National Academies workshop on scientific integrity

I spent most of the day in a (probably ill-advised) attempt to provide a service to the online science community. I followed as much of day 2 of the National Academies workshop on research integrity.

Most of the workshop was good, although I wouldn’t have called it a workshop, because I didn’t see any workshopping. I mostly saw people delivering familiar messages that you would expect based on their background. Publishers talked about the efforts that they are taking to try to screen out problem papers. Others said publishers were the problem and that we should walk away from journals. And so on.

But it was generally good, thoughtful stuff, even if the interaction was low. They did have a form to submit questions. Heck, one of mine got asked of a panel! Ironically, the answer came just at a point I couldn’t watch my laptop, so I didn’t get to hear the answer.

Attendance, from what I saw, fluctuated around a hundred. It was below 100 for the segment that attracted the most attention, a “fireside chat” with NIH and acting CDC director Jay Bhattacharya, moderated by Emily Oster.

To be clear, this was the worst session by far that I saw during the entire day and a half. I’ve watched a few events hosted by the National Academies, and this was the worst I’ve ever seen.

Oster was not an effective moderator. Oster was far too chummy with Bhattacharya, who started by saying that he agreed to appear because he was going to talk to Oster. She was slightly better at this than I feared. She did press Bhattacharya to answer questions he kept digressing away from. She did try ask one question from the audience. At least I thought it came from the audience. They were talking so far it was hard to keep up as I was typing.

Bhattacharya is not an effective communicator. He has a habit that I often share: he starts a sentence without knowing what he is going to say, so he is constantly backtracking and digressing rather than finishing what he is saying. 

I gave this event a chance. Bhattacharya started with some kind of reasonable discussion about replication.

But around the halfway point, his persecution complex started to kick in. And the session just went downhill, picking up speed as it went on.

He started to drop accusations of people having “bad faith” discussions about the NIH, that some information was “fake news,” blamed the Biden administration for... something (I can’t remember what), and near the very end complained about the New York Times and Washington Post of “not telling the truth” about a paper that he blocked the CDC from publishing.

It was about as bad as many critics predicted. 

At the end, organizer Katy Milkman seemed to say that she was “dispirited” but that having Bhattacharya on was “the right call.” I disagree. Even though well intentioned, I think it was a very bad call.

I do want to give a nod to earlier participant, Andrew Gelman, who was about the only person I heard who specifically called out the federal government for anti-vaccine disinformation.

I was able to thread all of my comments, which you can read as a single page on Threadsky here: https://tbsky.app/profile/doctorzen.net/post/3mkam24d2vk2y

(Bluesky users: This is a great tool. Copy the link to the first post in a thread. Paste it into a browser. Put a “t” at the start of the URL. That is, “tbsky” instead of “bsky”. And it unrolls the whole thread.

From what I can tell, the only other person posting about the Bhattacharya event as it happened was Jenna Norton. She did not thread her posts, so I am going to do some very fast copy and paste of some of her comments.

Okay, here we go! Jay Bhattacharya and Emily Oster have started their #NASEM fireside chat. 

Bhattacharya noted that seeing Emily Oster is the facilitator cemented his decision to participate. 

He has a pattern of only speaking with people who have been publicly sympathetic to his views. - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkb7puipys2u

Bhattacharya is discussing the problem of replication in research. A major source of failure to replicate is lack of diversity in the original study population. Thus his anti “DEI” efforts – which end up excluding already underrepresented people from research – are undermining his stated goal. - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkb7xxwhbk2u 

Emily Oster asked Bhattacharya: “What metrics is he going to use to measure improvement in replication?” 

He’s been talking for several minutes and I’ve not heard an answer to this question. - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkbaakfxk32u  

In the #NASEM fireside chat with Jay Bhattacharya, he says there is no political review of grants.

👀

NIH staff being required to censor grants base on a computational text analysis tool beg to differ. https://www.science.org/pb-assets/PDF/News%20PDFs/final_staff_guidance-1765918233.pdf - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkbb2tcskd2u

In the #NASEM fireside chat with Bhattacharya, he says the impact score correlates strongly with methods and not innovation. He neglects entirely the existence of summary statements as a source of information to program staff and IC directors who *used to* be able to inform final funding decisions. - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkbbjf35yt2u 

In the #NASEM chat with Bhattacharya, he talks about how supporting innovation will support early career scientists. Meanwhile, under his leadership, early career scientists have disproportionately suffered. 

