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About the Author
Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.
We’re often told that science is “self-correcting.”
But that’s not really true.
Science doesn’t correct itself like a thermostat adjusting the temperature in your house. Science is a human institution run by human beings. And human beings are vulnerable to career incentives, groupthink, moral fads, political pressure, and fear.
And when those forces capture academic journals, peer review stops being a filter for bad ideas and starts becoming more of a credentialing system for fashionable nonsense.
This isn’t exactly new.
In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal managed to publish a totally gibberish article in the journal Social Text full of trendy postmodern jargon. His point was simple: if you flatter the ideological commitments of certain academic editors, nonsense can pass as real scholarship.
Two decades later, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian pulled off the “grievance studies” hoax, placing over a half dozen absurd papers in peer-reviewed journals. One paper used dog parks to analyze rape culture and “queer performativity.” Another rewrote parts of Mein Kampf in the language of feminist theory.
The problem wasn’t just that fake papers got published. It was that they were completely indistinguishable from the real thing.
And today, the problem is even worse.
We now have serious science journals publishing papers about feminist lesbians marrying brine shrimp. We have disturbing papers that aim to “queer” and sexualize infants. We have scholarship on “lesbian-queer-trans-canine relationalities” and “trans-dog intimacies.”
But while Clown World papers are concerning because it makes a complete mockery of academia, the same broken, ideologically captured system is also publishing research in legitimate science and medical journals that pushes sex and gender pseudoscience, relies on deeply flawed data, and influences policies on the medical transition of children and young adults.
That’s not funny. That affects real people. It affects medicine. It affects law. It affects children.
And when critics try to respond, they often discover there’s no serious mechanism for correction. Submitted Letters to the Editor often go completely ignored. Contrary evidence is rejected without comment. As a result, the best critiques are often relegated to personal blog posts, social media threads, or newspaper op-eds, while the original paper remains in the literature wearing the armor of “peer review.”
That is untenable.
So Kevin McCaffree, editor-in-chief of Theory and Society, and I decided to do something about it.
Today, in the Wall Street Journal, we announced a first-of-its-kind article type called “Peer Review.”
The idea is simple: publication should be the beginning of academic scrutiny, not the end of it.
A Peer Review article can critique a paper from any scholarly journal. It can address problems with methods, evidence, logic, definitions, theory, or interpretation. But it has to focus on the claims and arguments, not personal attacks.
Submissions are capped at 2,500 words and go through a straightforward merit review instead of endless gatekeeping and ideological screening. We ask just one basic question: Is this critique coherent, serious, reasonable, or even popular enough to deserve scholarly attention?
If yes, it gets published.
And the authors of the original paper get a built-in right of reply, so readers can see the critique and the response in a legitimate academic venue.
That’s how science is supposed to work.
Science becomes self-correcting only when real people build the mechanisms that allow correction to happen.
That’s what we’ve done.
Now it’s time for academics to use it.
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