine really is due to wokeness:
Imagine what would have happened if the editor-in-chief of Scientific American had spoken about or published articles on the average difference in IQ test scores between white and black Americans and argued that the gap might be partially due to genetics—or, alternatively, if she had correctly stated that, on average, women score higher than men in trait Neuroticism on the Big 5 personality scale and suggested that that is why there are fewer female than male Fortune 500 CEOs. She would surely have been summarily fired and publicly denounced and we would have been told that such comments or articles “do not reflect the positions or policies of Scientific American or its governing board or staff; we apologize to all who have been harmed by them.” She would almost certainly not have been thanked for her years of loyal service and offered good wishes for her future.
Actual examples from the pages of Scientific American make my point of how wokeness poisons science:
There was Allison Hopper’s July 2021 “Denial of Evolution is a Form of White Supremacy” that denied creationists their religious motivation for their beliefs and instead labeled them with the “racist” calumny.
An August 2021 article, “Modern Mathematics Confronts its White Patriarchal Past,” contrary to all available evidence, accused an entire profession of both misogyny and racism while simultaneously ignoring all the other fields in which women outnumber men in graduate degrees, such as health and medical sciences (71%), social and behavioral sciences (61%), and biological sciences (51.4%).9 Do patriarchy and misogyny exist only in fields in which men outnumber women?
A December 2021 article, “The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson” accused the renowned evolutionary biologist of racism, a charge so incendiary that it caused a cavalcade of Wilson’s colleagues, post-docs, students, friends, and supporters to come to his defense.10
Peak wokeness was reached in the September 2021 issue when it was explained “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ is Problematic for Describing Programs that Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion,” examples of which included Star Wars characters who were too white, toxically masculine, religious, ableist, eugenicist, and worst of all resolved their conflicts through “duels with phallic lightsabers.” Phallic lightsabers? What do these woke authors have on their minds?
Then there was the November 2023 article “The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather is Wrong,” concluding from this (mis)reading of the scientific literature that “[i]nequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.” This is pure blank slate pablum that if true would put an end to all women’s sports.
As if all this were not problematic enough for a magazine with the word “scientific” in its title, the editors threw their weight behind the youth gender medicine and trans lobby, claiming that gender-affirming care for trans kids is good health care (it isn’t), that “rapid onset gender dysphoria” is not a thing (it most certainly is), and that biological sex is on a spectrum (it is binary). Numerous scientists published rebuttals of these dubious claims, including the acclaimed evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins11 and the evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, who has tracked this subject for years.12
Does anyone actually believe such claptrap? Obviously some do, and the fervor of their woke faith only makes them all the more able to convince themselves (and others of parallel ideological stripes) of the truth of claims that nearly everyone else can see have little-to-no contact with reality. It is also possible that the majority of people do not believe any of this woke ideology, but out of fear of cancel culture and being accused of bigotry and transphobia keep their mouths shut, leading to pluralistic ignorance, in which each individual is under the illusion that everyone else believes it, even though most people do not. That calls forth the importance of speaking truth to power.
The infiltration of woke ideology into the sciences is only the thin end of the wedge splitting academia into warring factions, the topic of Part III of this series on why I am no longer woke.
Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc,, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due. His latest book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is: Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Matters, to be published in 2025.
References
Remix News Staff. 2022. “How Woke Gatekeepers Control Western Education.” RemixNews, Feb. 25.
Krauss, Lawrence. 2022. “Physics Education: The Hordes Are at the Gates.” Critical Mass, April 11.
Krauss, Lawrence. 2022. “Now Even Science Grants Must Bow to ‘Equity and Inclusion’.” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 12.
Krylov, Anna. 2024. “Merit-Based Science is Effect and Fair: How Such a Banal Idea Has Become Controversial.” YouTube.
Coyne, Jerry A. and Luana S. Maroja. 2023. “The Ideological Subversion of Biology.” Skeptical Inquirer, July/August.
Weiss, Elizabeth. 2024. “The New Archaeology Wars: How Cancel Culture and Identity Politics Have Corrupted Science.” Skeptic, Vol. 29, No. 2.
Shermer, Michael. 2021. “Scientific American Goes Woke.” Skeptic, Nov. 17.
Shermer, Michael. 2024. “An Unscientific American.” Quillette, Nov. 21.
Perry, Mark J. 2020. “Women Earned Majority of Doctoral Degrees in 2019 for 11th Straight Year and Outnumber Men in Grad School 141 to 100.” AEI, Oct. 15.
Shermer, Michael. 2022. “Was the Great Scientist E. O. Wilson a Racist? No!” Skeptic, April 27.
Dawkins, Richard. 2024. “Race is a Spectrum. Sex is Pretty Damn Binary.” Quillette, Sept. 6.
Wright, Colin. 2024. “Understanding the Sex Binary.” Reality’s Last Stand, Aug. 4.
Thank you for this very interesting analysis. As a lifelong academic (my PhD is in biological psychology), my opinion is that much of this is driven by arrogance and intellectual laziness. It's much easier to teach one's political/social points of view about science than to teach the science itself. And it's much easier to get student buy-in when you're simply making things up. I saw the roots of this at The University of Chicago when I was a graduate student in the late 1980's, and I see it now in some of my younger students. It takes no intellectual acumen or effort to concoct a wild story about whiteboards. So, of course it is appealing to do so if you garner accolades. Oddly, I see part of the solution tied to reinforcing academic standards, and having the honesty to call out ridiculousness when it appears (as we do on our Substacks).. Thank you again. Sincerely, Frederick
"One wonders what the authors make of “blackboards”." Obviously, the switch from blackboards to whiteboards in classrooms was a reaction to the civil rights movement and attempt to reassert white supremacy in the classroom. OBVIOUSLY.