Academic Freedom

Well, the guy has guts: Cordelia Fine, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne, has carved out a niche for herself by attacking the notion that there are any evolved and genetically-based differences between males and females. Her books have been best-sellers (Testosterone Rex won the Royal Society book prize), probably because her conclusions appeal to those of a certain ideology. But those conclusions are flawed (see here, for instance). Fine’s critiques of some studies purporting to show sex differences are often good, but they’re combined with misguided characterizations of other work as well as the ignoring of results that go against her men-and-women-are-pretty-much-the-same thesis. In other words, Fine is tendentious, not objective, Read More ›

And anyway, does it even matter, if no one will join him?  At least, that’s the word on the street, they’re scared.* Meanwhile, here is Coyne, the author of Why Evolution Is True, concerned about a Woke science studies course that tells us: In the course of this survey, we shall engage a number of key questions such as: is science gendered, racialized, ableist or classist? Does the presence or absence of women (and another marginalized individuals) lead to the production of different kinds of scientific knowledge? – Science After Feminism (Catherine Taylor) Jerry says the obvious about the course: Do any of you doubt for a moment that the answer to both questions is “yes”? (My answers to both would be Read More ›

They thought the mob was coming for someone else. Amid the dead silence in the combox following “The perfect storm: Darwinists meet the progressive “evolution deniers” — and cringe…, , EDTA pipes up 1, Well, how does it feel now that the universal acid shoe is on the other foot? And who on the evolutionist side will have the guts to stand up for what they believe at the risk of their job now? We are in the odd position of being able to supply an answer in which we are,. unfortunately, confident. No, they won’t. They will continue to pretend nothing is happening and abandon those who speak up, maybe at one of those new, “edgy” mags where you are Read More ›

An evolutionary biologist chronicles the onslaught: At first, left-wing pushback to evolution appeared largely in response to the field of human evolutionary psychology. Since Darwin, scientists have successfully applied evolutionary principles to understand the behavior of animals, often with regard to sex differences. However, when scientists began applying their knowledge of the evolutionary underpinnings of animal behavior to humans, the advancing universal acid began to threaten beliefs held sacrosanct by the Left. The group that most fervently opposed, and still opposes, evolutionary explanations for behavioral sex differences in humans were/are social justice activists. Evolutionary explanations for human behavior challenge their a priori commitment to “Blank Slate” psychology—the belief that male and female brains in humans start out identical and that Read More ›

Well, PayPal’s Peter Thiel put it more politely but… that’s the bottom line. We don’t usually hear tech moguls talking this way. More frequent news is stuff like Is it Google-com or Google.gov? or Digital dictatorship. But Thiel thinks the riot is over: “The reformation is going to happen,” Thiel added, noting it won’t come from within, but from the “outside.” Thiel made the comments in a keynote speech at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Collegiate Network editors’ conference. The group funds independent and conservative-minded campus news outlets at universities across the nation, and Thiel is an alumnus of the 39-year-old nonprofit, founding the Stanford Review in the late 1980s. … In reality, higher education is in trouble, he said, citing Read More ›

Every new idea, good or bad, has had its establishment detractors who want Something To Be Done about the hateful people who make them uncomfortable. Joe Miller and guests talk about science and free speech at More Than Cake: In the tradition of natural law theorists such as John Stuart Mill, Free Speech is considered one of the most fundamental of human rights, yet this right is attacked today as a vestige of racist white Western civilization that oppresses minorities and gender-equality warriors. Today the guys look at attacks on free speech happening on our college campuses and argue from a Christian worldview why protecting this right matters to all of us regardless of political affiliation. It makes as much Read More ›

Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed has the story: Academic freedom is meant to protect scholars with controversial ideas. But a group of philosophers says academic freedom isn’t protection enough in an era of campus speech debates, internet trolls and threats against professors — and that academics now need a place to publish their most sensitive ideas pseudonymously. That venue, The Journal of Controversial Ideas, will launch next year. Co-founder Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and no stranger to controversial ideas, mentioned the idea for such a journal in a 2017 interview. But plans for it took shape in a BBC Radio 4 documentary on viewpoint diversity, Read More ›

