Marc J Defant. Skeptic. Volume 22, Issue 4, Fall 2017.
I first encountered the radical left’s flirtation with demagoguery in the 1990s when I was asked to teach in an interdisciplinary program that brought professors together from a bevy of different fields. During one of the lectures, a professor matter-of-factly brought up Voodoo religion in Haiti and its belief in the walking dead. She seemed to be insinuating that zombies strolled around the Caribbean islands. I naively thought, as the token professor of science in the room, that it might be apropos to make sure the class understood that there were no actual dead bodies traipsing in places like Port-au-Prince, thinking that my colleague would agree. Au contraire! The professor denounced me for cultural bias and insisted that there were the walking dead. Who was I to challenge Haitian belief systems?
Scientific Revolutions
An understanding of why the radical left has targeted science and the implications of those attacks within the broader context of society can only be distilled through a historical examination of leftist dogma. The history of the radical left’s assault on science is like a trip through wonderland replete with an existential discourse on reality itself. To begin to understand the great intellectual abyss that currently divides many leftists primarily in the arts and humanities and some areas of the social sciences from academicians in engineering, business, and the natural sciences, we must go back to 1962 when Thomas Kuhn published his widely read book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn, a physicist and historian of science, postulated that scientific research was done under the umbrella of a paradigm. He contended that discoveries of anomalies and inconsistencies within the existing paradigm force science into a crisis that eventually leads to a revolution he referred to as a paradigm shift.
Most scientists find Kuhn’s description palatable primarily because it seems to explain progress during the history of scientific discoveries. For example, few would disagree with the apparent paradigm shift from Newtonian mechanics to Einstein’s relativity, although the devil is in the details. Kuhn believed that paradigms are incommensurable and new paradigms negate older ones: “Einstein’s theory can be accepted only with the recognition that Newton’s was wrong.” This is a surprising assertion, considering Kuhn probably taught Newtonian mechanics to his undergrads at Harvard. Einstein didn’t displace Newton as much as he added to him. William Storage contends that Kuhn “cherry picked” his historical examples of science to make his point.
Kuhn asserted that although science moves from one paradigm to another, accumulating facts along the way, there is no trend toward “truth”: “We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth.” Kuhn even brought into question the notion of progress in science: “With respect to normal science, then, part of the answer to the problem of progress lies simply in the eye of the beholder. Scientific progress is not different in kind from progress in other fields [Kuhn used art as one example of another field]… But nothing that has been or wall be said makes it a process of evolution toward [his emphasis] anything.” Here, Kuhn descends into deeply antiscientific territory. As Nobel Prize laureate Steven Weinberg suggests, Kuhn’s writing seems to be imbued with relativism: “All this is wormwood to scientists like myself, who think the task of science is to bring us closer and closer to objective truth. But Kuhn’s conclusions are delicious to those who take a more skeptical view of the pretensions of science. If scientific theories can only be judged within the context of a particular paradigm, then in this respect the scientific theories of any one paradigm are not privileged over other ways of looking at the world, such as shamanism or astrology or creationism.”
Kuhn was an unlikely revolutionary. In any other decade, his ideas might have been only an important footnote in the history of science field. By the mid-1960s, however, universities were teeming and roiling with dissension. Science and technology were associated with the military-industrial complex, destruction of the environment, and white males in white coats. A disparate group of leftists latched on to Kuhn like hippies to black lights, under the banner of what came to be known as the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), which envisioned science as a social practice.
By the 1970s, post-positivism had opened the floodgates to epistemic relativism by radical philosophers determined to undermine the perceived hegemony of science. One of the leading lights was Paul Feyerabend, who in his book Against Method made the infamous statement:
It is clear, then, that the idea of a fixed method, or of a fixed theory or rationality, rests on too naive a view of man and his social surroundings. To those who look at the rich material provided by history, and who are not intent on impoverishing it in order to please their lower instincts, their craving for intellectual security in the form of clarity, precision, “objectivity,” “truth,” it will become clear that there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes [italics his].
Willard van Orman Quine contended that “any theory can be held true come what may…in the face of any evidence whatever.” Richard Rorty professed that “truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.” And Nelson Goodman stated that “truth cannot be defined or tested by agreement with the ‘world.'”
In short, post-positivists deny that science has a privileged way of knowing and is instead simply the creation myth of Western culture. The result is a vast wasteland of critical the ory, postmodernism, poststructuralism, deconstructionism and a host of other “isms” that took off during this period.
