The New Evolution Deniers

Evolutionary biology has always been controversial. Not controversial among biologists, but controversial among the general public. This is largely because Darwin’s theory directly contradicted the supernatural accounts of human origins rooted in religious tradition and replaced them with fully natural ones. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has described evolution as a sort of “universal acid” that “eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.” Fearing this corrosive idea, opposition in the US to evolution mainly came from Right-wing evangelical Christians who believed God created life in its present form, as described in Genesis.

In the 1990s and 2000s there were repeated attempts by evangelicals to ban evolution in public schools or teach the so-called “controversy” by including Intelligent Design—the belief that life is too complex to have evolved without the aid of some “Intelligent Designer” (i.e. God)—in the biology curriculum alongside evolution. But these attempts failed when scientists demonstrated in court that Intelligent Design was nothing more than Biblical Creationism gussied up in scientific-sounding prose. Since then, however, Creationism and Intelligent Design have lost a tremendous amount of momentum and influence. But while these right-wing anti-evolution movements withered to irrelevancy, a much more cryptic form of left-wing evolution denialism has been slowly growing.

At first, left-wing pushback to evolution appeared largely in response to the field of human evolutionary psychology. Since Darwin, scientists have successfully applied evolutionary principles to understand the behavior of animals, often with regard to sex differences. However, when scientists began applying their knowledge of the evolutionary underpinnings of animal behavior to humans, the advancing universal acid began to threaten beliefs held sacrosanct by the Left. The group that most fervently opposed, and still opposes, evolutionary explanations for behavioral sex differences in humans were/are social justice activists. Evolutionary explanations for human behavior challenge their a priori commitment to “Blank Slate” psychology—the belief that male and female brains in humans start out identical and that all behavior, sex-linked or otherwise, is entirely the result of differences in socialization.


https://quillette.com/2018/11/30/the-new-evolution-deniers/

The last paragraph there is a total load of bullshit...

Making false claims against "the Left",  as stating that all left-wingers supposedly believe in the crappola that he/she posted there..

When I will warrant that a good 70 -->> 80% of genuine lefties don't give any truck to that kind of extremist bullshit.

Another obvious flaw to these far-right-wing wankers attempts at disabusing all left-leaning people, is how they make these broad false allegations against that majority of that sector of society that simply doesn't agree with their far-right agendas --  irrespective of whether their opponents are genuine lefties, hardcore commies, 'feminazis', moderates, greens, or totally 'out there' anarchists,  they arrogantly lump all those opponents together into one amorphous and unidentified mob that they then ignorantly label as "the Left"..

Funny how he can't name a single person behind this...

Ben Reilly wrote:Funny how he can't name a single person behind this...

Well if you got out in the real world, there is plenty in the gender studies field making these absurd claims

You as seen earlier today, also falling into this category

Ben Reilly wrote:Funny how he can't name a single person behind this...

Maybe you should actually click on the many links highlighted within the article. They have a line under them, to make it easy to stand out for the clueless lefty

My liberal friends sometimes ask me why I don’t devote more of my science journalism to the sins of the Right. It’s fine to expose pseudoscience on the left, they say, but why aren’t you an equal-opportunity debunker? Why not write about conservatives’ threat to science?

My friends don’t like my answer: because there isn’t much to write about. Conservatives just don’t have that much impact on science. I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the “party of science.” But I’ve done my homework. I’ve read the Left’s indictments, including Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties?

Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced? Yes, the book reveals that Republican creationists exist, but they don’t affect the biologists or anthropologists studying evolution. Yes, George W. Bush refused federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but that hardly put a stop to it (and not much changed after Barack Obama reversed the policy). Mooney rails at scientists and politicians who oppose government policies favored by progressives like himself, but if you’re looking for serious damage to the enterprise of science, he offers only three examples.

All three are in his first chapter, during Mooney’s brief acknowledgment that leftists “here and there” have been guilty of “science abuse.” First, there’s the Left’s opposition to genetically modified foods, which stifled research into what could have been a second Green Revolution to feed Africa. Second, there’s the campaign by animal-rights activists against medical researchers, whose work has already been hampered and would be devastated if the activists succeeded in banning animal experimentation. Third, there’s the resistance in academia to studying the genetic underpinnings of human behavior, which has cut off many social scientists from the recent revolutions in genetics and neuroscience. Each of these abuses is far more significant than anything done by conservatives, and there are plenty of others. The only successful war on science is the one waged by the Left.

The danger from the Left does not arise from stupidity or dishonesty; those failings are bipartisan. Some surveys show that Republicans, particularly libertarians, are more scientifically literate than Democrats, but there’s plenty of ignorance all around. Both sides cherry-pick research and misrepresent evidence to support their agendas. Whoever’s in power, the White House plays politics in appointing advisory commissions and editing the executive summaries of their reports. Scientists of all ideologies exaggerate the importance of their own research and seek results that will bring them more attention and funding.

But two huge threats to science are peculiar to the Left—and they’re getting worse.