Early career scientists were disproportionately affected by terminations. - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkbbp7voit2u 

In the #NASEM chat with Bhattacharya, he suggests that requiring vaccines is “coercive” and undermines trust. He ignores the role concerted vaccine disinformation campaigns have had on trust (and the part he played in them). - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkbbvd3avo2u

In the #NASEM fireside chat with Bhattacharya, I will give Emily Oster credit on pushing Jay on refusing to publish the CDC study showing covid vaccine reduce hospitalization, especially when CDC just published something with the same methods on flu. - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkbc3p6gx62u

He lied more than once about the political influence happening inside NIH, where ideas are very clearly being constrained by his own admission to “agency priorities” that have been determined not by scientific or patient communities, but by the White House & Russ Vought’s Project 2025 plan. - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkbcstwsyc2a 

In the #NASEM chat with Jay Bhattacharya, he falsely accusing the Biden admin of censoring social media companies. In the lawsuit he helped bring, he failed to prove that claim. Yet he continues to repeat it. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c100l6jrjvno - https://bsky.app/profile/jenna-m-norton.bsky.social/post/3mkbbxxxjsg2u 

Former NIGMS director Jeremy Berg has said he will have a reaction later. I will update this post when he does. 

Update, 25 April 2026: Jeremy Berg has, as promised, delivered a thread on Bhattacharya’s chat. As with Jenna Norton’s posts, I will show a few excerpts:

(1) Replication actions

b. NIH starting a journal or something similar for posting replication studies (details unclear).

Most important to me: He seems to see this as a major force in changing academic culture. unless it leads to increased funding chances, I don’t see this.

2. Unified strategy for funding

He made statements that NIH staff just focus on funding papers that are likely to lead to high impact publications and that institutes do not worry about their overall missions, just one grant at a time.

This is ignorant nonsense.

 (4) The CDC report on COVID vaccine efficacy

He said that there were clear methodological flaws and the moderator (also an economist) agreed.

If that is the case, then he should have issued a clear statement to that effort with timeline for generating a more methodologically sound paper.

He cannot be so foolish as to not understand that HIS blocking a scheduled report related to COVID is going to be perceived as political given his history of weighing in on the political and policy issues around COVID, rather than purely scientific ones.

I was not surprised by his performance. It was largely was could have been anticipated.

I was pleasantly surprised that the moderator did push back on some issues.

But overall I don’t think this provide much useful information to the important topics under discussion.

By including him at this forum in this format, the National Academies of Science provided him a platform without substantial constraints or opportunities for others to fact check him or present other perspectives.

I, among others, would have been glad to do this.

I think the National Academies are damaging their reputation in an attempt to curry favor from political figures or to appease funders.

I am disappointed and hope (and will try to insist) that they will take different approaches in the future.

Update, 26 April 2026: Dorothy Bishop has a blog post about Bhattacharya’s performance as a friendly outsider (i.e., not in the United States). Excerpts:

I think that NASEM was right to include the Bhattacharya/Oster chat in the meeting for two reasons. First, I've attended endless sessions on research integrity with great speakers, but most of us feel powerless to actually do anything, other than call for action from funders and governments. Even if you don’t like what your government is doing, it can be helpful to know what solutions they will consider. 

I’m sure the organizers will be criticized for the fact that only one audience question was asked in this session, but I doubt that I could have done any better than Oster... Bhattacharya revealed himself as someone who gets very uncomfortable when confronted with inconsistencies in his behaviour or views. 

Bishop also provides a rough transcript of the event. Scroll down to the end of her post.

Related posts

The National Academies get ratio’d on research integrity workshops

The National Academies get ratio’d on research integrity workshops

The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics is showing — again — that they are not up to the moment.

Researcher Katy Milkman has organized a Zoom workshop for the National Academies on research integrity, featuring some speakers who have been accused of having little integrity themselves. 

I examined the full schedule, and I have to say: the program is a strange mix. Some people have great records on speaking about integrity! Elizabeth Bik, the master of image duplication detection? Yes. Ivan Oransky, who runs the Retraction Watch blog? Yes. Michael Dougherty, whose helped to reform career incentives at his department to align with DORA principles? Yes!

Others... do not.

The poster (pictured) mentions Jay Bhattacharya and Emily Oster, both of whom gained prominence for saying institutions overreacted to the covid pandemic. The poster doesn’t mention the format: It is a 45 minute “fireside chat” with Oster interviewing Bhattacharya.

Probably due to this poster featuring these two “covid contrarians” so prominently, the first post was ratio’d quite severely, with over 100 comments, 10 reposts, and about 20 likes as of this writing. 

In response to criticism, Milkman wrote:

To everyone responding with vitriol: please come! Our goal in choosing speakers was to platform both popular and unpopular figures advocating for scientific reforms to spark productive conversations across divides! If this makes you angry, come engage in dialogue — that’s how we improve.

