How the Left is Corrupting Science

Evolutionists used to complain endlessly on how religious believers were corrupting science by promoting Intelligent Design. It was all a big hoax. It never got into the schools or academia in any significant way.

The Skeptical Inquirer has a new paper:

Biology faces a grave threat from “progressive” politics that are changing the way our work is done, delimiting areas of biology that are taboo and will not be funded by the government or published in scientific journals, stipulating what words biologists must avoid in their writing, and decreeing how biology is taught to students and communicated to other scientists and the public through the technical and popular press. We wrote this article not to argue that biology is dead, but to show how ideology is poisoning it. The science that has brought us so much progress and understanding—from the structure of DNA to the green revolution and the design of COVID-19 vaccines—is endangered by political dogma strangling our essential tradition of open research and scientific communication. And because much of what we discuss occurs within academic science, where many scientists are too cowed to speak their minds, the public is largely unfamiliar with these issues. Sadly, by the time they become apparent to everyone, it might be too late.

Scientific papers are being blocked because of politics. We know the problem is bad, because papers are even being retracted because of leftist politics. Quillette reports:

In 2020, five psychologists asked the editors of PNAS to retract their study of racial bias in police shootings. PNAS, which stands for the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, is one of the most prestigious multidisciplinary journals in the world. Retraction is an outcome no scholar wishes to experience because it signifies a serious research error and, as such, entails considerable reputational damage.

Some observers have suggested that the retraction was politically motivated. The study, which showed no evidence of racial bias in police shootings, had been used in political debates in ways that challenged calls for radical police reform; calls that had grown louder in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. Heather Mac Donald, a research fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, claimed the article was retracted because she had cited it in a congressional hearing and in essays published in the Wall Street Journal and other right-leaning media outlets.

Another paper was retracted because it drew attention to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD).

This is being compared to Soviet Lysenkoism. At least the Soviets thought that what they were doing was right. And they were not grooming small children.