Leftist Scientists
Within the scientific community some Marxist ideas began to wend their way into public commentary on the nature of science, most notably by two Harvard scientists: the late paleontologist Stephen J. Gould and the biologist Richard Lewontin. Their beefs with science centered on IQ and evolutionary psychology. The initial skirmish began when Gould and Lewontin joined forces with various Boston academics, teachers, and students calling themselves the Sociobiology Study Group. They published a harsh critique against Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson and his book Sociobiology in the New York Review of Books. The group linked Wilson with intellectuals they asserted were biological determinists. But it was clear their distaste for Wilson was more political than scientific: “The reason for the survival of these recurrent determinist theories is that they consistently tend to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race or sex.” Loose translation—anything linking genetics to human behavior was verboten. Ironically, Gould was a prominent opponent of creationists—the miscreants who use religion to argue against science—and yet here he was using politics to refute science. I might also add that his creationist opponents used his attacks on perceived genetic determinism as a positive sign that evolution was still being seriously debated within the scientific community.
The mild-mannered Wilson became the boogeyman for genetic determinism, and Sociobiology generated an invective by Marshall Sahlins entitled The Use and Abuse of Biology. And in case you think that student radicals shouting down university speakers is a modern phenomenon of leftist outrage, Steven Pinker’s description of the campus turmoil over Wilson’s book should assuage any disbelief:
At Harvard there were leaflets and teach-ins, a protester with a bullhorn calling for Wilson’s dismissal, and invasions of his classroom by slogan-shouting students. When he spoke at other universities, posters called him the “right wing Prophet of Patriarchy” and urged people to bring noise makers to his lectures. Wilson was about to speak at a 1978 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science when a group of people carrying placards (one with a swastika) rushed onto the stage chanting “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.” One protester grabbed the microphone and harangued the audience while another doused Wilson with a pitcher of water.
Yet most of Wilson’s book concerned animal behavior, and only the last two chapters dealt with humans, in which he synthesized cogent arguments made in earlier now-classic papers by George Williams, W. D. Hamilton, and Robert Trivers. Richard Dawkins would follow in 1976 with an equally controversial book The Selfish Gene, which synthesized this work into a cogent theory. What was Dawkins’ sin? He portrayed genes as manipulating organisms to behave in ways that assured the “survival” of the genes into future generations. That is, the genes’ interests were not always in tune with the best interests of the organism they inhabited. Dawkins never meant to imply that genes were conscious living agents (who could therefore be “selfish”), only that the genes are the ultimate beneficiaries of successful reproduction, not the organism. Some commentators to this day continue misrepresenting the argument.
Gould spent 27 years denigrating perceived transgressions by Wilson, Dawkins, Trivers, and a host of other so-called genetic determinists, frequently using his popular monthly essays in Natural History magazine as his platform. By the 1990s, there was a ground swell of criticism of Gould from a variety of scientists, perhaps best summarized by the highly regarded biologist John Maynard Smith: “Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against creationists.” These sentiments were echoed by the philosopher Daniel Dennett in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and by the psychologist Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate. The bottom line: time was on the side of Trivers, Wilson, and Dawkins, and their work was instrumental in developing the field of evolutionary psychology, which now has courses routinely taught throughout biology and psychology departments, and has a leading textbook by David Buss, now in its fifth edition. Although there remain critics of evolutionary psychology, most notably David J. Buller, a philosopher at Northern Illinois University, most objections are limited to the social sciences and humanities and, as Benjamin Winegard and his coauthors have pointed out, the objections contain errors and misunderstandings of the science.
Social Science—No Man’s Land
In recent decades there has developed a balkanization of the academy into different departments and divisions that rarely interact, roughly speaking divided between the sciences and the arts and humanities, with the social sciences falling somewhere in between. As a consequence, those in the arts and humanities (and some social sciences) have been the most susceptible to this radical shift toward the left. An obvious example was the way all of those dead-white-male authors were displaced in literature courses in favor of the writings of many women and minorities during the 1960s and 1970s. Even today there are efforts to eliminate the dead-white-male authors of bygone centuries. Yale University undergraduate English majors submitted a petition in 2016, for example, demanding that the department not just diversify but “decolonize” by eliminating authors such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Eliot from the curriculum because “it creates a culture especially hostile to students of color.” We should not be surprised—the deconstructionists of the early 1970s have taught them that language has no meaning, and apparently they believe it.
