I have an unfortunate history with CFI and The Skeptical Inquirer. I ought to be aligned with the principles of skepticism, but too often organized skepticism has been this stodgy, hidebound dinosaur that is more interested in conserving the privileges of a narrow group of people than in actually implementing productive change. So I abandoned it, writing this in 2011.
[Diversity] has long been an issue with the skeptical movement. I used to subscribe to the Skeptical Inquirer, a very good magazine with well-written and substantive articles on skeptical issues, but I let my subscription lapse. It was a strange thing that prompted it; several years ago, there was an issue lauding the leaders of the skeptical movement, and it had a nice line drawing of four or five of these Big Names on the cover: and every one was white, male, and over 70 years old. I looked at it, and I wasn’t mad or outraged — every one of them was a smart guy who deserved recognition — but I saw it, sighed, and felt that not only was this incredibly boring, but that organized skepticism was dead if it was going to turn into a gerontocracy. I didn’t let my subscription lapse in protest, but out of lack of motivation.
Then, a few years ago, they fired Kavin Senapathy, a huge self-own. I commented on that:
That refusal to deal with the biggest social struggles of our time is what has always left me infuriated with the skeptic movement — oh, sure, let’s debunk ghosts and chupacabras and UFOs, but racist and misogynist beliefs are just too hard. They love the magic tricks and tests of dowsing, but eugenics? No one in organized skepticism seems to be smart enough to cope with that.
Merging with the Richard Dawkins Foundation didn’t help, and actually made it worse.
Kavin revealed some rather obvious inside information:
Two years ago, in an inept attempt to address the issue, CFI published a special issue of Skeptical Inquirer: “A Skeptic’s Guide to Racism.” The issue, penned exclusively by white men, demonstrated CFI leadership’s woefully shallow grasp of how racism works. In an article on “critical thinking approaches to confronting racism,” the magazine’s deputy editor, Benjamin Radford, referenced the view of evolutionary psychologist and author Steven Pinker that “the overall historical trends for humanity are encouraging”— a view that has been criticized as glossing over the plights of the most marginalized people. Radford’s contribution to the special issue also seemed to ignore the elephant in CFI’s room: He made not even a passing mention of the staggering racial disparities within his own organization — and within the very pages of the publication he was writing for.
You get the idea. It’s the whitest, most oblivious skeptical organization, although Shermer’s group is competing well with that status. Worse, they aren’t at all interested in broadening their perspectives and getting better. I publicly announced my departure from the organized skepticism movement over these sorts of differences years ago.
Well, now we have achieved the merger of skepticism with the aggrieved privileged conservative crowd. The Skeptical Inquirer has published an article by Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja titled The Ideological Subversion of Biology, which is full of bogus nonsense about how the Progressive Left is strangling science. It’s the same silly crap as that loony In Defense of Merit in Science paper that Coyne coauthored a while ago, and it’s a perfect fit for the Inquirer.
The title is an interesting choice — it’s a blatant call-back to anti-communist hysteria, and will strike a chord with Republicans and MAGAts all across the country. Once upon a time, it was the kind of thing the John Birch Society or Lyndon LaRouche would publish.
It’s really bad. Jerry Coyne has successfully transitioned from respected senior scientist to angry, bitter crank finding common cause with the worst right-wing academic grifters. It’s sad to see.
I’m working on a response to it. Coyne has written a long gish gallop of a paper, so it’s going to take a while, and another thing that’s not helping is that I’m flying off to a 4-day conference this weekend. I’ve also written to the Skeptical Inquirer asking if they’d be interested in publishing a response — I kind of doubt that they will, given their ideological predilections and the fact that they published a load of nonsense in the first place.
Stay tuned. With a few long days at the computer, I might finish a response before my flight on Sunday.
So you are not concerned about your precious bodily fluids?
If they are willing to publish dreck, why turn up their nose at more?
Barking up the same tree: Robert Reich has a new piece up about Trump™’s new/old focus on redbaiting.
