I wish people would stop running to Richard Dawkins for quotes defending regressive policies in science. He has nothing worthy to add, and it just damages his reputation more. Leave him in peace, to fade away gracefully.
His latest contretemps is to accuse the journal Nature of abandoning science for social justice
. He provided no evidence that Nature was compromising science.
A leading scientific journal has defended its efforts to boost the diversity of researchers cited in its pages after an academic accused it of abandoning science to pursue a “social justice agenda”.
The criticism of Springer Nature group, which publishes the journal, was made by Anna Krylov, an American professor who has been a supporter of President Trump’s drive to stop American universities from promoting diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) in their admissions policies.
Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist, backed Krylov and said that too many journals were “favouring authors because of their identity group rather than the excellence and importance of their science”.
Krylov has a prestigious position at USC and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She’s also a crank. She wrote an atrocious article equating soap companies using inclusive language in their advertising to Soviet-style purging of history, which was much loved by the right-wing opponents of DEI. Her latest criticism is even more absurd and contrived.
Krylov, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California (USC), said she had been invited to act as a peer-reviewer — a scientist asked to provide independent scrutiny — of a study being published in the journal Nature Communications.
In an open letter to bosses at Springer Nature, she said the topic was “within my field of expertise” and that she would “normally welcome the opportunity”, but asked if she had been contacted “because of my expertise in the subject matter or because of my reproductive organs”.
Wait, what? She’s highly qualified, she has expertise in the field, and her response to a routine request to review a paper is to ask if it’s because she has ovaries? The request says nothing about her sex, but is all about her skills, and she is reaching ridiculously hard to take offense. I would suggest that maybe her imposter syndrome has grown massive and malignant, but I think it more likely that she has found an angle that gets her a lot of attention. Either way, it’s a ridiculous complaint.
And look — she gets support from Richard Dawkins!
Reposting Krylov’s letter on X, Dawkins said: “Nature used to be the world’s most prestigious science journals”, but claimed it was now among many who placed emphasis on the background of authors rather than only on “the excellence … of their science”.
Nature is still among the world’s most prestigious science journals, and he has not shown in this complaint that the excellence of their science has diminished.
Unless…
Maybe he thinks Anna Krylov is such a poor scientist that he’s dismayed that she was asked to review a paper? That asking Anna Krylov to review a paper is evidence that Nature is scraping the bottom of the barrel nowadays? This could be a devious insult, you know.
Nah, near as I can tell, Krylov is an extremely well qualified chemist who is just afflicted with a petty and unjustified need to find offense in everything.
Once upon a time, Anna Krylov would have been unable to get a job in academia, and would have been discouraged from getting a college degree, let alone a Ph.D., and things have changed to the point where universities are doing their best to not discriminate against women or minorities (but not always succeeding). Now she wants to block progress in dismantling barriers, for some unfathomable reason, to the point she’s inventing slights against her career. It’s pretty bad when recognition that you’re a good scientist is used as evidence that scientific skills are being deprecated.
The obvious question here is: Why isn’t she at home making sammiches for her man?
Sounds like a case of DEI for me, but not for thee.
It looks to me like Krylov has fallen into the same “zero-sum” thinking that afflicts pretty much all right-wing thinking. “There’s only so much ‘X’ so I’d better make sure I and my tribe get theirs first—you can squabble over the leavings.”
There’s only so much wealth, or housing, or healthcare, or education, or food security, or anything else to go around, they think. And these resources have gone to my group first for as long as I’m aware, which confirms the feeling that my group is entitled that way. So let’s as a society arrange the power structures to keep it that way.
I even call it that for shorthand: “I got mine!”
(But on this website, I suppose I’m preaching to the choir. Moving on!)
In her case, there’s only so much academic prestige to go around, she thinks, so if it’s all used up inviting other reviewers to look at other papers for other journals, then for Nature Communications to invite her to review a paper must mean she’s a “DEI hire.” It’s kind of sad, in a way. Her own self-worth is so battered that she can’t accept the honor of being a peer reviewer—there must be something else to it.
It is worse than that.
Anna Krylov forgot to have children.
She is part of the problem that is destroying the white race by working for the Great Replacement. (This is sarcasm for anyone who doesn’t know how the GOP and fundie xians think.)
It gets worse from there.
She is also a foreigner, an immigrant. From the commie place, the old USSR.
Someone needs to turn her over to ICE.
Hmmm, well she is white. If she can get sun burned, they might let her stay.