Diversity is a demonstrably good thing within the academy. What I take issue with is not the diversity but the way these departments have been inculcated with the politics of identity and gender. Once these fields became seeded with radical leftists interested in promoting political agendas, the value of the academics became suspect. More important, the radical left made sure they hired new academicians with similar political views, which has left the arts and humanities a morass.
In the ensuing years, the radical left inserted themselves into departments in the social sciences, particularly in departments that were less rigorous in the application of the scientific method. Philosophy, political science, sociology, and even some branches of psychology and anthropology became battlegrounds. Newly formed women’s and African American studies departments aided and abetted in what became the “culture wars.” Anthropology became a particularly vociferous combat zone. The disciplines of archaeology, paleoanthropology, and physical anthropology are scientifically rigorous fields, whereas much of cultural anthropology is ethnographic, documenting the cultural landscape in which these scientists began to see themselves as advocates for ethnic minorities and environmental issues; not surprisingly, they are hostile toward Western civilization. The leadership of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 2010 even decided to remove the word science from their long-range plans.
The “anthropology wars” began in 1983 with Derek Freeman’s book Margaret Mead and Samoa, a withering indictment against the portrait Margaret Mead painted in 1928 during her research of the natives on Samoa. The idyllic culture she documented was supposedly the antithesis of Western civilization—absent of sexual jealousy, fidelity, intense competition, and violence. Mead’s research fit nicely with the new agenda of the 1970s, which touted the depravity of Western society and the premise that culture, and not genetics, was the source of all behavioral differences. The problem was, as Freeman discovered, most of what Mead reported was patently false. Freeman spent almost six years living among the natives, compared to Mead’s nine months; Mead didn’t even know the language when she arrived, and she did not actually live among the Samoans. Mead collected her data through interviews with girls who made a game of duping her. Freeman found that contrary to Mead’s naive research, Samoans behaved pretty much the way people do everywhere, and in a manner predicted by evolutionary psychology. In retaliation, the politically infused AAA ruled that Freeman’s book was “poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible, and misleading.”
In addition to the Mead-Freeman imbroglio, another paroxysm erupted around the anthropologist Napoleon A. Chagnon, a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, who gained his reputation studying the native Yanamamo of Venezuela in the mid 1960s. Chagnon’s work was steeped in the theory of sociobiology (later evolutionary psychology), which put him at fierce odds with many cultural anthropologists interested in promoting the idyllic and peaceful lifestyles of native cultures. Chagnon’s ethnography of the Yanamamo, first published in 1968, went through six editions and became the best selling anthropological textbook of all time. What was so controversial? It was the violence Chagnon uncovered among the Yanamamo men, who called themselves waiter, meaning “fierce,” and by all accounts, they are. Boys are initiated into violence at an early age and men routinely kill in battle during raids and forcefully abduct and rape women from other villages (44% of men over the age of 25 have killed). Once a man has killed he reaches the high status of unokai. From an evolutionary perspective, the unokai have 1.63 wives compared with 0.63 wives of those who do not kill, and this results in 4.91 offspring compared to 1.59, respectively. In other words, being fierce pays off, evolutionarily speaking. Of course, no respected radical cultural anthropologist was going to stand by and allow this antipostmodern heresy to go unchallenged. A tide about native people that included the phrase “the fierce people” was bound to offend postmodern sensibilities. Chagnon became a major target of many and in particular of Marshall Sahlins.
Things got really ugly for Chagnon in 2000 when a journalist, Patrick Tierney, published an article and followed it with a book that accused Chagnon and his colleagues of some fairly heinous crimes against the Yanamamo. Perhaps the most astounding accusation was that the late geneticist and Chagnon colleague James Neel intentionally introduced measles into the Yanamamo. In fact, Neel, Chagnon, and their colleagues spent a great deal of their time inoculating the Yanamamo against the disease. The political nature of Tierney’s attacks became evident with his postmodern accusations that Chagnon’s “sociobiological” beliefs underpinned Neel’s so-called eugenics program and that Chagnon, along with anthropologist and film director Timothy Asch, “staged” the 22 films made of the Yanamamo to make the natives look violent and dangerous. Rather than support Neel and Chagnon against charges that affected the entire field, the AAA set up an inquiry into their work under a committee led by former AAA president James Peacock. Chagnon’s critics seemed to come out of the woodwork. David Maybury-Lewis, chair of Harvard’s Social Anthropology Department, alleged that the words “Fierce People” in the title of Chagnon’s textbook harmed the Yanamamo, and Stephen Cory of Survival International accused Chagnon of fabricating the Yanamamo violence.