Um. If you’re all about “engaging in dialogue, that’s how we improve,” you may not want to call the comments, “vitriol.”

The ratio suggests Milkman’s stepped in it even worse the second time. 444 comments, 158 reposts, and 24 likes as of this writing.

 A co-organizer, Jeremy Freese, wrote (original emphasis):

To me, the viewpoint of the Director of NIH on the main issues of the workshop has obvious and considerable relevance for contemporary science policy. ... To me, it would have been both an abuse of the role and nutty hubris for a co-organizer to try to assert that the Director of NIH would be an improper participant in this event, or that there should be a “Bluesky veto” over speakers.

Two things. Maybe three.

1. This is supposed to be a workshop on “social and behavioural sciences.” Bhattachayra leads the NIH, which mainly does medical research, not social and behavioural research. Yes, I get that the NIH has a wide remit and supports some social and behavioural research, but it is not the major function of the agency.
2. Why invite someone whose work is agency oversight, which is largely removed from research integrity? Why not invite someone whose whole job is research integrity? The NIH has an entire Office of Research Integrity. It’s listed right there on the label!
3. Saying that people posting criticisms are asking for a “Bluesky veto” is a convenient way to dismiss what your colleagues are telling you.* I haven’t read everything that Freese read, but I haven’t seen any posts yet saying, “The event should be cancelled because Bluesky users say so.” What I have seen are people saying, “This event is extraordinarily unlikely to get the productive dialogue that the organizers say they want. It is more likely that this event will platform people who are actively undermining research.” It is weird that organizers who keep touting the “Let’s air out our differences and find a way forward” keep dismissing people and only minimally engaging in dialogue.

* Old joke: “When one person calls you a jackass, that person is obviously an ignorant fool. When ten people call you a jackass, maybe you should think about getting fitted for a saddle.”

Cole Donovan reposted with the comment:

Again, as a former National Academies program director familiar with the rules for these as well as how things should go, the issue isn’t whether the NIH director is an appropriate invitee or not to an event. The issue is whether the event’s design is one where disagreements result in dialogue.

I get that organizers put a lot of effort into creating what they thought would be a good event on a worthwhile topic. It’s hard to admit mistakes. It’s hard to course correct mere days before the event. I understand that they don’t want to undercut their own work just a couple of weeks before the workshop. 

But the whole thing positively smells like what we have gotten from the National Academies over and over again: absolute refusal to acknowledge that American science is in crisis. And that crisis is being caused by the federal government. And that people like Jay Bhattacharya are simply not leading American science out of the crisis.

Sometimes it feels like the National Academies would rather risk a hundred doctoral programs be cut today rather than risk one congressional representative saying something bad about them five years from now.

Related posts

Ignoring catastrophe: The state of science in 2025, according to the National Academies of Sciences

External links

PDF of workshop program 

Why Do Rightwing Foundations Fund Emily Oster’s Work on COVID and Parenting? 

Politics and pendulums

A lot of people, and organizations, assuming the status quo is immutable. So they talk like politics is all swings and roundabouts. Some days you’re up, some days you’re down. That the “pendulum will swing back.”

But societies aren’t pendulums governed by physical laws.

They ignore that many societies have undergone irreversible changes. Often sudden, sometime calamitous.

Organizations, in particular, get so accustomed to “normal times” that they have no crisis mode. 

I am reminded of this because Science magazine – who I have often criticized for underplaying threats to American science – is at it again. This week’s editorial argues that the real wins for science are all quiet backroom deals, and that loud protests don’t get stuff done. I’d analyze it more, but luckily, Joshua Weitz already did that.

No more H1-B visas in Texas for a year

Reuters is reporting that Texas governor Greg Abbot is telling Texas’s public universities and other agencies to stop asking for new H1-B visas. It will last until March 2027. 

I held that visa once, at a public university, which ultimately allowed me to work in Texas for 19 years.  Even though I haven't lived in Texas for a few years now, this feels sucky.

External links

Texas governor halts new H-1B visa petitions by state agencies, public universities 

Crisis? What crisis? More on the National Academies’ “State of the Science 2025”

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. 

Ignoring catastrophe: The state of science in 2025, according to the National Academies of Sciences

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. 

McNutt 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 ignores that 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.

#4: Build the STEM workforce of the future. “We can’t fill the jobs we have now.” McNutt claims, which leads me to ask why the hell so many scientists cannot find jobs.

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.) 

Related posts 

Okay, stop. Saying “science isn’t political” will not keep science safe from political attacks 

External links

The State of the Science Address 2025 

Public trust in scientists and views on their role in policymaking 

Teachers are not OK 

US science is being wrecked, and its leadership is fighting the last war 

National Academies, staggering from Trump cuts, on brink of dramatic downsizing 

How to shape public opinion

 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?

