Human Behavior Journal goes Woke

Nature, perhaps the world's leading group of science publications, announces:

Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans

New ethics guidance addresses potential harms for human population groups who do not participate in research but may be harmed by its publication.

So the Nature Human Behavior journal will now reject papers based on these principles:

1. Content that is premised upon the assumption of inherent biological, social, or cultural superiority or inferiority of one human group over another based on race, ethnicity, national or social origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, political or other beliefs, age, disease, (dis)ability, or other socially constructed or socially relevant groupings (hereafter referred to as socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings).

2. Content that undermines — or could reasonably be perceived to undermine — the rights and dignities of an individual or human group on the basis of socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings.

3. Content that includes text or images that directly or indirectly disparage a person or group on the basis of socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings.

4. Submissions that embody singular, privileged perspectives, which are exclusionary of a diversity of voices in relation to socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings, and which purport such perspectives to be generalisable and/or assumed.

Steve Pinker and other prominent scientists criticize it here and here. Separately, the same ones attack a NY Times op-ed denying the maternal instinct. These scientists are all old and retired, and academia is not producing truth-tellers anymore.

This seems to be saying: We are tired be being called racist for publishing research that Black people are inferior. So we are going to ban articles that even hint at the facts. Because George Floyd, we have to be more woke.

Human behavior does vary among racial and ethnic group. Good research about it is needed for social policy. We will not get it anymore. You might have to read century-old papers to get the truth.

Update: Noah Carl writes:

The reason I want to congratulate the editors of Nature Human Behaviour is that they are being open and honest about a policy that most social science journals already have. While many commentators have rightly criticised the absurd editorial, they seem to be operating under the illusion that it’s a one-off. It isn’t. Many journals follow exactly the same policy – they just don’t say so, or if they do, they hide it in the small print.

Even Intelligence, a supposedly controversial journal, has guidelines for the “use of inclusive language”. These specify that submissions must “contain nothing which might imply that one individual is superior to another on the grounds of age, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, disability or health condition.” ...

And it isn’t just journals. The owners of some datasets explicitly forbid you from testing certain hypotheses. To access data held by the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium, you now have to promise that you “will not use these data to make comparisons of genetically predicted phenotype levels across ancestral groups”.