Soo… do this crowd also think Eisenhower was a commie agent?
The John Birch dudes never retracted their claim.
Really looking forward to your response.
I used to be a regular over at his website/blog. WTF happened to that guy?
Always a bad sign.
Pinker is a hack.
He takes two data points, the stone age and the space age, draws a line and says see, “things are getting better.”
This is true but trivial.
.1. There were and are a lot of zig zags in that line.
A lot of the time, things are getting worse and it is only on long time scales that things are getting better.
A few examples.
Ask the Syrians, Rohingyas, or Ukrainians if things are getting better. The number of refugees in the world has hit an all time high at 89 million people and going up steadily. We see some of them on our Southern border.
” The wealth gap between America’s richest and poorer families more than doubled from 1989 to 2016, according to a recent analysis by the Center.”
Economic inequality in the USA has been steadily increasing and housing prices in many places are unaffordable for most people.
Roe versus Wade was overturned in a huge setback for the women majority of the US population.
.2. Pinker’s claim also ignores cause and effect.
Things haven’t been getting better since the stone age.
Large numbers of people, many of whom were opposed by…large numbers of people have been making things better since the stone age.
It has taken a lot of brave and talented people to get where we are now.
Guys like Pinker and Jerry Coyne are on the wrong side and trying to make things worse, not better.
raven @7: Heck, the US is seeing a refugee crisis within its borders as large numbers of trans people and their families flee persecution by red states.
It’s a strawperson.
There is a War on Science and we see it everyday as well as the victims.
It’s been going on since the Bush II administration. It’s been said that the War on Science was the only war that George Bush won.
A few examples.
.1. Evolution.
The creationists have been attacking the Theory of Evolution since 1865 with some success.
It’s de facto not taught in a lot of grade and secondary schools because the teachers are either creationists or just don’t want to deal with death threats and trouble.
.2. Climate change.
There is big money on pretending climate change isn’t happening.
And it is always easier to do nothing than prepare for the future.
.3. Trans people.
The fundie xians/right wingnuts have been busy inventing imaginary diseases for Trans people such as Rapid Onset Gender Disorder and making up reasons to persecute them and deny children and adults medical care.
.4. Abortion.
The forced birthers/female slavers have a long list of lies about the harms of abortion, fertility, cancer, insanity, etc..
Their latest is just ignoring all the pregnancies that go wrong and end up making women very sick or killing them because they can’t terminate a failing pregnancy in time.
.4. Covid-19 virus deniers and Antivaxxers.
This was a serious problem during the latest pandemic.
It’s estimated that 330,000 US Antivaxxers died from the Covid-19 virus.
There is a War on Science but it is being fought by the right wingnuts, not Progressives.
How long until we dare to confront the real problem: Drag Queens in Science?
The Inquirer got back to me — they offer 1500 words of space to reply to a 9100 word article, and Coyne would be given the opportunity to reply to that. They’re stacking the deck as much as they can.
I only skimmed beginning but in my opinion, the best way to attack is to point out how Coyne’s claim resembles creationists and other anti-science people whose positions science has refuted. They also claim a great conspiracy and a great coordination between different departments, universities, and countries to push out the “honest” scientists, i.e., those who agree with them. And here, Coyne is exactly doing the same thing:
Right, so the “humanities” took over all STEM fields, and the US government (and probably all the other governments too, I guess) and destroyed science and kicked out anyone who disagreed. Yeah right. Fucking clown.
@ 11
Did you point that out to them?
Also, for anyone lazy enough to click on the Coyne’s dumbass article, I’ll copy/paste the main bulletin points. They complain about the following. They are all so fucking tedious.
Yeah, they kind of ran out of material after #5 but they still had hundreds of lines to fill so they had to pull something from somewhere.
Re: Coyne #1. “All practical purposes” is garbage. Whose practical purposes? Each individual person. A misogynist’s practical purposes are very different.