 

The missing science solidarity

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Most scientists just want to work and aren’t “into politics.” Most fields are relatively unaffected.
4. Many scientists also feel an instinctive aversion to advocacy, worried that it is not scientific or objective enough.
5. 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.

Related posts

Okay, stop. Saying “science isn’t political” will not keep science safe from political attacks 

Scientific societies are failing the moment by scrubbing diversity from their websites without explanation 

External links

Christina Pagel on Bluesky

Michael Crighton: The Lost Opportunity 

Subtleties of sex in sticklebacks

Daniel Bolnick wrote a thread on Bluesky about the biology of sex that I thought would make a great blog post. So I saved him the trouble and compiled it.

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.

Scientific societies are failing the moment by scrubbing diversity from their websites without explanation

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.

Worst week for science ever

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.

Okay, stop. Saying “science isn’t political” will not keep science safe from political attacks

Advice from people with experience fighting powerful fascist opponents: “Do not comply in advance.”

In a new Science editorial, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine president Marcia McNutt starts complying well in advance. 

The editorial begins with blatant concern trolling:

I had become ever more concerned that science has fallen victim to the same political divisiveness tearing at the seams of American society.

Okay, stop. McNutt provides zero examples of supposed “divisiveness” of the scientific community. A recent Nature article showed exactly the opposite. The scientific community was strongly united in its preferred American election outcome: 86% favoured the losing candidate. I guess McNutt sees that as bad because it makes it harder for her to play nice with with administration of the winning candidate.

(The scientific community) must take a critical look at what responsibility it bears in science becoming politically contentious(.)

Okay, stop. Again, McNutt provides zero examples of scientists making science politically contentious. On the other hand, I can point to many examples of politicians who waded into scientific debates about the reality of whole branches of science (evolution, geology, climate science) and health care.

No, the problem (according to McNutt) is that we scientists don’t explain ourselves well. We don’t tell politicians and citizens about how we are just disinterested third parties.

(S)cience, at its most basic, is apolitical.

Okay, stop. I know this is a popular claim, but it’s time to put this into the ground and bury it six feet deep. There is a very good Nature podcast series that takes this claim apart. Claiming “We’re not political” is a fiction that favours those who are politically privileged. McNutt would have had a much stronger case if she had said that science is not partisan. Or that reality is apolitical.

But science is an organized profession done by humans, so science is political.

It is strange to say that science is apolitical when I see the two entangled all the time.

McNutt continues:

Whether conservative or liberal, citizens ignore the nature of reality at their peril.

Okay, stop. Many elected politicians and citizens are just fine with ignoring the nature of reality – as long as they personally are not affected. And those who are personally affected, in genuine peril, may not be able to generate enough political clout to change policy to make themselves safe on their own. They need allies.

McNutt’s argument that “the arc of the scientific universe is long, but it bends towards truth” is callous. It seems like her view is that scientists should passively sit on the sidelines, presenting data but never advocating, while watch people make the same mistakes about discredited claims that actively harm people over and over.

I can’t help but wonder where McNutt has been for the last decade or so when she can, apparently in all seriousness, write a sentence like this about climate science: 

It is up to society and its elected leadership to decide how to balance these options, including the use of renewable energy, climate adaptation, carbon capture, or even various interventions that reflect sunlight back into space.

Okay, stop.

Does McNutt understand that the incoming elected leadership repeatedly stated that their option is, “Climate science is all a hoax. We don’t need to do anything”?

Does McNutt understand that elected leaders can use their power to take actions that are not supported by the majority of society or scientific evidence?

Should scientists simply accept that their elected leadership is condemning millions to ever greater misery every day this denial of reality goes on?

McNutt is just trying to get her organization out of the line of fire of an incoming government that is more overtly hostile to science than maybe any other American government ever. 

The NAS stands ready, as it always has, to advise the incoming administration.

While it is the job of a civil servant to work with a new boss after every election, most scientists are not civil servants. They are not obligated to support a new government. They can, and should, do much more than just provide data and hope that elected leaders eventually come around to face scientific reality. If anyone is not coming around to face reality – the political reality, in this case – it’s McNutt.

External links

Science is neither red nor blue

The US election is monumental for science, say Nature readers — here’s why

“Stick to the science”: When science gets political (Three part podcast series)

I told you the Lemon test was important

I’ve been expecting new bills in the US that re-introduce “intelligent design” into schools. Reason? The Kennedy v. Bremeton School District ruling in 2022. 

