There’s a new book out to defend science, titled uncreatively The War on Science, by Lawrence Krauss. The theme is nothing new: I’d recommend instead The War on Science by Shawn Otto, or The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney, both of which are well-researched single-author works that more objectively examine the people and processes that are literally targeting the institutions of science for destruction.
Krauss’s book stands out because it is completely different. Most people discussing the war on science talk about the influence of dark money, or capitalist motivations to sacrifice long term investment for short term profit, or lobby groups that shape the government for personal gain, or the undermining of the educational system to generate an uninformed citizenry. They talk about specific initiatives by special interest groups that are counter to good science. They discuss the malignant influence of reactionary religious organizations.
Not Krauss!
He has gathered 39 contributors, calling them “renowned scientists and scholars,” who are instead petty, entitled whiners who have personal grievances against the social institutions that have alienated them from the mainstream. It’s written by sex pests, racists, bigots, and defenders of genocide. They don’t like the fact that senior scientists are told not to sexually abuse junior faculty and students. They don’t like the fact that people with different ethnic backgrounds hold protests on their campuses. They resent being expected to respect aboriginal peoples in their research. They are horrified that better informed people are rejecting their old bigotries and recognizing that gender is on a spectrum. They all think that Woke is the enemy of science, and that hordes of Leftists have been battering the Ivory Tower to bring it down.
They’re all idiots.
They also have very bad timing. This series of screeds against the evils of the Left was published this summer, after the Right took control of the government and began to literally wreck science in this country, revoking grants, punishing universities, giving control of the NIH and NSF and CDC and NASA to political hacks who began dictating new directions for science, telling libraries what books they’re allowed to stock, deporting scientists and students who weren’t sufficiently “American” for their taste, enabling more religious influence into government, and basically trashing the Constitution. So now we have this book on the shelves screaming about an apocalyptic threat from gay and transgender scientists at a time when far-right conservatives are flexing their muscles and sending troops to university campuses.
Hemant Mehta has summarized multiple reviews of this wrong-headed book, and the defenses of its authors. They recognize that their timing was ludicrously bad, and all of the authors make the same goddamn stupid argument.
We wrote it before Trump was elected again, and we had no idea the Republicans would do this.
Larry Krauss has been an embarrassment for a long time.
That’s no excuse, and if you’re so ignorant you couldn’t see the Right’s agenda, despite the fact that people have been writing about it for decades, then you are in no position to publish a book that so thoroughly misses the point. And they’re still arguing even now that the True Danger is Wokeness, as Trump tears their institutions down around them.
For an example of how pig-headedly idiotic the authors are, Hemant quotes Jerry Coyne.
The book was put together before Trump began his assault on universities by punishing science grantees and by appointing people like RFK Jr. to science positions. I expected that, after this unpredictable bout of executive-branch bullying, there would be some wokesters who adopted a “whataboutery stance,” saying, “This book largely comprises attacks on how the progressive Left wing is eroding science. But Trump is dong much more damage from the Right.” And right now that is indeed the case, but Trump will be gone in a bit over 3 years, and I expect that, when Democrats take over (fingers crossed), the government will cut back strongly on interfering in the funding and production.
The effect of the Right on science, then, will probably be more temporary. In contrast, that from the Left will last a lot longer, for progressive professors who believe in nonsense like a spectrum of sex in animals will teach this nonsense to their students, and thus it will pass among academic generations. We simply cannot sit by and let progressives distort science in the cause of ideology, regardless of what the Right is doing.
(I hope Jerry is enjoying the sight of the National Guard patrolling his campus, the fucking moron.)
Unbelievable.
Hemant has an excellent summary of this abomination of a book.
The War on Science isn’t a defense of reason. It’s a monument to intellectual cowardice. Its authors, armed with petty grievances about pronouns and diversity programs, aimed their intellectual firepower on paper cuts that exist only in their minds while everyone around them is being decapitated. They act like the biggest problems in science involve grad students asking for inclusive policies, professors acknowledging biological complexity, or institutions offering STEM scholarships to underrepresented groups.
To publish such a book now, in the face of deliberate and systemic sabotage from the highest levels of government, is not only ridiculous, it’s malpractice for any half-decent scientist or science communicator. Even Jordan Peterson should be embarrassed—and that’s saying something.
Every page wasted on performative outrage over “wokeness” is a page that could have been used to sound the alarm about the real, ongoing destruction of the scientific world. And given that many of these authors have spent the past few years appealing to right-wing bigots, that could have been extremely useful.
Instead, by pretending that the greatest threat to science comes from progressive inclusion rather than authoritarian arson, Krauss and his allies have given cover to those who would dismantle our research institutions. They’re compiling propaganda for those who want to bury science under the weight of their own ignorance. They are enablers who fiddle with culture war nonsense while the laboratories burn.
Meanwhile, like most of the professors I know, I’ll continue to teach that the development of sex is a complex, gradual process with multiple variations and that gender is a social and psychological process expressed as a continuum, not because of ideology, but because that’s what the evidence says. At least, I’ll do that until I hear the jackboots marching down my hallway and the Republicans shut down my liberal arts university.
