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