Surprisingly, a lot of people do not seem to think this is likely.

But state legislators sure noticed the court case.

You may have heard that there was a bill introduced into the Texas legislature to require schools to display the Ten Commandments of the Bible (88R SB1515). It’s passed the Senate.

The analysis of the bill includes a section on the intent of the bill. And it’s super clear: the bill is being pushed because the Kennedy ruling said the Supreme Court was abandoning the Lemon test.

This legislation only became legally feasible with the United States Supreme Court's opinion last year in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 142 S. Ct. 2407 (2022), which overturned the Lemon test under the Establishment Clause (found in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971)) and instead provided a test of whether a governmental display of religious content comports with America's history and tradition.

If the loss of the Lemon test was an open invitation for lawmakers to display religion in schools, why on earth would they stop with displays? Why would you not start to push for religious instructions in public schools?

I think that “intelligent design” bill died

I’d been occasionally checking the West Virginia bill tracker for the progress of the “intelligent design” bill (Senate Bill 619) that made it out of the Senate’s education committee. Every time, I saw the bill still in the House Education Committee, so I thought it was still possible that it might move forward.

But the legislative session ended last month. The bill tracker makes no note the end of the session, which is why I missed it. The bill never make it out of committee for a vote.

I think that means the bill in its present form is done?

Related posts

That “intelligent design” bill hasn’t died yet

That “intelligent design” bill hasn’t died yet

Well, hell.

The pro “intelligent design” bill in West Virginia passed the Senate Education Committee.

The bill has now gone to the House Education Committee. The bill’s progress can be tracked on the West Virginia bill tracker. 

This Metro News article has more background on the bill, including the slightly strange fact that the bill was prompted by an idea from a high school student.

Committee chair Amy Grady, R-Mason, is leader sponsor and told the committee that the idea was brought to her by Hayden Hodge from Hurricane High.

Hodge appeared before the committee and said a teacher gave him the idea. The teacher wanted the option to teach ID alongside evolution.

“I am not in favor of getting rid of evolution,” Hodge said. And ID is not ultimately religious. (I hope this is Hodge’s opinion, not the reporter trying to state a fact. - ZF)

“I’m not asking for religion to be taught in classrooms, period,” Hodge said.

This is, of course, untrue. “Intelligent design” is a religious argument. This has been documented many times. We have the receipts. 

Reading the comments from the committee members is depressing. A retired science teacher was arguing in favour of this bill. In favour.

I’m glad the American Civil Liberties Union spoke out against the bill.

The bill made it out of committee with only one vote against it. The report doesn’t say who it was, but my hat is off to you, anonymous West Virginia senator.

External links

Senate education committee approves 4 bills including ‘intelligent design’ measure

‘Intelligent Design’ bill threatens science education in West Virginia

Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) decision clears way for new science education battles

I did not want this to be a blog post. 

Below is an article I first wrote back at the end of June. I thought this was important, and I submitted it over and over again (six times, I think?), trying to find a bigger venue than my blog to publish it in. No takers.

None of the editors disliked what I had written. Some even agreed it was timely. In a couple of cases, the sticking point seemed to be that I was not a lawyer. (How dare a mere biologist comment on a matter of law?!) But nobody said the analysis below is wrong.

I was reminded of this because Nature published an article on the Supreme Court’s “war on science.” (I did not submit this piece to Nature, thinking a UK based journal might not be the best home for a comment / analysis piece on US law. Oh well. Maybe I gave up too soon.) I admit I am surprised the Nature article does not mention the Kennedy ruling or the Lemon test, which has been key to court cases about the teaching of evolution. (Pictured: Alton Lemon, whose 1971 Supreme Court case gave us the “Lemon test.”)

My impression from trying to get this piece published? I feel like both the biological research communities and the science teaching communities are sleepwalking into disaster. The court did a rug pull on teaching evolution. Scientific communities are like cartoon characters after the rug has been pulled out from under them: suspended in mid-air, not realizing that in a moment they are going to come crashing down very hard, very fast.

Anyway, here’s the last version of the article I submitted before accepting its fate was just to be a blog post.

Unless there’s an editor reading this who is interested? (Hope springs eternal, I guess.)

 • • • • •

Abstract

For decades, teaching creationism in the United States was ruled unconstitutional because it violated the First Amendment of the US constitution. A recent US Supreme Court decision rejects the legal test that prevented teaching creationism in public classrooms. Educators should expect renewed efforts to insert creationism into public schools.