In a two-volume report published in 2002, the Peacock committee found in favor of Tierney and accused Neel and Chagnon of questionable conduct. The report’s findings were accepted by the AAA in May, 2002. Eventually after the political nature of the report became obvious, the AAA voted in a referendum for the retraction of its report and called for an independent investigation. Both Neel and Chagnon were further cleared of all wrongdoing when the National Academy of Sciences and the American Society of Human Genetics concluded that Tierney’s claims represented fraudulent allegations. Chagnon was fully vindicated, both personally and scientifically.
Feminist Science
In 1994, Paul Gross and Norman Levitt published their book Higher Superstition, which turned out to be the opening volley in what would become known as the Science Wars. They took exception with noted philosopher of science Sandra Harding, who once called Newton’s Principia Mathematica a “rape manual.” Readers unfamiliar with this reference may be forgiven for thinking something was taken out of context, so here it is in Harding’s own words:
One phenomenon feminist historians have focused on is the rape and torture metaphors in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon and others (e.g., Machiavelli) enthusiastic about the scientific method. Traditional historians and philosophers have said that these metaphors are irrelevant to the real meanings and the referents of scientific concepts held by those who used them and by the public for whom they wrote… But if we are to believe that mechanistic metaphors were a fundamental component of the explanations the new science provided, why should we believe that the gender metaphors were not? A consistent analysis would lead to the conclusion that understanding nature as a woman indifferent to or even welcoming rape was equally fundamental to the interpretations of these new conceptions of nature and inquiry… In that case, why is it not as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton’s laws as “Newton’s rape manual” as it is to call them “Newton’s mechanics”?
In response to this argument Gross and Levitt note: “[Harding] has openly called for a revolution against science, for replacing it with a multicultural, multiracial, ethnically diverse discipline, claiming that it will be more ‘strongly’ objective than the existing version.” If science demonstrates “truth” about the physical world, one wonders how a more multicultural version would make science more objective. Obviously it can’t, and therein lies the bugaboo. Gross and Levitt do not argue (nor do I) against a more diverse scientific community. They simply note that “incessant linguistic criticism has not yet produced a single revision of the body of serious science. Feminist cultural analysis has not yet identified any heretofore undetected flaws in the logic, or the predictive powers, or the applicability of mathematics, physics, chemistry, or—much complaining to the contrary—biology.” This remains true today.
One of the more remarkable and often cited claims of the importance of feminist science is instructive. Feminists assert that the ovum has been viewed by misogynistic male science as passive and the sperm as indefatigable. Thanks to the reporting by the Biology and Gender Study Group we learn that the egg has been found to be energetic and involved in attaching the sperm and pulling it inward. Once again, Gross and Levitt don’t mince words: “We are supposed to conclude, then, that without the habits of thought provided us (and the Schattens) by feminist insight, we would still be mired in the thought of the egg as a fat, immovable female-vegetable of a cell, and of the sperm as a steely bearer of glad tidings, a swift warrior… Reproductive biologists of either gender who spoke that way would be considered by their colleagues…as overdue for deep psychoanalysis.”
If anything, feminist science studies today have driven off the cliff of reality into the abyss of relativism. While scientists are quietly working in their laboratories, most unaware of the assault on science, radical feminists have been publishing a bewildering amount of vitriol against science. And the only way most of the nonsense could be published is if the feminist community is purposely closed to outside perspectives and thoughts. I have selected a typical example from the ever growing literature of critical feminist science to represent the genre.
Laura Parson received her Ph.D. in 2016 from the University of North Dakota and published her dissertation results in The Qualitative Report, which I assume at least partially contributed to her being hired as an assistant professor at the University of Louisville. Parson took eight syllabi of science courses published on the web and analyzed them through something called “feminist critical discourse analysis.” Discourse analysis includes “stance” which is conveyed in syllabi “through the use of modal verbs” such as “must” and “should” and imperative moods “to imply obligation to students without the politeness.” “Stance,” we are told, “typically conveys obligation and permission” with such intimidating phrases as “Come to class on time” (her emphasis). Pronoun use “has been found to be indicative of the power relationship in the classroom” (she is referencing other research which gives you some idea of how feminist science “research” has become infused with these ideas). So when an instructor uses “we” in a syllabus rather than “you,” Parson intuits that the instructor is “hiding the power relationship between the faculty member and students implying that they were equals.” Finally, vigilant discourse analysis must include “interdiscursivity,” which Parson tells us “is the use of elements in a text that carry institutional and social meaning from other discourses.”
