Scientific American Magazine Has Gone ‘Woke’
“the virus of progressive wokeness”
Science should not be politicized, but that’s just what’s happening in many cases. Nicholas Wade calls out the once esteemed magazine Scientific American for bowing to the progressive agenda.
He writes at City Journal:
The New Lysenkoism
A strange thing is happening to the venerable magazine Scientific American. It has decided to kick its science-loving readers in the teeth and embrace a modern equivalent of Lysenkoism—the doctrine that required Soviet biologists to ignore evolution and the genetics of plants.
The great biologist Edward O. Wilson died on December 26. Few readers of Scientific American could be unaware of Wilson’s towering contributions to biology and conservation, or of his rare gifts as a synthesizer and writer. They surely didn’t expect that the oeuvre of this globally renowned scientist would be labeled by Scientific American, just three days after his death, as “built on racist ideas.”
Why would the editor of the magazine, Laura Helmuth, take it into her head to insult almost everything her readers believe in? The sad truth is that she, like some editors of more important scientific journals, has been infected by a taste-destroying, judgment-paralyzing malady: the virus of progressive wokeness.
The article she ran, by a junior academic at UC San Francisco, Monica McLemore (who holds a Ph.D. in nursing science), asserts that Wilson’s “racist ideas” come from his book Sociobiology, which supported “the notion that differences among humans could be explained by genetics, inheritance and other biological mechanisms.”
The assertion reflects the foundation on which woke theory is built: everyone is the same, with no genetic differences between sexes or races. By rejecting genetics, adherents can dismiss the notion that people might have different innate talents and earn different rewards. The theory instead attributes any deviation from equality, whether in occupations or income, to discrimination. At one blow, the hope of a merit-rewarding society is destroyed, to be replaced by a distribution of wealth according to wokeist rules.
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Comments
I gave up my subscription to Scientific American thirty years ago, when they went all in on the Global Warming lie.
That they are even worse now is irrelevant. As far as I’m concerned, they had no credibility left to lose.
You and me, both.
I gave up about the same time because more and more content was written by “Science” Explainers rather that scientists. The final, never read another SA article was when they went “all in” on Obamacare and most of that content was Woke BS.
I particularly enjoyed their appeal to all-out tyranny as a Final Solution to the Globular Warmening issue:
“To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers. There would have to be consideration of some way of embracing head-in-the-cloud answers to social problems that are usually dismissed by policymakers as academic naivete. In principle, species-wide alteration in basic human behaviors would be a sine qua non, but that kind of pronouncement also profoundly strains credibility in the chaos of the political sphere.”
Heh they were right. To make the world go as it has, you need Clown World. Some people probably read that and concluded it could never happen. Others saw it as a recipe.
I can’t remember exactly when I cancelled my subscription, but I had first subscribed in high school and this was decades later. It was when they published this Global Warming themed issue with the sub-text “Science Defends Itself Against the Skeptical Environmentalist.” Oh, so now you guys are officially “science” and everybody else is chopped liver. It was a total piece-of-shit hatchet job on Bjorn Lundberg. They had been pulling this sort of crap for a while, but that was the last straw. I never read another issue. If it’s worse now, then I guess I didn’t miss anything of value since then.
Nature/nurture has never been a lopsided debate…the fun of it was in the spirit of hashing out the respective contributions of each and knowing that it would settle somewhere in the middle.
EO Wilson saw that and didn’t disagree, but these idiots want to try and tell you to ignore one side in the name of “social progress”.
I will concede that humans and species with longer lifespans and low reproductive capacities do have a greater effect of nurture than other species but that’s only because natural evolution (aka “nature”) occurs more slowly in these species. It’s definitely still there and plays a huge role! On the other hand, if you follow insects, they are almost all driven by selective mechanisms of inheritance because of their short lifespans and high reproductive capacities.
Also, I don’t know that I would call this magazine “venerable”.
It was always consumer fluff on science, which served a role for communication with the public. However, it was always highly vulnerable to subversion because of its lack of primary literature and hard looks at data.
Vulnerable is just a four syllable word for “old”.
Venerable ^^
50 or 60 years ago it wasn’t fluff, and original journal articles weren’t easily available online either. Nor was it particularly leftist.
That has been changing for a long time though. If you’re a younger guy, you don’t remember when SA was better.
She got her degree from UCBerkley.
Any questions? {Sigh}
I don’t know how “esteemed” Scientific American every really was. Outside of occasionally producing some useful illustrations on interesting scientific points, its readership was primarily on a non-academic level. Researchers primarily stick to peer-reviewed journals (when they were still interested in real science and not agenda-driven crap) for serious scholarship.
Scientific American now is owned by a German media conglomerate that puts its Eurosocialist agenda into every facet of what it does, and the publication appeals directly to mindless leftists who like to wear the leftist “smart glasses” and appear intellectual. In fact, the Scientific American readership is primarily ineffectual, vague and political automatons who know nothing of the scientific method, let alone the fundamental idea that science is never “settled”.
In the days before the internet and online access to academic journals, SA had some better readers. My father, a PhD chemist, got it at home. I learned about cellular automata there (the game of Life) in John Conway’s math column, which was good the other months too. A couple decades later I saw this phrase “cellular automata” and said hey I played with that idea!
I’ll confess I used to read it a lot as an undergrad! Always had the best cover art and illustrations. Couldn’t pass by it in the library without thumbing through it to see if there were anything interesting. Undergrad access to some of the more arcane journals was tough, and there was no internet back then—just reams of dead trees and hopes that you could find something. Today’s undergrads would look in shock and horror at a card catalog.