Seen on social media lately, attributed to former American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
The scientific research base of the United States of America is the research university. We made that decision 80 years ago. We don.t have a Plan B.
The first time I searched for this, the only place it showed up was on social media posts. It made me rather skeptical of its reality. But I found it from a Fox and Friends clip here.
Yesterday, I took a lot of time that I didn’t really have to watch Marcia McNutt’s presentation to the National Academies. I know there was a panel discussion afterwards, but didn’t watch it because McNutt’s talk was so frustrating.
And all I can say is, “Thank you, Heather Wilson.”
Wilson, president of the University of Texas El Paso, was the only panelist – of five! – who even came close to addressing the unfolding self-inflicted extinction event that is unfolding on American science.
She was the only one who talked about the president’s budget request to the American Congress, which proposed slashing science by amounts not seen in decades.
She was the only one who talked about getting grants terminated. (“That’s not ‘woke science,’ that’s genetics” she said at one point, gathering applause.)
She said science’s moral authority derives from its pursuit of truth,
I sent her a “Thank you” email for saying what she did.
The other panelists? Like McNutt, they were so concerned about showing a silver lining that they could not admit there was a cloud.
Or, to use a better known metaphor, “Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
It is wild to listen to people talk about “needing to inspire kids in K-12 to take science and math” (biology is usually the most popular major of undergraduate students), how “scientists need to communicate with the public better” (no supporting data or acknowledgement of the fractured information ecosystem run by algorithms and gatekeepers), and, worst of all from former adviser to the current president, Kelvin Droegemeier:
We don’t want folks to walk out of here thinking, “Oh my god, it’s all doom and gloom.” Doom and gloom is the best opportunity to do really exciting, forward-thinking things.
That came . Such a flippant “Go make lemonade” dismissal of how much harm is being done by that president now.
Photo from here.
Marcia McNutt gave a “State of science” speech to the National Academies of Science yesterday.
In a time when researchers are feeling shock, uncertainty, and volcanic anger at the actions taken against them, McNutt failed spectacularly to address the harm that is being done to US science now.
McNuss started with a couple of quotes that she said shows that everyone wants the US to be a world leader in science. The lived experiences of too many scientists say otherwise. Marcia, I hate to break it to you, but there are a lot of people in the current federal government who change their tune depending on who they are talking to.
She goes back to 2007 report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, to make it seem as though the current problems are just a continuation of what has been happening for years. This is sanewashing. 2025 is not an extension of the 2007 to 2024 trendline.
McNutt proposes seven action items.
#1: Her first item is to “build on a culture of innovation.” (19 minutes into the talk). She says, “We need a radical new US innovation enterprise.”
She worries that peer review is “too conservative” and reviewers look for reasons not to fund, hinting they do so to improve their own chances of grant success. Her solution is to look for better peer preview to select “truly innovative” proposals.; a.k.a., “Just get better at picking winners.” This has never worked. You know how to fund more innovative proposals? Fund more proposals, period.
#2: Create a national research strategy. The current disruption, she says, gives us a chance for change! Find the silver lining in that storm cloud! Your diagnosis of life-threatening disease is a great chance for a makeover!
Researchers are in existential crisis and being told to look on the bright side. Talk about salt in the wound.
She argues that the US has no national strategy for research. She assumes the current government wants one. In one of her more pointed criticisms, she says she doesn’t think people should pay for disaster warnings; it should be a federal responsibility. This is something that I think many people would agree with, but Project 2025 called for privatizing the national weather service anyway.
#3: Better K-12 education. She says this is a high priority for Americans. But popular does not translate into political action. Otherwise, there would have been a lot more “common sense gun regulations” than consistently enjoy high support in public polling.
McNutt this is a state responsibility and there is not much the federal government can do. She partly blames this on Department of Education for a lack of leadership. This seems like a bit of a DARVO tactic to appease Republicans, many of whom have wanted that department abolished for years.
McNutt also buys into the “school choice” rhetoric, cloaking this as a chance to do controlled experiments in education. Interestingly, she admits her daughters go to religious schools “only after I interviewed the science departments.”
And then, oh no, she has a slide of “Better directions” in education that lists “Explore AI as tutoring aid for students who need help” and “Provide AI as teacher's assistant. Apparently she hasn’t read the article about how badly teachers are getting screwed over by rampant use of chatbots. ” I saw a great presentation from Khan Academy" which is a company with a product to sell. Yeah, I heard the same from Bill Gates about Khan Academy in a TED Talk in 2011.
McNutt wants to know why students cannot get six figure salaries with a bachelor’s degree and a couple of years of extra training. It’s because businesses don’t value them. McNutt does not see the connection between “We don't have enough people” and “Why don’t scientists get paid more?” McNutt seems too enamoured of industry to suggest that they could solve their own problems.