The first threat is confirmation bias, the well-documented tendency of people to seek out and accept information that confirms their beliefs and prejudices. In a classic study of peer review, 75 psychologists were asked to referee a paper about the mental health of left-wing student activists. Some referees saw a version of the paper showing that the student activists’ mental health was above normal; others saw different data, showing it to be below normal. Sure enough, the more liberal referees were more likely to recommend publishing the paper favorable to the left-wing activists. When the conclusion went the other way, they quickly found problems with its methodology.

Scientists try to avoid confirmation bias by exposing their work to peer review by critics with different views, but it’s increasingly difficult for liberals to find such critics. Academics have traditionally leaned left politically, and many fields have essentially become monocultures, especially in the social sciences, where Democrats now outnumber Republicans by at least 8 to 1. (In sociology, where the ratio is 44 to 1, a student is much likelier to be taught by a Marxist than by a Republican.) The lopsided ratio has led to another well-documented phenomenon: people’s beliefs become more extreme when they’re surrounded by like-minded colleagues. They come to assume that their opinions are not only the norm but also the truth.

Groupthink has become so routine that many scientists aren’t even aware of it. Social psychologists, who have extensively studied conscious and unconscious biases against out-groups, are quick to blame these biases for the underrepresentation of women or minorities in the business world and other institutions. But they’ve been mostly oblivious to their own diversity problem, which is vastly larger. Democrats outnumber Republicans at least 12 to 1 (perhaps 40 to 1) in social psychology, creating what Jonathan Haidt calls a “tribal-moral community” with its own “sacred values” about what’s worth studying and what’s taboo.

“Morality binds and blinds,” says Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University and author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. “Having common values makes a group cohesive, which can be quite useful, but it’s the last thing that should happen to a scientific field. Progressivism, especially anti-racism, has become a fundamentalist religion, complete with anti-blasphemy laws.”

Last year, one of the leading scientific journals, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, published an article by Haidt and five colleagues documenting their profession’s lack of ideological diversity. It was accompanied by commentaries from 63 other social scientists, virtually all of whom, even the harshest critics, accepted the authors’ conclusion that the lack of political diversity has harmed the science of social psychology. The authors and the commentators pointed to example after example of how the absence of conservatives has blinded researchers to flaws in their work, particularly when studying people’s ideology and morality.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/real-war-science-14782.html

More to read on the link

WhoseYourWolfie wrote:

The last paragraph there is a total load of bullshit...

Making false claims against "the Left",  as stating that all left-wingers supposedly believe in the crappola that he/she posted there..

When I will warrant that a good 70 -->> 80% of genuine lefties don't give any truck to that kind of extremist bullshit.

Another obvious flaw to these far-right-wing wankers attempts at disabusing all left-leaning people, is how they make these broad false allegations against that majority of that sector of society that simply doesn't agree with their far-right agendas --  irrespective of whether their opponents are genuine lefties, hardcore commies, 'feminazis', moderates, greens, or totally 'out there' anarchists,  they arrogantly lump all those opponents together into one amorphous and unidentified mob that they then ignorantly label as "the Left"..

Didge is very much like Trump, only instead of calling what he dislikes fake news, he calls it the left. It's a nice, specific adversary, making the world and easy black-and-white.

The left is also guilty of unscientific dogma

The left likes to pride itself as being firmly on the side of science, scoffing at conservative questioning of climate change, pollution, and evolution. But while Liberals are certainly au fait with evolution, they’re far less accepting of the evidence when it challenges their own ideology.

In areas where left-wing opinions contradict scientific evidence, there’s an unfortunate tendency to suggest that such scientific research is morally problematic. This speaks to a common trope on the left: their views aren’t simply accurate, but moral. Though those on the left are quick to point to right-wing scientific illiteracy, they’re often steadfast in their refusal to recognize their own dogma.


I saw this play out recently after reporting on the widespread myth that chemical imbalances cause depression. Thanks to a dearth of credible evidence, psychiatrists no longer ascribe to this theory. Scientists know both biological and social factors contribute to depression; they simply don’t yet know exactly which biological conditions create depressive symptoms. Similarly, though antidepressants are a huge help to many with mental health challenges, we don’t know precisely how the drugs work.

None of this is controversial from a scientific perspective, and was substantiated by eminent psychiatrists and peer-reviewed research. Yet, after we published, many on social media reacted with confident assertions that the story was false. Some suggested that debunking the chemical-imbalance myth of depression was akin to saying depression isn’t “real.”

My article, however, fully supported the conclusion that mental illnesses are undeniable and hugely harmful health conditions. And it did not say we should ignore the value of medication or stop investigating the biological causes of depression. Rather, it argued that though antidepressants do affect brain chemicals, a “chemical imbalance” in the brain is not the cause of depression. Further, an excessive focus on the biological explanation has led the scientific community to largely overlook the social causes of mental illness.

