How political ideology corrupted science

Spectator

6 days ago

Science is no longer regarded or respected as an objective pursuit, one in which the principle of impartiality is sought with due diligence. This is the inference we can make from comments made by Ella Al-Shamahi, presenter of the new BBC science series, Human. 'We do have to be a little honest,' she says, 'to many, it seems like left-leaning atheists have a monopoly on science.'
Science as presented to the public has taken a decidedly left-wing turn in recent years, and in many cases has been contaminated by hyper-liberal ideology
Her remarks, reported in the Sunday Times, echo those made earlier this month by the Wellcome Trust chief executive, John-Arne Røttingen, who said that scientists now had a 'responsibility' to demonstrate why research from across the political spectrum matters, in light of the fact that the 'research community overall is more on the progressive/left-wing side.'
Al-Shami's words are a rare admission of a well-known development. They confirm what many have come to recognise: science as presented to the public has taken a decidedly left-wing turn in recent years, and in many cases has been contaminated by hyper-liberal ideology.
This became evident to many after the death of the biologist, entomologist and polymath E.O. Wilson in December 2021, when Scientific American published a scolding obituary of this titan of our times. 'With the death of biologist E.O. Wilson on Sunday, I find myself again reflecting on the complicated legacies of scientists whose works are built on racist ideas', began the article. It damned his 'problematic' work and legacy, chiefly because his 1975 masterpiece, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, suggested that human societies in many ways reflect innate human characteristics. While this notion has always been largely objectionable to the traditional left, it is utterly intolerable to modern-day hyper-liberals.
Scientific American was one of the greatest casualties of the Great Awokening of ten years ago. It abandoned all pretence at impartiality last September by endorsing Kamala Harris to be US president, having previously jettisoned most claims to seriousness in 2021, when it published an article urging readers to reject the Jedi religion, based on the Star Wars franchise, on the basis that this quasi-faith was 'prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution.'
That article was merely an egregious warning that a global scientific establishment had become captured and compromised. A far more serious symptom of this development was how health institutions worldwide came to accept and then propagate the non-scientific, non-empirical trans ideology of 'gender self-identification'. While the NHS today still states that, 'Gender identity is a way to describe a person's innate sense of their own gender', the World Health Organisation's guidelines parrot the same subjective mantra: 'Gender identity refers to a person's deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender'. In 2023 John Hopkins University took trans ideology to its ultimate, absurd yet inevitable conclusion, when in releasing a new glossary of terms for clinicians and the general public, it defined a lesbian as 'a non-man attracted to non-men'.
The corruption of scientific discourse and public instruction when it comes to the fact that human beings are divided into two sexes is one of the alarming signs of a global scientific and academic community that has become degraded by politics. The profusion and contamination of wokery, with its other obsessions of race and hurtful words, has been equally as conspicuous. In 2017 Professor Rochelle Gutierrez from the University of Illinois made the claim that 'on many levels, mathematics operates as whiteness.' In 2020 the Journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry produced new guidelines to 'minimise the risk of publishing inappropriate or otherwise offensive content'.
This language shows how postmodernist relativism has spread into the scientific field – the very last place it deserves to belong. It's something Richard Dawkins has long-been attuned to and exasperated by, having written in River Out of Eden of those who insisted that science was merely a Western origin myth: 'Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite.' One of Dawkins's most recent interventions has been against attempts to include Maori 'ways of knowing' into science classes in New Zealand.
Science can't but help be influenced by the politics of its time. It's why 'scientific racism' flourished in the 19th century. It's why a previous generation of deranged leftists, those in charge of the Soviet Union, denied the mainstream theory of evolution, becoming beholden instead to the Lamarckian delusion that organisms could pass to their offspring traits acquired in their own lifetimes.
Even if science can never attain a purely God-like perspective on the world, we should always strive for objectivity. Examples from history should remind us to forever be on guard against our own unconscious bias.