Remember we are in postmodern territory where she notes that truth does not exist. There are many codes that require deconstruction. “Syllabi reflect the conventions, values and practices of neighboring discourses and communities that are identifiable, in part, through content-specific terminology.” The point is that not only do the syllabi demonstrate male power, they also reflect an institutional “environment that is not welcoming, inclusive or supportive for women.” Parson and other feminists refer to the academic environment, in general, as a “chilly climate.” Examples of the glacier-like ambiance are “weed-out courses, courses that grade on the curve, a competitive environment, reliance on lecture as a teaching method, and individualistic cultures, and comprehensive exams.” According to Parson, even prerequisite course requirements speak of the chilly environment. That this might be true in the humanities and feminist studies and not, obviously, in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, speaks volumes.
The ultimate goal of the analysis is to determine what feminists termly “gendered.” I will let Parson explain her analysis of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) curriculum:
Post-structuralist feminist thought provides insight into the exploration of STEM syllabi as gendered. Through the poststructuralist lens, it is possible to make a comparison between a modernist view of knowledge as based on notions of absolute truth and a single reality, which is masculine, and the social construction of knowledge, where knowledge is unstable and informed by context… The view of knowledge as socially constructed challenges the modern male concept of power.
An aspect of concern about the research is that she has made some rather sweeping conclusions based on only eight syllabi. Clearly statistics is not the friend of critical discourse if male power in science can be gleaned from a sample size of eight. Are we to infer from this that the extensive data collecting and analyses typically done in science dissertations reflects a male-centrist ideology meant to discriminate against women? Parson thinks that the syllabi create the “impression of extremely difficult courses which contributes to the chilly climate in STEM courses, and would be prohibitive for those not confident in those areas, such as women and minorities.”
More alarming, Parson concludes that she has ferreted out through “deeper review” that “the STEM syllabi…promoted the male-biased STEM institution by reinforcing views of knowledge as static and unchanging, as it is traditionally considered to be in science…. Syllabi promote the positivist view of knowledge by suggesting there are correct conclusions that can be drawn with the right tools [ah, antipostivism rears its ugly head].” What has Parson wringing her hands? The syllabi request students to “draw conclusions from the data represented in multiple formats” [her emphasis]. She concludes (pun intended) that “Instead of promoting the idea that knowledge is constructed by the student and dynamic, subject to change as it would in a more feminist view of knowledge, the syllabi reinforce the larger male-dominant view of knowledge as one that students acquire and use [to] make the correct decision.”
Of course, one wonders what feminist knowledge in science would be? We are not told. If, as Parson contends, there is no “truth,” how are scientists to know what to teach? Are all truths equal? Astrology and astronomy? Alchemy and chemistry? If everything is subjective, how can we take anything Parson says seriously? I asked Parson to comment on these questions, but received no reply. But I think I know the answer. Postmodernism is a political movement where truth only gets in the way of goals and agendas.
Postmodern Impacts
The promotion of subjectivity by postmodernists has resulted in a plethora of bizarre claims and assertions by the radical left: Afrocentrism—the belief that Western culture was stolen from Africa; that rape is a means by which males “keep all women in fear” rather than a way for lower socioeconomic men to pass on their genes; that Native Americans lived in ecological harmony and in peace with one another, despite evidence to the contrary; that prior to Indo-Europeans there was a goddess culture in which there was an ancient peaceful feminist neopagan civilization led by women.
The postmodern anti-science diatribes promulgated in universities have now reached beyond the academy. If academics don’t take science seriously, why should anyone else? GMOs have been scorned by environmentalists, even though study after study has verified their safety. The impact of global warming has a cadre of naysayers, even though the scientific community is virtually unified in its concern over the potential dangers. The National Football League long denied the adverse affects of blows to the head, despite a bevy of scientific reports to the contrary. There is a growing group of environmentalists that scorn big agriculture and champion a movement to go “back to organic” natural products, even though Big Ag feeds the world. There is still a large contingent of anti-vaccination advocates, even though the leader of the movement, Andrew Wakefield, was eventually found to have made fraudulent claims that vaccines cause autism and was stripped of his medical license. Although it is difficult to prove that postmodernism led to modern science denial, can there be much doubt that the radical left has opened the door to such quackery? When science becomes the enemy, bad things can happen.