A few commenters confidently asserted that this argument would contribute to stigma around mental health. The false narratives around chemical imbalances have become closely intertwined with this admirable goal, as they’re used to suggest depression is a purely biological, physical disease, and so the impacts of mental illnesses are as undeniable as bodily ailments. But many illnesses are affected and treated by both biology and social conditions—diet and exercise are used to prevent heart attacks, while cancer risks are heightened by lifestyle factors like smoking and sunbeds—and are no less real for it.

https://qz.com/1177154/political-scientific-biases-the-left-is-guilty-of-unscientific-dogma-too/


More to read on the link

phildidge wrote:

Ben Reilly wrote:Funny how he can't name a single person behind this...

Maybe you should actually click on the many links highlighted within the article. They have a line under them, to make it easy to stand out for the clueless lefty

The links are mostly to papers the author considers erroneous; there's another link to an article about dealing with the topic of transgenderism humanely and rationally. I don't actually see the author name anyone who has intimidated researchers, or published an article criticizing them.

And you dont think papers that claim sex is not binary, is not problematic by gender studies far leftists? Seriously? You are just sticking your head in the sand. A group has already exposed these grievance studies to be flawed and not based on any real academic standards but ideologies. If this is hitting the scientific fields, then beliefs are taking over scientific facts simple to push beliefs. The eviodence is there, you simple are in denail and there is plenty of examples on this. Either you back science or poor cultish far left ideology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_Studies_affair

https://areomagazine.com/2019/05/10/white-fragility-theory-mistakes-correlation-for-causation/

https://areomagazine.com/2019/05/08/give-them-an-argument-logic-for-the-left-book-review/

https://areomagazine.com/2019/04/25/intersectionality-is-wrong-for-the-right-reasons/

https://areomagazine.com/2019/04/25/whiteness-studies-and-the-theory-of-white-fragility-are-based-on-a-logical-fallacy/

https://areomagazine.com/2019/04/17/listening-at-the-great-awokening/

https://areomagazine.com/2019/05/26/the-anatomies-of-two-academic-scandals/

https://areomagazine.com/2019/04/11/iconoclasm-and-the-erasing-of-history/

https://areomagazine.com/2019/04/11/the-beauvoir-bluff-what-gender-idealists-keep-getting-wrong-about-the-second-sex/

https://areomagazine.com/2019/04/05/the-fine-old-art-of-bullshitting/

https://areomagazine.com/2019/03/27/racializing-environmentalism/

Cool down , Didge. Your mind is starting to overheat, as it did before, causing your meltdown, and subsequent hissy fit and storming off in a huff.
You despise the left.We get that.
But not EVERYTHING that is at fault with people nd the planet is directly attributable to your broad and sweeping generalisation of "The left".
Stop looking for fault in one area only.

Radio host Alan Jones.
Wolfie will know him well.

https://mol.im/a/7152239

Another climate change denying idiot.

A lecturer who signed an open letter to The Sunday Times criticising LGBT training in universities has been threatened with being sacked as an editor of an academic journal unless she recants.

Sarah Honeychurch, a fellow in the Adam Smith Business School at Glasgow University, was among more than 30 academics who signed the letter in last week’s Sunday Times. It registered “disquiet” over a programme run by the charity Stonewall in which “anti-scientific claims are presented . . . as objective fact”.

The guidance includes instructing academics on using gender neutral pronouns such as “zie” and “ey”, as well as insisting that “one in 100 are born with an intersex trait” and that trans women should be allowed to use female changing rooms.

The letter was organised by Kathleen Stock, a professor at Sussex University. Many lecturers believe academic freedom to debate trans issues is being stifled on campus.

Last week Honeychurch, an editor of the journal Hybrid Pedagogy, received a formal email from Chris Friend, the managing editor, stating: “Unless I have misunderstood the intentions of the letter or the convictions of your signature, I must ask that you resign your position as editor for HPJ.”

Honeychurch said she had been branded a transphobe by students for signing the letter and was worried that her academic contract might not be renewed at Glasgow. But she was not going to back down.

“I’m not going to recant — I signed that letter after hard thought because people get so much abuse simply for wanting discussion,” she said.

Another signatory of the Sunday Times letter, Michele Moore, honorary professor at Essex University, who has edited the journal Disability & Society for many years, is also facing calls to resign after warning that autistic and other children might be harmed if they are wrongly encouraged to question their gender, which could lead to taking hormones and later surgery.

A petition from 750 colleagues calls on her to step down. She said her career hung in the balance because of the campaign, but the journal’s publishers and people from around the world were being supportive.

She added: “Somebody has to say we will talk about the potential harm of transgenderism of children, as many with autism or other social learning problems are being caught up in this.”

Stock said any academic who examined gender identity critically faced intense hostility.

Today more than 1,000 academics have signed a counter letter to The Sunday Times denying that the Stonewall “diversity champions” programme is a threat to academic freedom.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/academic-faces-sack-for-letter-to-sunday-times-that-criticised-trans-training-gnbr8gxgm


Posted in full, as is the Times, which you have to be a member