Keywords: evolution • creationism • Supreme Court of the United States • constitutional law • lawsuits

There is a long history of legal battles over teaching evolution in America. While many might have thought this settled after the Scopes “monkey trial” in 1925 (stirringly – if not always accurately – shown in the play Inherit the Wind and movie adaptations), there have been many legal challenges seeking either to limit instruction of science or to introduce religious concepts into science classrooms. Court rulings have consistently rejected arguments against teaching religion.

But a recent Supreme Court decision opens the path for new legal challenges that might allow the teaching of creationism, intelligent design, young Earth geology, or any number of other religious claims about the natural world.

The Supreme Court case Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022) did not concern science education. The issue was a football coach who prayed before his players. The court ruled in favor of the coach. But more important than whether the ruling favors religion is the justification the ruling. In its ruling for the praying coach, the Supreme Court explicitly rejected the so-called “Lemon test,” which had provided the legal footing for rejecting religious instruction in science classes.

The “Lemon test” refers to Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), a First Amendment case before the Supreme Court. The ruling established a three-part test for whether the state had violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment that forbids government from establishing a religion. Actions concerning religion were legal if (1) the rule had a secular purpose, (2) the main effect did not advance any particular religion, and (3) the actions did not excessively entangle the government with religion. All three of these considerations needed to be met for the action to be constitutional.

The Lemon test had been an important consideration three court cases concerning teaching of evolution. Arkansas tried to pass legislation that required evolution and “creation science” get equal time in schools. Maclean v. Arkansas Board of Education (1982) ruled that the law failed the Lemon test and was unconstitutional. That same decade, Louisiana tried to prohibit the teaching of evolution unless it was accompanied by “creation science.” Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) also ruled this as unconstitutional. Most recently, the Lemon test was used again in Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005), the only major court case on “intelligent design” (creationism with references to God stripped away in hopes that it could pass a court case). Intelligent design advocates lost this case resoundingly. The presiding judge described the board’s actions as “breathtaking inanity.” The ruling was so decisively opposed to the Dover School Board’s efforts to introduce intelligent design that it effectively killed all further efforts to introduce intelligent design into schools – until now.

In the Kennedy decision (2022), Judge Neil Gorsuch surprised court observers by claiming that the Supreme Court had “long ago abandoned” the Lemon test. Gorsuch called the Lemon test “abstract, and ahistorical.” Instead, his opinion argues that the Supreme Court should interpret the Establishment clause by “reference to historical practices and understandings.”

The move away from the Lemon test and towards history in the Kennedy decision is consistent with other recent decisions. The Kennedy decision came days after Dobbs v. Jackson (2022), in which the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which assured a right to an abortion. Both Kennedy and Dobbs concerned with religious issues, and both were justified by arguments about history and tradition. Critics pointed out that the court’s description of both history and current facts were selective.

The loss of the Lemon test is a precarious moment for science education. Despite a Supreme Court ruling that teaching creationism was unconstitutional, many parents and teachers have tried to insert some creationism into classrooms. People often make no pretense about their efforts: they want their religion taught in public schools. While such efforts were usually not fought in court, science educators were usually confident if they did, they were likely to win. Decades of precedent supported the idea that schools should teach science in science classes.

Science educators should be prepared for a legal system that no longer has their back.

These recent decisions by the Supreme Court confirm that the court is far further to the political right than it has been in decades and seeks to undo civil rights victories of the left. Judge Clarence Thomas wrote a supporting opinion for Dobbs that said that the Supreme Court should revisit cases like availability of contraception and marriage equality.

Conclusion

While the Kennedy decision was not specifically about science education, the loss of the Lemon test should be the writing on the wall for professional scientific and educational societies. Conservative parents, local school boards, and state boards of education have showed time and time again that they are determined and persistent in their efforts to have their religious beliefs taught in public schools alongside, or in place of, established science. Supporters for science education must be prepared for renewed legal battles to push creationism and other religious ideas into classrooms.

References

Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. 2022. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/21-418_i425.pdf

Lemon v. Kutzman. 1971. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep403/usrep403602/usrep403602.pdf

Maclean v. Arkansas Board of Education. 1982. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/529/1255/2354824/

Edwards v. Aguillard. 1987. https://www.loc.gov/item/usrep482578/

Kitzmiller v. Dover. 2005. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2426499-kitzmiller-v-dover-decision

Dobbs v. Jackson. 2022. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf

Prediction: American creationists will try again to get evolution out of schools

On Friday, the United States Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade, which was precedent for the nation-wide legal right to an abortion.

That sucks. 

I won’t pretend for an instant that I have anything particularly insightful to say about that particular case. But I do want to post something here about something this signals that are relevant to my own particular interests, namely science education.

It is clear that the US Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade because they could. Far right conservatives have been wanting this and threatening this for years. It was always clear that as soon as there was conservative majority on the court, Roe v. Wade would be under threat. And now it’s done.