McNutt describes the National Defense Education Act that was a response to Sputnik, and says, “We are facing another Sputnik moment.” Marcia, the call is coming from inside the house. This isn’t a Cold War moment where the country is uniting against an external foe. This is a federal government that does not value the things that scientists value and is determined to shrink science.
Then she argues that one of the problems with academia is that there are too many grad students and postdocs and we should use AI to get rid of them. See above comments on how businesses could solve this by creating entry level science positions with six figure salaries.
Edit, 5 June 2025: Chemjobber writes about the slide shown,
I’m sorry to be so graphic, but if I kidnapped the children of 20 full professors and said “You get your kid back if you give me a definition of ‘molecular engineering’”, I would get 40 different definitions.
That someone at the National Academies think these projections are credible is concerning.
Chemjobber also has comments about how “unmet workforce need” is calculated and why it seems suspicious.
#5 is deregulation. I bet this made the conservatives in the audience happy. McNutt says that researchers lose 44% of time is lost to paperwork. I.m willing to be a lot of that time lost to paperwork is grant proposals, which could be fixed by more funding. And she suggests again that AI will relieve researchers of the burden of paperwork. (AI seems to be her go to answer for all of science’s problems.)
#6 is international collaborations, which McNutt calls an “unforced error.” “The trend recently is to do just to opposite.” Look, I get that she doesn’t want to call Republican politicians right wing nationalists, but surely she could call this more than a “trend.” The way people are being treated and detained is more than a “trend.”
#7 is the one that annoys me the most. McNutt wants scientists to “Rebuild trust with the public.” Last year, Pew Research showed that 74% of Americans have positive perceptions of scientists. McNutt even shows a slide of it! “The public” is not the problem here. She correctly says trust in science is not uniform across the political spectrum. She can’t even bring herself to say “Republicans” here.
McNutt points out that very few people were alive when polio was a big problem, as an example of things that people take for granted. But a lot of people were alive when covid killed over a million people in the US and a vaccine was developed in less than a year and widely deployed in less than two. Why doesn’t she say that? I suspect she doesn’t want to say that because she knows that the federal government’s position is that covid wasn’t a big deal and that vaccines are bad.
She ends by saying she wants to make science a bipartisan issue again. She has no recommendations for what that will take. (Maybe she thinks that too can be solved with AI.) There's no way she would say it out loud because that would require here to criticize, and criticize one party more than the other.
McNutt is trying to being facts to what is an ideological fight. She touts the economic benefits of science, which have never been disputed. The economic benefits of allowing scientists to immigrate is not going to persuade people who held up “Mass deportation” signs at the Republican convention last year.
I almost wish I hadn’t watched this talk. It alternates between “What?” and “Please no,” and sometimes hits both at the same time. McNutt values not upsetting anyone more than accurately describing what is happening mere blocks from the National Academies headquarters.
Scientists deserve better leadership.
Update, 5 June 2025: John Timmer reaches similar conclusions about the astonishing lack of urgency in McNutt’s speech.
I also want to point out that McNutt’s speech is in line with her Science editorial right after the last American election.
Update the second, 5 June 2025: Dr. Kiki was nice enough to draw my attention to the news that the National Academies are facing a terrible balance sheet and are laying people off. Moreover, McNutt had faced internal criticism of her timidness:
McNutt faces challenges that go beyond finances, including complaints that NASEM leaders are timid at a time that calls for outspokenness in defense of science. “I [have] tried to convince, unsuccessfully, Marcia McNutt … to take a public stand,” Schekman says, “and I have received no encouragement and some considerable resistance” from her. (McNutt did not respond when asked to comment on his statement.)
Okay, stop. Saying “science isn’t political” will not keep science safe from political attacks
The State of the Science Address 2025
Public trust in scientists and views on their role in policymaking
US science is being wrecked, and its leadership is fighting the last war
National Academies, staggering from Trump cuts, on brink of dramatic downsizing
Two projects I’ve been meaning to mention.
I was involved in the early stages of creating DORA’s new implementation guide. One small contribution that I made was ensuring that there was a small section that talked about including graduate students and postdocs when considering research assessment reform.
This guide is timely and badly needed. Many American research universities are going to have to change what they think a successful research career looks like.
And an update to one of my passion projects, my collection of academic hoaxes.
This update contains two new pet-themed hoaxes: a dog impersonating a scientist and a cat impersonating a scientist. The first of these occurred after the first version of this document, and I missed it. This is indicative of how difficult it is to keep on top of these events.
Also, a slight update about how Google’s search result is now displaying material from hoax papers as though they were real.
I am slightly amazed that what I thought would be a project that would close or at least slow down is still updated so regularly.