Yeah, Anna Krylov is a crackpot.
If it wasn’t for liberals and Progressives, she wouldn’t have a career in science. She would be a second class citizen working a limited number of jobs. I don’t know, if she can type she could be a secretary.
It looks like Anna Krylov is desperately searching for some evidence that she is being discriminated against.
That she was asked to review a paper isn’t any sort of evidence whatsoever that this is the case. It is actually evidence that she in fact, isn’t being discriminated against.
Anna Krylov is also apparently Jewish. She was born in the USSR and gained citizenship in Israel. The Law of Return in Israel grants automatic citizenship to Jews.
If she really wants to complain about persecution, there is some real persecution in the USA to watch out for.
Antisemitism in general and the Nazis and white supremacists in particular are gaining power and influence in the Trump regime. Last week, one of Trump’s appointees had to withdraw his nomination when it was discovered he was a real fan…of the Nazis.
The soviets weren’t exactly fans of free markets.
@vinnievidivici:
The usual British expression for that sort of attitude is “I’m all right, Jack!” which is all about that sort of smug selfish satisfaction and not caring whether or not anybody else is doing well.
There was a 1959 film by that title that was basically a satire involving factory management deliberately trying to create a labour dispute and strike situation so that the other factories owned by the same cartel could jack up prices. (It was one of Peter Sellers’ earlier major roles; he played the union shop steward who was very clearly playing his own form of politics and was more interested in maintaining his fiefdom than in anything else.)
There’s also a song by Canadian band Spirit of the West called ‘Profiteers’ which was about how landlords in downtown Vancouver were deliberately evicting long-term tenants in 1986 so they could run B&Bs for the tourists in town for the World’s Fair that year. (Spirit of the West may be better known for their drinking songs, but they were at least as much a political protest band as anything else.) The chorus to that went:
And, of course, when you have people engaged in Krylov’s sort of gatekeeping and pulling up the ladder behind them, or being ‘one of the good ones’ in the club, they rarely realize until it’s too late is that pulling up the ladder behind them leaves them at the edge of the cliff and the first ones likely to be pushed off later on.
See, for example, <a href="https://www.wonkette.com/p/maga-outraged-at-demon-worshiper"<Kash Patel being subject to massive online abuse from the MAGA faithful because he made a 'Happy Diwali' posting. And yet we keep seeing the next generation of ‘cool girls’ or the like thinking things will be different this time.
So this Krylov person is suggesting that — even though she knows, and everyone agrees, that she’s qualified to do this peer-review assignment — maybe she was only hired because she’s a woman…and Dick to the Dawks loudly agrees and says “YES, she’s nothing but a DEI hire and doesn’t deserve the job!” And therefore DEI is bad?
This really shows that Dawkins’ cognitive decline is worse than even a few months ago. PZ is right: people should stop soliciting quotes from him, and stop pretending he’s still an “expert” in anything.
But hey, it’s not like Dawkins is the first cognitively-impaired person the Republicans have propped up in public to dutifully spout deranged bullshit.
(Here’s another guess about Krylov’s motivations: maybe the paper she’d been asked to review was written by people who’d benefitted from DEI, or its thesis was in support of some “social justice agenda” she opposed; so rather than do the job right and admit the work was okay and proper, she decided to run away and pretend she’s a victim of something. Sort of like cis women athletes refusing to compete with a trans competitor and then crying about unfair competition.
The obvious question here is: Why isn’t she at home making sammiches for her man?
Maybe because her man is a librul feminist wuss who can’t command respect from a woman…? /s
There was a time women could not attend a University or college. Much less be a professor at one. Women could not vote, hold office and much more. These pre-revolutionary practices were known collectively as coverture and were an established part of English common law as practiced in America. We see our MAGAt friend howling about feminism, which over time eliminated the worst of coverture. Every young American woman should know about coverture and its elimination to counter the “feminism bad!” rants of the extreme right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverture
Wow, maybe she can go back to Ukraine or Israel or Galt’s Gulch and take her deeply ingrained racism with her. Her linked essay sounds like it was written by Ayn Rand.
Oh no, science will perish if we simply call them the laws of motion rather than glorifying Newton?
Her claims that science is apolitical are lacking in scientific rigor and completely disproven by her own examples.
Tethys: from the opener of her essay, I can guess she wants to move back to the great Russian city of Donetsk, where there’s no water or gasoline. Not the Ukrainian city of Donetsk that was captured by Russia in 2014.
