Weekly Recap

Journal self-immolates over social justice, UC Berkeley injects woke ideology into biology classes, the Endocrine Society shirks responsibility for gender dysphoria treatment guidelines, and more!

Science Journal Self-Immolates Over Social Justice Article

Recently, a once-respected science journal called The American Naturalist, decided to temporarily suspend their normal rigorous peer review process in order to publish an activist screed that would never have stood the chance otherwise. The paper is titled “Discussions of the “Not So Fit”: How Ableism Limits Diverse Thought and Investigative Potential in Evolutionary Biology,” and is perhaps the most absurd piece of “scholarship” I’ve ever seen.

The paper argues that foundational concepts like “fitness” and “natural selection” are “harmful” and have been “weaponized against marginalized communities in the modern day.” And the authors’ thesis is that evolutionary biology’s use of purportedly “ableist” terms and concepts discourages disabled people from studying the field, and is therefore more discriminatory of the disabled than other areas of study.

The authors don’t bother justifying any of their claims with evidence. They simply do the age-old “equity” trick by finding some inflated CDC statistic that found 26% of the US population was disabled using an incredibly broad definition that relied on self-reporting, was based on only six questions, and included people over the age of 65. They compared this statistic to a National Center for Science and Engineering Studies (NCSES) statistic that found 8.1% of disabled doctorate recipients in the life sciences. And, because there is a difference between these figures, the authors concluded that evolutionary biology was systemically ableist.