It’s being reported that:
(E)ight selective colleges, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, and Vanderbilt University announced they will accept these “civility transcripts” among the factors they weigh in college-admissions decisions.
Sigh.
On the one hand, I appreciate this sentiment:
Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as “empty,” “meaningless,” or “dishonest,” and scorn to use them. No matter how “pure” their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best. (Heinlein 1978)
My problem with words like “civility,” “politeness,” and
“professionalism” is that they are coded. If it’s hard to counter someone who accuses you of “incivility” because it can mean many different things. Some can use it just as a way of saying, “You shouldn’t make that point at all.”
So in addition to being vague, civility and its relatives can easily be used just to enforce the status quo.
“Do it in the right way.” Yeah. This is the same language used to try to neutralize protests. The “right way” gets so prescribed that it effectively prevents expression.
On the other hand, there are some things one should not be civil about.
MR. NANCY: Shit, you all don’t know you black yet. You think you just people. Let me be the first to tell you that you are all black. The moment these Dutch motherfuckers set foot here and decided they white, and you get to be black, and that’s the nice name they call you. Let me paint a picture of what’s waiting for you on the shore. You arrive in America, land of opportunity, milk and honey, and guess what? You all get to be slaves! Split up, sold off and worked to death! The lucky ones get Sunday off to sleep and fuck and make more slaves, and all for what? For cotton? Indigo? For a fucking purple shirt? The only good news is the tobacco your grandkids are gonna farm for free is gonna give a shitload of these white motherfuckers cancer. And I ain’t even started yet. A hundred years later, you’re fucked! A hundred years after that, fucked! A hundred years after you get free, you still getting fucked outta jobs and shot at by police! You see what I’m saying?
[sees the rage on a slave’s face]
MR. NANCY: This guy gets it. I like him. He’s gettin’ angry. Angry is good. Angry gets shit done. (Green & Fuller 2017)
Anger is a legitimate form of human expression.
I do not like the idea of “civility transcripts.” At all. I am disappointed in the universities are going to consider them.
Heinlein RA, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long (1978). G.P. Putnam’s Sons: New York.
Green M, Fuller B, 2017, “The Secret of Spoons,” American Gods.Colleges will give a leg up to students who demonstrate civility
After years of sloganeering, it’s interesting to see two trials of paid peer review coming on the heels of one another. The latest test of paying peer reviewers was run by the journal Biology Open (where I have published) using about 20 manuscripts. (Update: Biology Open has now published this study.)
Reviewers got paid somewhere around US$259-285 for doing a peer review that had to come back promptly. As in, within a week. And they did, with no apparent lapse in quality.
This looks promising, but some issues that are not caught in a small trial could emerge if payment becomes institutionalized.
Got to get back to prepping for class.
Update, 26 March 2025: The pseudonymous Overly Honest Editor on Bluesky writes (light edits):
I’m seeing £44k for 20 papers after discounting pay for refs. That is £2200 per paper, not far off from many mid-range journals APCs. Which to me translates to the usual: yes, we could pay peer reviewers, if people are willing to cash out 30% extra. And people aren’t willing.
This is making one of two assumption. Either that (A) publishers are nonprofits, or; (B) the profits of publishers must be protected and cannot be reduced.
Gorelick DA, Clark A. 2025. Fast & Fair peer review: a pilot study demonstrating feasibility of rapid, high-quality peer review in a biology journal. bioRxiv: 2025.03.18.644032.
“Pay reviewers” has become a social media slogan that could be a welcome change to academic publishing if potential pitfalls are avoided. But because we are researchers, we need to do the experiment. A recent paper by Cotton and colleagues (2025) is the first I have seen to test what paying peer reviewers might accomplish. (There was a prior test by Chetty and colleagues in 2014.)
The journal Critical Care Medicine offered reviewers an incentive of $250 on alternate weeks.
Does offering to pay peer reviewers get more reviews? The authors measure this in three ways.
By the way, for those 32% of reviewers who got a review done within two weeks for no pay, I appreciate you. Not all heroes wear capes.
Is peer review quality affected? Not noticeably. The results note that about a third of the reviews that were received did not got a quality assessment. By reading between the lines, it appears that the handling associate editors were only “encouraged” to grade the reviews, and a chunk of the editors just did not rate the reviews.
There is a difference by offering payment, but is it worth it? Trevor Branch noted:
(T)hese results (8% higher rate of completing review, 1 day earlier on average) don't exactly motivate journals to pay reviewers.
Cotton and colleagues notes that the costs add up.
(F)or a journal with 1,000 reviewed submissions per year, three paid reviewers per article, and payments of $250 per reviewer, such a payment mechanism could cost $750,000 annually.
Even if you ramped it down to two reviewers, which is common for many basic science journals, it’s not clear that the cost-benefit ratio of paying peer reviewers is worth it for journals.