For now, though, here is the list of authors of this terrible book, every one a disgrace. Remember them. They aren’t going anywhere, and we should be prepared to publicly shame them at every opportunity.
Dorian Abbot, John Armstrong, Peter Boghossian, Maarten Boudry, Alex Byrne, Nicholas Christakis, Roger Cohen, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Janice Fiamengo, Solveig Gold, Moti Gorin, Karleen Gribble, Carole Hooven, Geoff Horsman, Joshua Katz, Sergiu Klainerman, Lawrence M. Krauss, Anna Krylov, Luana Maroja, Christian Ott, Bruce Pardy, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Richard Redding, Arthur Rousseau, Gad Saad, Sally Satel, Lauren Schwartz, Alan Sokal, Allesandro Strumia, Judith Suissa, Alice Sullivan, Jay Tanzman, Abigail Thompson, Amy Wax, Elizabeth Weiss, Frances Widdowson
Fortunately, I don’t recognize a lot of names of the authors.
Unfortunately, I do recognize some of them.
Yeah, it is the worst of scientists we can produce.
Jordan Peterson isn’t a scientist. He is an uber creep.
His main message is that women are icky and it is OK to hate them.
Niall Ferguson. idiot. He isn’t a scientist either, some sort of political writer. He defended the Iraq war long after it was obviously a complete waste of 2 trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives.
Anna Krylov Russian racist at USC Right wingnut anti-DEI
Amy Wax Not a scientists either. Racist sanctioned by UPenn.
Alex Byrne. Trans hater and bigot at MIT. Not a scientist either.
Boghassian, Pinker, Dawkins, Coyne, Famous for being bigots and creeps.
Most of these authors don’t seem to be scientists at all.
This isn’t a book about the War on Science which is a real thing that American science is currently losing big time with Trump as president and RFK jr. in charge of NIH, CDC, FDA, NSF etc. from being head of HHS.
It’s a book mostly about how racists, haters, and bigots can’t be open racists, bigots, and haters in academia today.
That is a good thing, deal with it snowflakes.
“It was written before Trump but in fact we added some addenda on this”
Addenda 25
Krauss’ observation that the attack on Science by the Trump Gang is “temporary” is both callous and naive, bordering on utterly stupid.
One case in point that I know about is a PhD student in her third year of fieldwork having her funds frozen in March. Had to cancel the season. Nothing temporary. No fieldwork. Fortunately, her advisor thinks she has enough material to cobble together a dissertation but it’s less than she planned to do. She’s one of thousands who were cut off at the knees.
And, while we’re at it, let’s not just blame the Heritage Foundation and Stephen Miller for this debacle. It’s every politician and government official cowering in their caves afraid to even speak up. They all need to get effed!
Yeah, Jordan Peterson is such a great scientific mind. Goes to Russia to treat his substance abuse problems by weird crankery instead of methods known to work reasonably well, and advocates an all meat diet because his daughter decided it was a cure all. And is only well known because he decided to lie about the extension of protections for trans and nonbinary people in the Canadian Human Rights Act. “They’re gonna throw me in jail for refusing to call Jack Jill!” Because the right loves fake martyrs.
The book was put together before Trump began his assault on universities by punishing science grantees and by appointing people like RFK Jr. to science positions…
That’s exactly what I guessed/predicted when PZ first posted about this rubbish: they thought Trump would lose, so their whinery could sound plausible without being overshadowed by a fascist takeover.
“…But Trump is doing much more damage from the Right.” And right now that is indeed the case, but Trump will be gone in a bit over 3 years, and I expect that, when Democrats take over (fingers crossed)…
How much do you wanna bet most or all of these morons VOTED for Trump (“fingers crossed” of course), thinking/hoping he’d lose, just to “own the libs” or whatever? Like a lot of Trump apologists, they all knew he was bad news from day one, but voted for him anyway because they hated “The Left” so much more and thought/hoped someone else would defeat Trump for them.
The effect of the Right on science, then, will probably be more temporary…
No one who says this gets to pretend they’re even responsible adults, let alone honest scientists or science-advocates. The American far right (among others of course) have been relentlessly and insanely attacking science, education, reason, secularism and academics at least since the end of WW-II! Have these pig-headed idiots never heard of the John Birch Society? Joe McCarthy? Fundamentalists? Creationists? Jerry Falwell? None of this started with Trump, and it won’t end with him either. There’s nothing “temporary” about this.
My newest piece on the two-pronged War on Science just appeared in Reason Magazine.
The most charitable response I can offer to this is “HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW!” Was that libertarian rag the only one that would take his BS? They don’t even pretend to be a “scientific” publication. Even libertarians know that’s not considered a credible source on anything. Just another indicator of how low and unserious that whole lot are.