You don’t get to deny people whose practical reality involves differences “because fewer”. I like competent language that includes everyone. My practical purposes shouldn’t be irrationally tracking genitals.
Who says all behavioral and phycological differences are generated by society? I believe most of them and await more data while I respond to people who need innate differences without reasons.
In other words, science…has become heavily tainted with politics, as “progressive social justice” elbows aside our real job: finding truth.
Which “truth,” SPECIFICALLY, has science allegedly been elbowed out of finding?
And when you have maternal trauma associated epigenetic marks in newborns society IS biology. The death of a loved one was on the stressor list so it doesn’t have to be physical. “Maybe the next difference down will hold my assumption”.
Well, given that Coyne can’t wipe his ass without finding out how Richard Dawkins does it first, he probably just sheepily followed the Dawk into the depths.
This is true and many or most relevant scientists in related fields will agree with this.
In fact, there was an article in Science magazine a few years ago that said exactly this.
The problem with evo-psych that they never dealt with is that human behavior is very plastic and variable.
Evo-psych has never been able to prove that human differences aren’t due to culture and socialization rather than genetics.
They’ve given up even trying and are still using white American college students as representative of 8 billion humans on the planet.
This is a strawperson.
There aren’t too many people who claim this and I certainly don’t know any scientists off hand who agree with this.
By way of contrast, there are huge numbers of people who claim that all behavioral, psychological, and sociological differences between human males and females are due to genetics and god’s will.
What we actually see in differences is just a snapshot of one moment in our society’s history.
It used to be thought not so long ago that women were too stupid and delicate to got to college. My friend in the 1970s was told she shouldn’t be in a science class at college because she was pregnant.
Today in the USA, the majority of college graduates are…female.
Another strawperson and it is also just wrong. Intersexes exist.
It’s also irrelevant and Coyne is being highly dishonest here.
This is an attack on Trans people.
The issue isn’t that sex is binary.
The issue is that sex assigned at birth (AMAB or AFAB) for some people doesn’t match their gender identity. Sex and gender are two different variables that usually line up but not always.
Coyne knows this and just ignores it because he is ideologically driven.
Another strawperson.
Race and ethnicity are both.
There is a biological basis but it isn’t all that sharp and clear between different groups.
And there is a huge amount of social contruction piled on top of race and ethnicity which often overwhelms any scientific and biological meaning.
It wasn’t so long ago in the USA that Slavs, Italians, and Irish were considered low class and inferior. These days who cares? Our president, Biden, is an Irish Catholic.
Strawperson.
They aren’t equivalent they are additive.
Just my answers without spending a lot of time on them and I’m sure people can find things to disagree with so feel free.
This is all boring right wingnut claims that we’ve seen over and over again.
I’ve been reading Coyne’s blog for a decade now. Still do, although now when I click over to it I’m thinking to myself ‘Wonder what’s up Jerry’s bum today?’. His book Why Evolution is True is a wonderful layman’s introduction to evolution. But that was 15 years ago. It has been sad to watch his descent into MAGA madness.
In addition to his anti-woke caterwauling, he has developed a sick obsession with Trans people in sports and their medical care, a racist tinged loathing for Kamala Harris, his insistence that the looted mortal remains Native American are rightfully the property of academia, and worst of all, his knee-jerk support for the murderous apartheid policies of Israeli Zionism.
Mr. Coyne is just another in a long list of smart, white, wealthy and mostly middle aged men who believe their past accomplishments qualifies them to forcefully opine on subjects far outside their area of expertise. Jerry doesn’t know shit about Trans people and I doubt he even has met one but that doesn’t stop him from suggesting they are somehow lesser human beings. And that coming from a self-identified secular Jew.
Look, Jerry is not a complete bore but I wish he’d stick to evolution, duck ranching and cat memes.
Coyne has had a recent obsession with the Maori ways of knowing recently that I’ve ignored. His most recent treatment of otherkins or furries (at first) made me think I should stop reading his blog altogether.
I stopped a decade ago.