This study can’t address many of the other possible problems that will undoubtedly emerge. For example, what will authors say if they found if their article is rejected on the basis of what they think is a shoddy review that the journal paid for? What is an appropriate amount of incentive?
I recognize that for many, paying for peer review is about moral fairness, not financial prudence.
On a related note, Stat News has an update on the lawsuit launched against scientific publishers last year. The publishers are asking for a dismissal for similar reasons that I outlined last year.
Legal experts told STAT that while there’s little question unpaid peer review has helped enrich publishers, it may be difficult to prove the practices cited in the lawsuit were the product of an anticompetitive agreement.
Much of the article, however, is as much about about the service model of peer review as the lawsuit itself. The service model of peer review is under strain, but I don’t think the article articulates the reasons why very well.
First and foremost, the assessment schemes of most research institutions are weighed far too heavily towards output.
Second, the globalization of science means that the community of peers is more diffuse. Peer review works best, I think, when many people know each other.
Third, there are likely still imbalances in who is asked to review papers (e.g., established researchers from established institutions in countries with colonial histories are asked more often than researchers everywhere else).
Chetty R, Saez E, Sándor L. 2014. What policies increase prosocial behavior? An experiment with referees at the journal of public economics. Journal of Economic Perspectives 28:169–188. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.28.3.169
Cotton CS, Alam A, Tosta S, Buchman TG, Maslove DM. Effect of monetary incentives on peer review acceptance and completion: A quasi-randomized interventional trial. Critical Care Medicine: in press. http://doi.org/10.1097/CCM.0000000000006637
Shana Gadarian just wrote this useful thread on Bluesky. I’ve compiled it with some light editing.
Some brief thoughts from someone who studies public opinion.
The federal firing spree can be made unpopular because it is being done in a haphazard way, there will be huge economic effects not just in DC but also across country and it’s also likely illegal in many cases. But how to make that argument?
First, remember that most people pay attention to politics most of the time and don’t really know how things work so first explain to people how the federal government works. Really! Who allocates money, who gets to spend it, and why is it a problem for an elected person to be firing civil servants.
Much of our policymaking is done in basically invisible ways so it’s not always clear to people what the policies are that affect their lives. (See The Submerged State by Suzanne Mettler.)
Tell people what current policy is and how long it’s been there. People want policy information but if they don't have it, they fill in the details. (See The Invented State by Emily Thorson.) Right now, the current regime is telling them that government is wasteful and inefficient.
Focus on both the immediate effects of federal funding cuts on the health and welfare of specific people and the country as a whole. Tell both sets of stories! What happens to federal workers at NIH when they lose their jobs, their research, and what are the effects on cancer patients.
It is really hard to track things that don’t happen, but also think about and articulate scenarios of what might happen if PepFar doesn’t fund HIV treatments. Babies develop AIDS. Other countries, like China, fill in the gaps of where the US was and win influence in these regions.
Focus on the very unpopular aspects of the cuts. You can’t go to national parks if there are no park rangers and it’s unsafe to go there. National parks are very popular!
People want things to work and they want to be safe. Talk about the direct consequences of things like cutting FAA staff for airline safety. It would be helpful for pilots, flight attendant, and crew unions to be doing this publicly and also privately through lobbying.
Opinion works when it’s collective, so helping people to understand their own values map on to what is happening and how to then translate that into political action. Calls and emails to their members, working with membership groups, letters to the editor, protest. There are many ways to make voices count.
Trace out the economic effects in very local ways. How many people in your local area work for federal agencies. Will farmers stop getting subsidies? Will disabled students stop getting needed services? Which hospitals will have to stop clinical trials? Which people are affected the most?
So. In the United States, funding for science has slowed, mass layoffs have cut through federal science agencies like a chainsaw, and someone who doesn’t believe that germs cause disease is leading the country’s health agency.
Are we scientists reacting with anywhere near enough unity to fight back?
Christina Pagel wrote (lightly edited):
Another group who have done little to organise an opposition are scientists and scientific societies.
While there are ongoing lawsuits around pauses in grant funding or pausing international health programmes, these are being driven by labour organizations or non-governmental organizations, not scientists. Instead, some journals, organizations, universities are quietly censoring output of targeted terms like “gender.” Publicly funded bodies such as NASA, NIH and NSF have little choice but to comply. Individual scientists have spoken out, but many are also reporting self-censoring in fear of impact on their careers.Possible reasons:
- The scientific community is spread across universities, private research institutes, and government agencies and across very different disciplines, making coordinated action – or even agreeing on aligned interests – challenging.
- Large national grant making bodies are not independent of the federal government. Scientists often require a funder’s permission to publish and have little formal say in priority areas for funding.