Sounds like another ladder-puller.
I suspect it’s related to the editorial in Nature Reviews Psychology’s on citation diversity: https://tinyurl.com/5n8pby4t
Since it specifically mentions Trump’s attack on DEI it has outraged many on the right
She definitely has an issue with the citation diversity statement, even though they are optional for the author and aren’t part of whatever needs peer review. I think she is misunderstanding the point entirely to conflate censorship with diversity.
Her actual problem is her white lady insistence that institutional racism isn’t a real issue. It’s obvious from the last paragraphs of her soap essay. She somehow believes that STEM is a pure and sacrosanct level playing field which doesn’t need any of that newfangled social justice from those lesser soft sciences.
It’s quite strange that she is a vocal supporter of women in STEM, but can’t apply the same efforts at broader inclusion to other less visible science communities.
From wiki:
Krylov is active in the promotion of gender equality in STEM fields, especially in theoretical chemistry.
She created and maintains the web directory Women in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry, Material Science, and Biochemistry, which currently lists more than 400 scientists holding tenure and tenure track academic positions, or equivalent positions in industry, national laboratories, and other leading research establishments. She has delivered several talks on gender equality in STEM including a lecture at the international symposium in Uppsala, Sweden
It’s likely I may be among a tiny minority here (so what else is new?), but in my opinion it’s a bit disingenuous of the original post to not state the exact reason for Krylov’s position instead of inventing straw men (or straw women, in this case). Nature Reviews Psychology recently (8 Oct 2025, actually, and linked by user pbdg’s #12 post above) released a recommendation that the journal is “now explicitly encouraging authors to take up one of the steps involved in inclusive writing discussed by Quam and Roberts: diversifying citation practices.” The statement begins by citing the Trump administration’s targeting of DEI issues, implying that this is one way scientists and authors can, apparently, fight back. Krylov and others (including Dawkins) do not agree with this, claiming that new publications should cite the best science, independent of the gender/skin color/sexual orientation/genetic background of the researchers. Yes, this is a recommendation and not a requirement, but such a statement can still evoke strong reactions among some – does that sound familiar, anyone?
Whether you agree with Krylov or not, IMHO a more proper response would be to argue with the actual reasons for her position – which seem missing in the original post, to anyone who’s familiar with this issue. As much as I enjoy and agree with a huge majority of the posts here, this one just isn’t up to expectations. If having this perspective inspires the blog owner to ban my login account, so be it.
(And of course, the best way to cite previous work is self-referencing! That’s a GREAT way to improve your citation index!)
Have a great day, everyone!
Davidw, way to miss the point.
This isn’t the first time Anna Krylov has complained about social justice, DEI, and inclusiveness. She’s been writing about this for quite a few years now.
This puts her current complaints into perspective.
Here she is in 2021 complaining that DEI is “turning STEM education into a farce.
No data here, no examples, no reasons why it is “turning STEM education into a farce.”
It is an assertion without proof or data and may be dismissed without proof or data.
She is wrong.
Up until January when Trump was inaugurated, US science was healthy and doing quite well.
Who is politicizing science, seriously attacking US science, and causing an immense amount of damage are the current right wingnut and xian nationalist extremists that control the USA. They are taking away funding from world class universities that they consider liberal such as Harvard and MIT and giving it to Red state universities that agree to be bigots in states like Texas. NIH and NSF budgets have been cut by billions of dollars.
Not one word from Anna Krylov yet about this.
She is just a right wing crackpot that I find mostly just boring.
If she can’t find something to complain about, she will just invent it.
Strangely enough, Anna Krylov is a huge fan of DEI herself.
She is an advocate for gender equality in STEM fields.
So as long as you are female it is OK to be DEI and woke.
At best she is inconsistent and more likely hypocritical.
She is boring, and it is a waste of time to try to figure out what she is complaining about and why.
@davidw
More context behind her reason is included in the post if you click through both links. PZ did quote the relevant portion.
Boosting the diversity of researchers who are cited is not a difficult task. There are plenty of diverse and qualified researchers in the world. You might note that nowhere does it say to promote poor science. Broadening your sample size is a pretty basic scientific concept.
It seems to me that both scientists quoted are very white people who vehemently deny that racial bias is embedded within the very human social fabric of the STEM community. This is an example of the social structure known as ‘white privilege’.
In any case, PZ would never ban someone for simply disagreeing with a post. Feel free to post vigorous criticism.