I realise that my comments tend somewhat to the center (and are probably mostly somewhat lukewarm), but the flock of authors of the book is not entirely uniform. There are at least two authors of whom I would assert with reasonable confidence that they have not engaged in sexual misconduct.
In the end, Erwin Schrödinger was openly pedophile. We can rage against it all we want, but very many people are unethical to some degree and in some respects. It is a shame. But groping is something different from fully-fledged rape, which is something your president has been accused of.
In the end, it is a question of how much wickedness one is willing to tolerate, and who should be the most important target of any shaming. And I don’t know of a certain way to obtain an answer to these questions.
drdrdrdrdralhazeneuler: We don’t have to tolerate ANY wickedness from people who have nothing decent to offer and have been proven to be bigoted liars and idiots.
“Trump will be gone in a bit over 3 years, and I expect that, when Democrats take over (fingers crossed), the government will cut back strongly on interfering in the funding and production.”
Don’t bet on it.
It is both stupid and wrong. You don’t have to be very smart to figure that out.
Krauss failed anyway.
It takes many years and decades to build a world class scientific community.
With a lot of effort, all that can be destroyed in a few months.
It takes 5 years to get a Ph.D. and then a postdoc or two of 2 years to even get to beginning scientist. When science is defunded and attacked that pipeline of new scientists is destroyed and people are going to think long and hard about science as a career after all that.
That is what happened in the old Soviet Union with Lysenkoism.
They destroyed Mendelian genetics based on crackpot theories. Some of their most prominent geneticists ended up dead in the Gulag camps.
Soviety agriculture never worked well and they periodically had famines that killed millions. The Chinese also adopted Lysenkoism and had a famine that killed 20 million people.
Lysenkoism eventually joined the Flat Earth and Supply Side Economics.
Soviet agriculture got better but never really recovered from their academic incompetence.
I saw it myself once when a world class biotech company was taken over by corporate style management.
They couldn’t figure out what all those weird people wearing T shirts and tennis shoes were for so they got rid of them, in the order of best and brightest first.
Within two years the company started to collapse because their research had more or less stopped.
The BOD had an emergency meeting, fired the president for cause.
They tried to rebuild, it took 5 or so years, but they never got back to where they were and eventually got bought out for not a lot of money considering.
If this quote of Lawrence Krauss (from The War on Science) is any indicator of the level of knowledge these jokers have of the “postmodernist” bogey, we aren’t dealing with the sharpest knives in the drawer here:
Coyne doesn’t seem to refer much to “critical theory” any more on his blog but he has no idea what he’s babbling on about when he does. His buddy Pinker makes a mess out a quote of Adorno and Horkheimer in Enlightenment Now either to deliberately misrepresent them or unintentionally signal his own ignorance.
Bullshit cultural warrior propaganda.
I’m a little surprised Sabine Hosenfelder wasn’t on that list of contributors. And so much for Krauss’s reputation as a futurist; “We wrote it before Trump was elected again, and we had no idea the Republicans would do this.”
How could anyone with two functionaing brain cells to rub together not see that the Republicans, who have been screaming for the last decade exactly what they want to do, would do this?
@11 Artor:
“As a scientist, I always judge things on empirical evidence and [Jeffrey Epstein] always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen [anyone younger], so as a scientist, my presumption is whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.” —Lawrence Krauss
Weird to read that 2011 Skepchick post, where Krauss is making excuses for Epstein. Who know that, only a few years later, he’d be revealed as a bit of a predatory creep himself? And that was a few months pre-Elevatorgate, I believe. Now it seems like the beginning of the Great Rift. Lots of water has flowed under that bridge in the last 14 years.
“And Lawrence fiddled about political correctness and pronouns as the academia was burned by fascism”
(Yeah, I know its a Christian lie about Nero but I like the evocative language)
Once you understand their pov, their claim that “Trump temporary, left permanent damage” makes sense because they don’t actually care about science what they want is going back to the good old days of men’s club science without having to worry about toxic work environment or non-white people. And on this regard, they are right that there’s no going back there.
drdrdrdrdralhazeneuler@6: “In the end, it is a question of how much wickedness one is willing to tolerate…”
Not at all. Bad behaviour is a matter for institutional standards and, in the worst cases, criminal law. Yes, Schrodinger’s sexual behaviour was unforgiveable, but nobody is demanding a retraction of Schrodinger’s equation. Heisenberg helped the German war effort. Nobody wants to repeal the HUP. Shockley was a flaming racial bigot. Nobody is suggesting we stop using transistors.
The problem with this rogue’s gallery of writers is that they all have track records of misrepresenting science, and in many cases, to defend sexual misconduct and various forms of bigotry.
And as for Krauss’s position, I would like to know why so many scientists are leftists if leftism is antagonistic to science. And I would be interested to learn examples of any science department, institution, research program, or PhD thesis torpedoed by the tyranny of postmodernists in academia.
I own a copy of Shawn Otto’s book and couldn’t help but notice that Krauss wrote an introduction to it. Apparently he must not have noticed his own previous writing when he helped edit the new book of the same name.