- Most scientists just want to work and aren’t “into politics.” Most fields are relatively unaffected.
- Many scientists also feel an instinctive aversion to advocacy, worried that it is not scientific or objective enough.
- Some who benefit from changes in funding priorities will welcome the opportunity to further their own research.
We saw all these factors play out in the ideological bent to science in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia.
The stability of recent decades has left scientists unprepared for when their independence is revealed to be so fragile with few if any legal protections.
Pagels’s list is helpful start, to which I will add.
Point 1: That the scientific community is spread across institutions is one of the reasons we have scientific societies. Academic societies can represent thousands, or tens of thousands, of researchers in the United States and around the world. But the response of scientific societies to the catastrophic events of the last few weeks has been – at best – mixed.
Scientific societies have the potential to be critical advocates for science in the United States, and organize collective action – by which I mean protests – against the budget cuts and firings and all other forms of federal attacks.
But I think many scientific societies are too cautious, and have spent too much effort worrying about what the most reticent of their members would think. They will need their members to push them – hard – to take stronger actions.
Point 2: Yup. Many scientists are – or were – employees of the American government.
Points 3 and 4: I think these are variations of “Science isn’t political.” We saw this view promulgated late last year in an editorial by the head the National Academies of Science in the journal Science. I didn’t like it then and I think we have seen how badly misguided it was.
Point 5: Thankfully, I have not seen scientists pulling, “I got mine, so what?” I’m sure some exist, but I don’t think there are many.
I will add a sixth point. A few years ago, Randy Olson wrote:
Science is run by committees, top to bottom. Committees don’t lead, they facilitate. They don’t come up with good ideas and make them happen, they wait for individuals to come to them with good ideas that they can support or reject.
I’ve thought about this paragraph a lot. I don’t agree entirely that science is leaderless, but it surely tends to be run by committees. I don’t agree entirely that committees cannot come up with good ideas. But committees are slow and deliberative on purpose, and that is holding us back right now, where we need speed.
That makes the role of strong existing “committees,” like scientific societies, all the more critical. Let’s not waste time striking new committees. Let’s mobilize the ones we have already.
If we can get them to be strong enough.
Okay, stop. Saying “science isn’t political” will not keep science safe from political attacks
An American politician with a seat in the House of Representatives has introduced a resolution “to acquire Greenland and to rename Greenland as “Red, White, and Blueland”.
This is real. Not a prank. Not a hoax. Not an imaginary story. Not an April Fools day joke.
Carter introduces bill renaming Greenland, February 11, 2025
I am glad to hear that Felisa Wolfe-Simon is doing well and still loves science.
But lots of other information in a new article in the New York Times about Wolfe-Simon is not as warming.
First, the timeline of events circa 2010 described in the article is very fuzzy at best. I’m not sure if it6s wrong or just cloudy.
By focusing on Wolfe-Simon, others involved in this story – notably Rosie Redfield – are reduced to namely “critics.” There are other elements of the story that are maybe over emphasized?
Critique soon became attack, and attack often became personal – focusing, for instance, on Dr. Wolfe-Simon’s appearance, including her dyed hair.
Several articles described her colourful hair positively. And Rosie Redfield dyed her hair, too. I cannot doubt some attacked her appearance, and that any of those comments can hurt bad.
And soon, Dr. Wolfe-Simon said, she couldn’t get grants or publish papers.
A lot of researchers struggle to get grants or publish papers. There’s no way of knowing what proposals or manuscripts she was submitting or what the comments were.
Second, there is news that the journal Science is considering retracting the original paper. Current editor, Holden Thorp, expands on the possible retraction of the arsenic life paper in a thread on Bluesky. i asked what point a retraction would serve, to which Thorp replied, “Partly because of AI and even before with search engines that only look at the title, papers like this continue to get cited uncritically. ‘Retraction’ is added to the title in these cases.”
This strikes me as reasonable, but I still have some reservations. By the same argument, anyone who only looks at the title and sees “Retraction” will also view that uncritically and not read the retraction notice. This could mean someone would not cite this paper appropriately for its discovery of a new strain of arsenic-tolerant bacteria (which is not contests).
Retraction is a blunt instrument.
Third, this article paints Wolfe-Simon as someone who was wronged, not as someone who was wrong.
Usually, professional consequences so severe are reserved for those who fabricate data or commit fraud, which no one has alleged with #arseniclife. Why, then, were the repercussions so resounding for Dr. Wolfe-Simon?
And from reading this article, it seems to me that Wolfe-Simon still thinks she found bacteria that use arsenic instead of phosphorus.
She also defended the discovery against scientific consensus. Some see that as an unwillingness to change a conclusion in the face of new information. Dr. Wolfe-Simon would say that information is wrong.
And...
