Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne will likely never know how much is own attitudes over the years helped build, for him and his, the climate that once spelled trouble only for — for example — researchers who see design in nature. Now it’s more generally becoming any researcher whose evidence counters a Woke perspective:
Somebody called my attention to three new articles and op-eds in Scientific American that have no science in them, but are pure ideology of the “progressive” sort. I agree with some of the sentiments expressed in them, as in the first one. But my point is, as usual, to show how everything in science, including its most widely-read “popular” magazine, is being taken over by ideology. Not only that, but it’s ideology of only one stripe: Leftist “progressive” (or “woke,” if you will) ideology, so that the “opinion” section is not a panoply of divergent views, but gives only one view, like a Scientific Pravda. Remember that the editor refused when I offered to write an op-ed expressing different (but of course not right-wing) views…
What is it [one article] doing there? It’s because the editor, Laura Helmuth, has decided to turn Scientific American into a mouthpiece for the illiberal Left. Other magazines do that much better, and more regularly, and don’t harp on Mendel and Darwin being racists. It’s as if you picked up an issue of an LGBTQ+ magazine and found op-eds and articles on how genes can be edited or how we found gravity waves. – Why Evolution Is True (January 8, 2023)
What to do about it is unclear. Censorship is great for keeping mediocrities in positions of power and influence.