One day, I just asked myself, “Why am I wasting time reading this drivel.” and didn’t have a good answer.
Also, yeah, he was a good scientist at one time and I read his book. I didn’t care to watch his descent into MAGAdom.
About Pinker, more than all the crankery he’s associated directly or indirectly, I’ll never forget that when Jason Hickel showed that the graphs he (and many others, such as Bill Gates) frequently used were made to mislead people about the actual state of worldwide poverty, he called Hickel a “marxist ideologue” leaving basically every point made by Hickel unanswered.
@P.Z. Myers @11
I think it would still be a good opportunity to focus on how anti-creationist Coyne is now a Gish gallop practitioner and limit the rebuttal to a few claims.
@Matt G @6
Eh. He was always this way(see various criticisms of Coyne by the people who he would call accomodationists/faitheists etc way back when) – We just happened to agree with him on some topics. Personally I realized not all is right when Coynes definition of free speech worked out to the same as Musks “You have the right to say anything,anywhere as long as I agree with it!” – culminating with an open letter to Josh Rosenau’s employer for what he used to write on his personal blog!
@luarian:
Yeah, I used to read his blog a lot. Even after I got banned a few times. His evolution posts were very good, I love cats and I enjoyed the cat memes and I also enjoyed his taste in movies (sorry PZ but your taste in movies, let’s say is not on par). I honestly miss the old days when the most insufferable thing about Jerry Coyne was his ridiculous obsession with the overrated British boy band Beatles.
@25- lotharloo
He seems to think good music stopped being made after the 60s. Fits with his “off my lawn” intergenerational biases shared with fellow Boomer Bill Maher, who he cites quite often. He’s really elitist, which may go hand in hand with the private school thing. He has a hated word list he updates periodically. Weird tropes.
And every time free speech comes up he reflexively touts University of Chicago principles and some Kalven Report. You can set your watch by it.
I’m with Nancy in looking forward to your longer rebuttal, PZ.
lotharloo @25:
Thanks, I needed a good laugh today.
Yeah, I’m getting big “old man yells at cloud” energy from Coyne these days. This Skeptical Inquirer article is nothing more than a greatest hits compilation of the clouds he’s been yelling at. One thing about the print edition. (Yeah, I still subscribe.) It’s got lots and lots of references, you know, because obviously the more references you cite, the righter you are.
Kinda reminds me of antivaxxers. Or creationists.
They chose the “subversion of biology” specifically to rekindle eugenics and free them up to merge with a better funded, more influential organization, the KKK.
Once that’s established, they’ll be in position to leverage that merger to take over the neonazis organizational umbrella.
I say that we stick them and the far right onto an abandoned island. I’ll convince the navy to sink the island.
Like. I just don’t get it. It’s got to be some preconceived ideological commitment. Coyne starts by saying “sex is a binary”, and then gives an example of how it’s not a binary (intersex persons). Shouldn’t that be demolishing to his own argument? Sigh. Then I read the part where he complains about “assigned male at birth’, and I contrast that against his definition of sex that relies apparently entirely and solely on stuff directly relating gamete production, and my first thought it “what about women with androgen insensitivity syndrome”? These women are “biologically male”, and they are also “assigned female at birth”. Clearly “assigned female at birth” is a useful term. Yet Coyne pretends that it is not. I don’t understand. Then there’s the whole issue of human chimeras which further destroys any pretense of strict dichotomy.
I wouldn’t bother. It’s a rigged game. Just let ‘er rip on the blog, and then dare them to tack on a link to the rebuttal after the article online. That’s what I’m thinking about doing. I can comment pretty well on 5/6 of the points. (I don’t feel knowledgeable enough about evolutionary psychology to opine much on the topic, and I do actually tend to agree that a lot of it is bogus, but not for the reasons Coyne claims, more because right wingers have co-opted it as a series of ‘just-so” stories that “explain” and try to maintain the way things are.) I know experts on #1 and #2.