To this day, Dr. Wolfe-Simon defends the work, noting that she wishes the team had saved less data for a second paper. The team published a response to critiques in Science, and Dr. Wolfe-Simon disputes failed replications of their findings. Other co-authors say they also stand by the integrity of the original work.
What I would like to know if whether the co-authors stand by the conclusions of their work. Do they think they discovered a bacterium that uses arsenic in place of phosphorus?
Wolfe-Simon throws Science magazine under the bus a bit:
She wouldn’t pursue a flashy journal that would impose a heavy hand in publication and press, she said.
We absolutely have to make space for making mistakes and being wrong in science. But researchers have to be willing to admit those mistakes.
Her discovery wasn’t alien life, but science has never been the same. (Paywalled.)
This has been lightly edited from the original thread.
Well, no surprise that (Jerry) Coyne used his blog (whyevolutionistrue) to argue with the SSE/SSB/ASN letter about definitions of sex. I’m not going to engage deeply with the letter here. Like any committee-drafted text it reflects compromises; I agree with some phrasing but some could have been clearer.
Instead, I want to respond specifically about his comments regarding my work on stickleback. He points out, quite correctly, that I have personally used the terms male and female, and sex, extensively in my own research on stickleback. True.
But it misses the point.
Yes, stickleback can generally be categorized as male and female. And they have a XX female / XY male sex determination system (in some species, not in others). And yes, when I run stats I often check for effects of sex, and often find them. I’ve had whole papers devoted to sexual dimorphism. But Jerry might want to talk to me (or another sticklebacker) before making claims about stickleback sex differences. Because its not as clear cut as he likes.
Yes, the large majority of stickleback I’ve caught are phenotypically male or female, in the sense that they have ovaries or testes. But I have caught quite a few stickleback (hundreds at least) with neither identifiable ovaries nor testes. I have twice seen stickleback with both (yeah, we dissect a lot of fish). These are rare, but they exist. In statistical analyses, these fish get coded as NA, and excluded.
So when I publish on sexual dimorphism, or use male/female as a factor in my stats (which I do a lot), I am simplifying, setting aside a small minority to focus on overall tendencies of the majority.
That’s okay for stickleback, but its not ethical when applied to humans.
I could readily have published my papers instead with three levels of “sex”: male, female, and “unknown,” with the third group being comparatively small and under-powered for statistical purposes given my sample sizes.
Then there’s the issue of trait differences between the sexes, which are clear-cut for most individuals in some environments, but less so in other environments. Stickleback are famous for males having bright red chins and blue eyes as a sexual signal... except when they don’t. There are plenty of lakes where I work in BC, in which males are dull brownish-green, and indistinguishable visually from females. Indeed, in some lakes we have a hard time generating in vitro crosses because we’ll grab a fish we think is male, only to find after we euthanize and dissect it to obtain sperm, that it had ovaries.
For many traits that we have measured (diet, isotopes, morphology, size, color, immune traits, gene expression, metabolomics), males and females are on average different. But for most of these traits the sexes distributions overlap extensively. The magnitude of that dimorphism varies. In some lakes it can be easy to distinguish the sexes (for most individuals), other lakes it can be very hard, even in multivariate trait space. We can measure this dimorphism using things like linear discriminant function analysis (LDA). This LDA can score individuals as to how distinctively male or female they are and it varies numerically in ways we can measure precisely. Some populations are more dimorphic, others less. These differences persist in the lab, meaning there is genetic variation in between-sex differences.
To conclude: yes, I use the terms male and female in my work, reflecting real features of the fish I study. But I also set aside individuals who don’t fit neatly into the categories; again, that's a fair simplification when working with fish, but not morally defensible with people.
I also emphasize that even after 25 years studying stickleback, I can mis-identify an individual’s sex, even when the gonads are unambiguous. In these cases the gametic sex is a real distinction, but its relation to other traits is complex.
I'm not personally a deep expert on the biology of sex, that's not my specialty. But, if Coyne wants to have a conversation about sex and sexual traits in stickleback, I'd be happy to point out the subtleties. Most of all, the subtlety that seems to elude him is we can recognize male/female differences that characterize many individuals, and use this distinction, yet still acknowledge that these differences do not apply completely to fully 100% of a population.
Anisogamy (Differences in size of gametes - ZF) will surely come up in comments. I don’t have a problem with this criterion as a broad rule, but again there exist exceptions that make it less than universal. Individuals exist that produce no gametes: genetic sterility, environmentally induced sterility, parasitic castration. For instance, the parasite I study, Schistocephalus, can completely sterilize its host in some cases: we find males with no functional testes, females with non-functional ovaries. Do they cease to be males/females because they don’t have any gametes (whether large or small)?