There was not a reasoned legal decision. This was a partisan power play to give far right conservatives what they wanted.

There is every reason to think that far right conservatives are going send a host of cases going to the Supreme Court. Andy Kim reported hearing, “Let’s keep this going now” on the floor of the House of Representatives. 

Judge Clarence Thomas (who will not bury a hatchet) practically invited it when he laid out three cases that he thinks the court should revisit. They are all high on the conservative wish list to repeal and all concern people’s sex lives. (Which is, by the way, super creepy.)

But Edwards v. Aguillard has to on the far right conservative hit list. 

That’s the ruling that said it was unconstitutional to teach creationism (or “creation science” as it was called for a while) in science classes in US K-12 public schools because it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. That said, “states can’t get promote one particular religion over the others.”

No, Edwards v. Aguillard hasn’t been mentioned by name by Thomas or others. I haven’t seen anyone else bring this up yet. But I would bet that creationists are already looking to line up court cases in hope of getting the issue on the docket of the Supreme Court. 

Given that Kitzmiller v. Dover never got to the national stage, it wouldn’t surprise me if the Discovery Institute or some other entity decided to make another run at making “intelligent design” legal in schoolrooms.

Creationism is important to the same far right, religious fundamentalist conservatives who have been spearheading the assault on Roe v. Wade. Mike the Mad Biologist has often written about “Nothing in movement conservatism makes sense except in the light of creationism.” (2012, 2019, to give a couple of examples.) My take is similar. The tactics used by creationists for decades were eventually adopted by the wider US conservative political machine as their default mode of operation.

The teaching of creationism will be come up, and soon, if the court continues the way it’s been acting.

This week, the national meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolution has been happening and I’ve asked a couple of times if anyone is even talking about Edwards v. Aguillard. No answer yet. This makes me worry that my colleagues are going to be shocked and appalled if this goes to court and they lose, because they won’t have taken any action or prepared for such an eventuality.

This is small potatoes compare to the big ticket fantasies that conservatives have (i.e., terrorize people who are not white conservative Christian fundamentalists). An enormous amount of damage could be done well before the courts get to repealing a science education case.

But it’s not nothing, either. 

Attacks on education undercut the future you can even imagine, never mind the future you can build.

Edit: On reflection, it might not be creationism that goes up for a court challenge. It might be Engel v. Vitals, which ruled against prayer in schools. Or something else about Christianity (disguised as generic “religion”) in public schools. Because it’s one of their big bugbears. They know the power of public education in shaping culture and they want to influence it.

Update, 27 June 2022: Well, this morning’s ruling on Kennedy v. Bremerton School District seems relevant to this post. In particular, the Supreme Court rejects the so-called “Lemon test” that I have seen cited consistently in cases regarding the teaching of creationism.

This is getting out of my knowledge base very fast, but here is one early reaction:

(T)he Supreme Court effectively grants special, heightened First Amendment rights to religious speech, allowing public school teachers to pray on the job while denying most other public employees basic free speech rights.

And from David Shiffman:

I went to public school in a very blue part of a purple state.

As a Jew, I requested that our music class “holiday concert” include at least one song that’s not a Christmas song.

A Christian classmate threatened to murder me.

Today the Supreme Court sided with him, not me.

This seems to be a very clear move towards more religion in public schools. And that would include science classes.

Update 2, 27 June 2022: Something that puzzled me in the decision was verbiage that the Supreme Court had long ago abandoned the Lemon test or words to that effect. Steve Vladek disputes this.

As Leah notes, the conservative majority in Kennedy overrules SCOTUS’s major prior Establishment Clause precedent in Lemon, but tries to pretend that the Court had already overruled it in prior cases (spoiler alert: it hadn’t [Emphasis added.]). This is sketchy even if you think it's correct.

And other people seem to agree. This isn’t ye olde coute rulyngs, but the first time the Supreme Court has explicitly rejected the Lemon test. Tweets here and here, for instance.

What the American furore over critical race theory means for science education

 

Well, that escalated quickly.

In the last few months, “critical race theory” has gone from an academic idea mostly (but not exclusively) taught in law school to a flashpoint item that American right wingers are willing to go to the mattresses over. 

There have been ample shouting in school board meetings.

Nikole Hannah-Jones was denied tenure after winning a Pulitzer prize and a McArthur award for the 1619 Project. Not because her colleagues voted against her, but because the normally quite Board of Trustees voted against her.

Critical race theory is not my area of expertise (please forgive me, social science and humanities scholars, for musing here), but watching this feels very much like something I am familiar with and have watched closely for a long time: the fight over teaching evolution.