I also like the slickly deceptive slight-of-hand Coyne employee for #5, where he and his coauthor conflate ethnicity with race and then use evidence addressing the effects of ethnicity on human health as a stand-in for race to argue that race is biological.
That’s what I’m thinking. 1500 words is not enough, especially if it just triggers them to let Coyne spew even more bullshit.
@8: “Heck, the US is seeing a refugee crisis within its borders as large numbers of trans people and their families flee persecution by red states.”
Also significant numbers of women, not all of them currently pregnant.
” they offer 1500 words of space to reply to a 9100 word article, and Coyne would be given the opportunity to reply to that”
Call your article Part 1
Lead of with how there is lots to respond to, brief point list of the parts, and frame part 1 as a response to a single part.
Your part 1 could link to here and say “full response here as the rag would only allow a limited response in their pages”.
PZ: You could use the 1500 words to give a limited response to only his evo psych section, where he has name-checked you.
@ 32 GerrardOfTitanServer
What you’re reading is motivated reasoning. It’s based in transphobia. Transphobes don’t want trans people to have any validity in society, so they’re ideologically committed to rejecting the idea that sex is a label, or a physical set of changeable body parts. Sex must be envisioned as a fixed, objective, unchangeable attribute (they like the word “immutable”). There must be a clear delineation – no fuzziness – hence strictly two categories. Then a stubborn reality that refuses to fit the model is made to fit by reinterpreting reality to suit the model. I once wrote a parody of transphobes’ ideas about sex and it went like this:
GENDER CRITICAL COLOUR THEORY:
GC: “There are only two colours – red and blue.”
Normal Person: “What? How about green?”
GC: “Green was meant to be blue but something went wrong. Just because blue doesn’t always work perfectly and sometimes looks green, it doesn’t mean it isn’t blue. You should apologise to green for ‘othering’ it by denying it’s blue.”
NP: “Erm… what about orange?”
GC: “*sigh* Orange is organised around being red. Just because it isn’t exactly red doesn’t mean it isn’t organised around being red. Variation within the two categories doesn’t disprove the existence of the categories! Duh.”
NP: “Dare I ask… yellow?”
GC: “Yellow! Now you’re just being completely ridiculous! Hardly anything is yellow! Look around you. Almost everything is not yellow. Yellow is a rare aberration and therefore can be dismissed. Surely you’re not trying to say rare aberrations disprove the existence of the two colours? We’re not throwing out all of science because of the odd banana.”
NP: “Are you feeling okay?”
GC: “I see you’re intent on denying the indisputable scientific fact that colour is binary and immutable, agreed on by all people who understand science. You’ll confuse children with this absurd ‘third colour’ ideology. Now tell me; why do you hate blue?
NP: “Wait, wut? I don’t…”
GC: “STOP TRYING TO ERASE HALF THE COLOURS!”
Being a parody the silliness is exaggerated, but this is exactly the sort of reinterpretation of reality they do to try to make reality fit the ideological model, rather than changing the model to fit reality.
The irony is, even if it were true it wouldn’t invalidate trans people at all. Even if all humans had exactly one set, of a possible two sets, of sexually differentiated characteristics, it wouldn’t in anyway follow that your “sex” is anyone else’s business, or that you can’t live socially like the other “sex”. The only people they’re really harming with their ideological commitment to “binary and immutable sex” are intersex people. It’s this ideology that there are two “correct” presentations of sexed traits, and everything else is an aberration that leads to completely unnecessary genital mutilation of healthy intersex infants to “fix” them. :-(
Silentbob @ 39, I still remember seeing medical reference books that stated outright that intersex infants needed to be assigned and true hermaphrodites also needed to be assigned, as hormonal mixing gave poor survival outcomes.
And when the internet became a thing, I was utterly unable to find a non-retracted study in support of either claim.
As for the colors conversation, I’d part with, “I don’t hate blue, it’s just that blue doesn’t exist, only pink exists, sailor”.
It’s a sheer mystery to me why so many people have insisted that my parents were never married.