To wrap up at last: my impression as an empiricist specializing on a particular fish species: stickleback sex is clearly delineated most of the time (hence, I use the term a lot), but not in every single instance.
The latter is where Jerry misses the point: Once we pivot into the world of humans, the biology of sex in stickleback (and how I simplify it slightly in my work) is irrelevant to the ethical standards by which we treat each other.
Update, 21 February 2025: Nathan Lents provides another great thread on the biology of sex. (Lightly edited.)
Biological sex and sex differences are real, but poorly captured by a simple binary.
No one is saying there is no such thing as “male” and “female.” (Of course there is.)
No one is saying there aren’t difference between “male” and “female.” (Of course there are.)
No one is saying that “male” and “female” aren’t real categories. (Of course they are.)
We’re saying that these categories are continuous. Continuous categories are still categories. There are many examples of continuous categories in biology, but the simplest is developmental age. Child and adult are real categories, with real and important differences. A child and an adult are different and must be treated as such. But there is no hard line we can draw between those two categories. It’s a spectrum, and a gradual transition. They are continuous categories. But that doesn’t mean the categories aren’t real and important.
There are borderline cases where it’s not simple to say which category someone belongs in – child or adult – but that doesn’t mean the categories are meaningless. All of adolescence could be seen as fuzzy gray area. Child and adult are still different.
Dawkins and Coyne’s “gotcha” moments of finding authors using the term “male” and “female” in their publications isn't the flex you think it is. They (and you!) probably use other continuous categories like adult, juvenile, adolescent. Continuous categories are still categories.The same is true for speciation, of course. There wasn’t a Homo heidelbergensis woman that gave birth to a H. sapiens baby. (See? I used “woman” and no one will take issue!) The transition between species is gradual and continuous, a spectrum, but species are still different.
And this is what we’re saying with biological sex. The categories are not as easy to define as we thought because almost all sex differences are bimodal, not binary. Except for the gametes (I’ll get to them in a sec), pretty much all sex differences are continuous.
Examples:
Height, muscle mass, hormone levels & ratios, red blood cell count, white blood cell count, basal metabolic rate, bone density, thickness of the corpus collosum, ratio of white matter and gray matter, size of pre-optic area, breast size, facial hair, waist-hip ratio, libido… These are all features of sexed bodies that show continuous bimodal sex differences. Don’t all of those matter a whole lot more to health, daily life, relationships, than what gamete you make? Yes, gametes are binary, but they also matter very little most of the time.
There are important health differences. Women are nine times more likely to get lupus. Men two and a half times more likely to get Parkinson’s. Women suffer depression more. Men die by suicide more. Women more often anemic. Men more heart attacks. These are important, but have nothing to do with gametes. There are two liver diseases that are, bizarrely, reciprocally bimodal: Women are nine times more likely to get primary biliary cirrhosis cases, while men are nine times more likely to develop primary sclerosing cholangitis.
Recognizing that biological sex is complex doesn’t deny sex differences, it affirms them. I understand why some want to center the gametes – they are simple and binary. But that ignores all kinds of important sex differences all over the body that actually matter. In my view, the fact that people are retreating to gametes to define sex shows that they know that all of the other sex differences are continuous / bimodal.
Men and women are real categories with real differences, but the categories are continuous and differences are bimodal.And I haven’t even gotten to intersex people, who are real people that exist. They are almost always healthy, usually fertile, and in any case deserving of dignity and respect. They, too, cannot be ignored or discarded, simply out of preference for nice neat categories.
Biology is messy, adaptable, and endlessly creative. It rarely traffics in binaries and loves wondrous variety. Life will always frustrate the human desire for neat categories with simple, universal definitions. Diversity is a universal feature of life. Let's acknowledge celebrate that!
Photo by Jason Ching/University of Washington on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.
I called last week, “The worst week for science ever.” Of course, it was just the worst week so far.
This morning, I saw reports of two large scientific societies – The American Chemical Society (ACS) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) – editing their websites to remove or reduce mentions of diversity.
“The ACS has deleted its website on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Respect.” – David K. Smith
“The main DEI page from AGU has been modified to take diversity out of the title.” – Celeste Labedz
This is on top of the American Society for Microbiology removing a bunch of pages relating to diversity and replacing them with “Under review.”
Not all societies are taking this road. The Society for the Study of Evolution released an message today, for instance, said the society still supported “community building in an equitable and globally inclusive manner.” Near the end, it concludes, “we note that the attacks on historically excluded members of society are reprehensible. We encourage our membership to be unwavering in your support of the most vulnerable within the community.”
My hypothesis about these is that somewhere in these big societies, there is one or more federal grants supporting some program or another. They had lawyers review the executive orders, who suggested that they change the website to avoid getting sued. A lawsuit exposes the entire society to financial risk, or maybe even ruin.