I noted on Twitter that a lot of the same forces that traditionally mobilize against the teaching of evolution are now mobilizing against the teaching of critical race theory. Laws are successfully getting passed in state legislatures. And while one side is willing to show up in large numbers and shout at school boards, the other... has not been so active.

There’s a lot of reasons for the lopsided reaction, bit I can’t help but wonder if people who are not freaking out over critical race theory are not bringing the same fire to the fight is because they look at the laws that are being passed, think, “That’s going to court and the laws will get overturned.”

A few things make this sound plausible on the face of it. 

Critical race theory isn’t taught in K-12 schools, so prohibiting the teaching of something that isn’t taught is bizarre.

But more to my point here, this is what happened with the teaching of evolution. There was often widespread political and public support for laws that tried to regulate the reaching of evolution. But time and again in the US, the courts have said, “No, those anti-evolution laws are unconstitutional.”

I do not feel extremely confident that an American court case would strike down the laws prohibiting critical race theory. 

While regulating or banning the teaching of evolution and banning the teaching of critical race theory are both pet projects of the political right in the US, the arguments over evolution are inextricably intertwined with religious beliefs. A government promoting particular religions (mainly fundamentalist Protestant Christianity) runs afoul of the establishment clause of the first amendment of the US constitution. That has been a key legal aspect of all the cases.

The opposition to critical race theory is not as clearly driven by religion, which makes the legal issues very different. Even if the end result – states dictating what can and cannot be taught – looks very much the same.

This is why academics of any stripe, including my fellow scientists, need to be paying very close attention to how these fights over critical race theory play out. 

University instructors have mostly taken it for granted that they can teach subjects as they see fit. The fights over critical race theory are a test case.Climate science is another area that many on the right would probably love to dictate how it is taught. Ditto anything around sexual and gender diversity. 

If those laws are not smacked down fast and hard, whether in the courts or by political and public action, this could be the start of a sustained squeeze on how universities teach in the US. And America’s reputation for its universities in the world will suffer.

Picture from here.

Why people don’t believe in science and the importance of criticism

Yesterday, Dr. Anthony Fauci said:

One of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are—for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not understandable—they just don’t believe science.

 

Fauci is operating in a political environment, so I think he is reluctant to list the many reasons we know why people don’t believe science.

People don’t believe in the science of evolution because of religions.

People don’t believe in global warming / climate change because of a misinformation campaign prompted by fear of communism.

People don’t believe the Earth is spherical because they watch a lot of YouTube videos.

People don’t believe in COVID-19 because of Fox News and the current US president.

But all of these examples boil down to social influence – or, to put it another way, peer pressure. Humans are social animals. We pay a lot of attention to what other people think, say, and do.

In the information / belief / influence ecosystem, professional science is relatively new (maybe a few hundred years compared to thousands of years for some religions), relatively small (Rupert Murdoch’s wealth, ~US$17.3 billion, exceeds the entire annual budget of the National Science Foundation, currently ~US$7.8 billion), and disorganized as shit (“committees top to bottom”).

We’re lucky that science gets things done. Because of that, we are sometimes able to overcome those disadvantages and punch above our weight. Honestly, it’s sometimes surprising that science has as much sway as it does.

Science is not a natural, intuitive way of thinking. There’s a reason the training for scientists goes on for so long. It doesn’t take a long time just because you have to learn a lot of facts, it takes a long time because you have to practice the patterns of thinking so that they become habitual. (“What are the alternative explanations? Does this prediction really flow from that hypothesis? And what do those error bars show, anyway?”)

All of the above (most of which I tweeted earlier) got me thinking about how one of the keys of science’s success, the reason we punch above our weight, is that science institutionalized and valued behaviour that is kind of anti-social.

Criticism.

Because we are social animals, we do not like criticism. We feel attacked. We get defensive. We try to shut it down all the time. (In my many years of blogging, the only times I got aggressive emails about posts were from professors who didn’t like that I was commenting on student posters. It wasn’t even criticism of them.)

Science normalizes criticism in a way that a lot of other institutions don’t. A lot of institutions place a lot of value on reinforcing their existing beliefs. There may be traditions of criticism and examination within that, but there are usually some lines that you don’t cross if you want to stay part of that community.

Author David Brin like to say, “Criticism is the only known antidote to error.” I think there’s a lot of truth to that. We have to recognize how fundamental its role in science is.

And, as I said above, we have to recognize that learning how to deliver and take criticism without destroying the social glue that allows the scientific community to function is not a natural, normal thing to do. It is something that you need to learn, a habit you need to develop, and a skill you need to practice and improve.

External links

My Twitter thread that started this post