The crackdown on religion is said to stem from Xi Jinping, who became President in 2012. After he got term limits removed in March 2018, some have begun to privately call him “Emperor Xi”: Pastor Bob Fu, a Chinese civil rights activist since Tiananmen Square in 1989 and founder of ChinaAid, reports that facial recognition technology is being used to discourage churchgoing in China: “The government-sanctioned churches that are allowed to exist right now have unique restrictions. Each church has to install a facial-recognition camera in front of the pulpit. The purpose is to identify certain people in the congregation.” … Christians are treated with special wariness because they are associated with Western political values but, as Shepherd points out, Read More ›

Quillette is one of the publications to which we sometimes direct your attention. It publishes figures who, in many cases, shouldn’t be particularly controversial but are. Along comes Politico to oblige us with an explanation: An Australian atheist feminist and psychology dropout, Claire Lehmann, founded it because she realized that magazines are more fun when people who have studied things seriously are allowed to say what they think: At times, it has drawn intense social media backlash, with contributors labeled everything from “clowns” to “cryptofascists” on Twitter. But fans of the site include pop psychologist Jordan Peterson, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, psychology professors Steven Pinker of Harvard and Jonathan Haidt of New York University, and columnists like David Brooks, Meghan Read More ›

A historian draws our attention this post from late 2016, a reflection on the survival of classical learning during the Christian era, in response to “Skep,” an energetic atheist blogger: But the usual way that those who are forced to admit that there were, in fact, many medieval natural philosophers studying all kinds of proto-scientific ideas, and doing so in the tradition of the Greeks and Romans and their Islamic successors, deal with this awkward fact is to claim that these poor scholars were cowed by the terrible restrictions of the Church and tightly constrained in what they could explore. Which, right on cue, “Skep” proceeds to do: “The fact is there weren’t a lot of scientists around for the Read More ›

You take for granted that you can just choose to read Uncommon Descent. Or something else instead. Increasingly, governments would like you to read what they think is best: There has been a definite uptick in digital authoritarianism worldwide, according to Freedom House, which assessed 65 countries: Chinese officials have held sessions on controlling information with 36 of the 65 countries assessed, and provided telecom and surveillance equipment to a number of foreign governments, Freedom House said. … The report found 17 governments approved or proposed laws restricting online media in the name of fighting “fake news,” while 18 countries increased surveillance or weakened encryption protection to more closely monitor their citizenry. According to the researchers, internet freedom declined in Read More ›

It’s almost as if transactivism was a specific test of whether fact and evidence really matter in science today: In August, Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island was criticized for removing a news release about a peer-reviewed study published in PLoS One by one of its academics—Lisa Littman, a physician and researcher at Brown’s School of Public Health. Littman’s article, titled “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: A study of parental reports,“ discusses the phenomenon by which social media and peer pressure seem to have fuelled the recently observed trend by which young teenagers (typically girls) suddenly declare themselves transgender. The paper infuriated transgender activists, who claim that the entire notion of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is a Read More ›

And, he says, there is no nice way to put it: A new survey by Gallup shows that only 48% of U.S. adults have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in academia, down from 57% in 2015. And it’s not just due to partisanship; confidence has fallen among people of all political persuasions. While it is true that confidence has fallen the most among Republicans (17 points), it’s also down among Independents (4 points) and Democrats (6 points). Alex Berezow, “Confidence In Academia Falls Nine Points In Three Years” at American Council on Science and Health Here’s the survey. About the only group enjoying a lot of confidence are the military and small business. Pollsters are not mindreaders, of Read More ›

We outlined the story of how a mortarboard mob hounded out of the journals a paper by a respected mathematician that had passed peer review for fear of “repercussions” (= the hell they themselves would go out and raise). The paper was about “greater variability in various traits among males than females of many species, including humans.” That is, more men than women win the Field’s Medal and more men than women sit on Death Row. That is something everyone everywhere has noticed but the social justice gestapo makes it difficult to discuss intelligently, as in this instance. Anyway, from The Scientist, we learn, For the scientific community, the double retraction has highlighted issues with the editorial process, and how Read More ›

In St. Louis earlier this month: What do you do if you’re a climate activist and a geoscientist speaks at a meeting near you offering scientific evidence against your point of view? Well, of course—you do what any rational person would do. You attend and listen carefully and weigh the arguments and consider whether you should change your views. Maybe you ask some questions during the Q&A at the end of the talk, challenging some of his evidence or reasoning. Maybe, if you’re really confident of your views, you contact the event organizers in advance and offer to debate the speaker, making the event all the more valuable to people of all persuasions. Or maybe not. Maybe, instead, you just Read More ›