I appreciate that scientific societies want to continue to exist and are sensitive to risk.
But I am deeply disappointed that there seems to be no communication about these changes. Words and phrases and entire pages are disappearing with no warning or notice. That’s not transparency and it sure as anything isn’t leadership.
Sunday: American Society for Microbiology scrubs mentions of diversity from their websites.
Tuesday: NASA stops everything to scrub mentioned of diversity from their websites; ICE arrests a student on campus; NSF announces plans to make deep cut to staff; USAID is halted.
Wednesday: HHMI kills one of its diversity program; NIH trashes applications for diversity F grants.
Friday: NIH cuts its indirect costs and sets them to 15%.
Yes, these are all American centric. But the United States was, until the start of 2025, the world’s undisputed science superpower. These effects will not be contained within the borders of the United States.
The United States has doused itself in gasoline and lit a match.
The only question is whether the fire can be put out with no more than scorched clothes, or whether it will burn until even the bones are ash.
For everyone whose grant or pay is in limbo, I’m so sorry. You don’t deserve this bullshit.
There’s a lot to unpack and I won’t try to do it all in this post. But the current crisis did make me think back a few years about science crowdfunding. In particular, I think I had a good point about the importance of diversifying your portfolio for research funding.
So I wrote a little thread on Bluesky suggesting that some scientists might consider what they could do with crowdfunding for research.
This blog post is also a good opportunity to point to this post on Southern Fried Science about Andrew Thaler’s experience with Patreon:
By just about any metric, the return on investment from Patreon exceeds, by an order of magnitude, just about an other funding I’ve received in the last decade. For most of us, we don’t need to move mountains, we just need the space to stop and breathe and create.
I’m under no illusions about what science crowdfunding can and cannot do. And it sucks that I have to bring it up because we are facing an all out attack on research funding. But times are what they are and we have to think in new ways to keep the gears turning.
My Bluesky thread on science crowdfunding
My blog posts about the #SciFund experience
Small drops make mighty oceans: 10 years as a scientist on Patreon
In 2021, I was in front of the US Consulate in Toronto. And there was a small plaque that was surprisingly moving to me.
As the United States marks the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, in the name of all Americans, Consulate General Toronto thanks the people of Ontario for their support and generosity following the worst attack on American since WWII.
The nearly 3,000 innocent victims from ninety countries included twenty-four Canadians, our friends and family in Ontario, and all of Canada, were with us in our darkest hour, as you always are. Neither terrorism nor any adversity can conquer free peoples, and we are grateful to stand with the best neighbours any nation ever had.
As together we look back, together we go forward.
We are eternally grateful.
September 11, 2011
Reading the text of this now is just crushing to me. I’m sad that “eternal” gratitude seems to have lasted less than 15 years since the plaque was revealed.
The Bookseller is reporting that Springer Nature is testing AI checks in their production pipeline for journal articles.
According to the publisher, the AI systems are designed to alert editors to “quality issues.” I find this frustratingly unclear, much like Elsevier’s testing of production pipeline changes. What, exactly, are they looking for with these systems?
I can see some automatic checking being very valuable. For example, it blows my mind that many journals apparently do no basic checks for plagiarism. I can also see value in an AI system that scanned basic statistical information, like whether reported p values were possible given the sample size, test statistic, and so on. For example, there is a program called Statcheck that has been proposed for exactly such purposes (Nuijten & Wicherts 2023, 2024), although there are ongoing debates about its utility (Schmidt 2017, Böschen 2024).
If the publishers were confident that these systems were genuinely making the peer review process better and were catching things like:
All of which are real problems that need addressing. So why are academic publishers being so cagey about what processes they are implementing and what they are supposed to catch? Are they worried that this provides information that cheaters can use to bypass their “quality issues” detection systems? Something else?
Publishers always claim that they add value to academic publication. These new AI checks provide a real opportunity that they could show how they are adding value to academics who are increasingly mad at them and asking “What good are you?”
Elsevier turns generative AI loose on manuscripts for no discernable reason
Springer Nature reveals AI-driven tool to ‘automate some editorial quality checks’
Böschen I. 2024. statcheck is flawed by design and no valid spell checker for statistical results. arXiv: 2408.07948. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2408.07948
Nuijten MB, Wicherts J. 2023. The effectiveness of implementing statcheck in the peer review process to avoid statistical reporting errors. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/bxau9
Nuijten MB, Wicherts JM. 2024. Implementing Statcheck during peer review is related to a steep decline in statistical-reporting inconsistencies. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science 7(2): 25152459241258945. https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459241258945
Schmidt T. 2017. Statcheck does not work: All the numbers. Reply to Nuijten et al. (2017). PsyArXiv. https://psyarxiv.com/hr6qy
