NY Times columnist Pamela Paul writes today about disturbing evidence that science won’t be spared from the long march of identity politics through our institutions. A group of 29 scientists including two Nobel laureates collaborated on a paper titled “In Defense of Merit in Science,” but major science journals rejected it.

A paper published last week, “In Defense of Merit in Science,” documents the disquieting ways in which research is increasingly informed by a politicized agenda, one that often characterizes science as fundamentally racist and in need of “decolonizing.” The authors argue that science should instead be independent, evidence-based and focused on advancing knowledge…

Yet the paper was rejected by several prominent mainstream journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Another publication that passed on the paper, the authors report, described some of its conclusions as “downright hurtful.” The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences took issue with the word “merit” in the title, writing that “the problem is that this concept of merit, as the authors surely know, has been widely and legitimately attacked as hollow as currently implemented.”…

“What’s being advocated are philosophies that are explicitly anti-scientific,” Anna Krylov, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California and one of the paper’s authors, told me. “They deny that objective truth exists.” Having grown up in the Soviet Union, where science was infused with Marxist-Leninist ideology, Krylov is particularly attuned to such threats. And while she has advocated on behalf of equal treatment for women in science, she prefers to be judged on the basis of her achievements, not on her sex. “The merit of scientific theories and findings do not depend on the identity of the scientist,” she said in a phone interview.

The paper itself expands on that last idea, i.e. that science and its conclusions stand apart from the identity of scientists:

Scientific truths are universal and independent of the personal attributes of the scientist. Science knows no ethnicity, gender, or religion. Of course, by itself, universalism does not prevent the personal views of scientists, which are influenced by culture and society, from affecting the practice of science. Indeed, scientists have not always lived up to the ideals of fairness and impartiality in evaluating merit. In the past, scientific culture contributed to the exclusion of various groups from the scientific enterprise. For example, sexism limited women’s entry into science, and those who helped raise awareness of such issues have done science a service. However, the shortcomings of individuals or the community should not be confused with the science itself. Whether sexism prevented Cecilia Payne­-Gaposchkin from receiving credit for her conclusion that the Sun was made mostly of hydrogen is irrelevant to the fact that the Sun is made mostly of hydrogen. Although there are feminist critiques of how glaciologists have conducted themselves, there is no such thing as “feminist glaciology,” just as there is no “queer chemistry,” “Jewish physics,” “white mathematics,” “indigenous science,” or “feminist astronomy.” Glacial, physical, genetic, or prehistoric phenomena are independent of the positionality of the scientist. By prioritizing the truth value of scientific research, personal influences of individual scientists are minimized.

The paper also discusses the danger of allowing science to be dictated by political dogma, using an example from the Soviet Union.

In the Soviet Union (USSR), the aberrations of Trofim Lysenko had catastrophic consequences for science and society. An agronomist and “people’s scientist” who came from the “superior” class of poor peasants, Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics because of its supposed inconsistency with Marxist ideology. Dissent from Lysenko’s ideas was outlawed and his opponents were fired or prosecuted. Lysenko’s ideologically infused agricultural ideas were put into practice in the USSR and China, where, in both countries, they led to decreased crop yields and famine. Today, biology is again being subjugated to ideology—medical schools deny the biological basis of sex, biology courses avoid teaching the heritability of traits, and so on.

The paper goes on to offer some general criticisms of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) approaches to science.

CSJ-­driven pedagogy can be pernicious, even when proposed innovations appear benign. For example, the proposed curriculum decolonization in pharmacology involves teaching about drugs developed from folk remedies and focusing on the contributions of non-­Europeans. While such topics might be appropriate for a history of medicine course, centering the curriculum around them, as has been proposed, would be detrimental to training health professionals. The vast majority of today’s pharmacopeia is derived from the research and development efforts of the modern pharmaceutical industry; effective treatments derived from traditional medicine are rare, especially in the era of bio­ and immunotherapies. For example, of the over 150 anti­cancer drugs available today, only three are of natural origin (trabectedin, taxanes, and vinca-­alkaloids).

The last portion of the paper offers more examples of the ways in which ideology is intruding into science, often with little evidence. This is from a section on efforts to replace merit-based policies with identity-based policies.

Claims of bias in STEM, which now pervade the literature, are typically based on anecdotal evidence, superficial analyses, or ideologically based assumptions. A typical example is a paper that alleges the existence of gender bias in chemistry publishing based on a superficial analysis of publication statistics. Although the authors found gender differences in various metrics of professional accomplishment, the differences were small—e.g., on the order of one percentage point in manuscript acceptance rates. Moreover, the authors failed to adequately control for potentially confounding factors (e.g., seniority of researchers) that could explain the observed gender discrepancies. Yet, despite this paper’s poor scholarship, it has been cited as evidence of biases in chemistry and used to justify imposing gender quotas on editorial boards and in reviewer pools.

When confounding factors are controlled, evidence of gender bias in STEM all but vanishes. Controlling for confounding variables, a recently completed quantitative synthesis of the literature on gender gaps in six academic science domains (manuscript acceptance rates, recommendation letters, tenure ­track hiring, grant funding, salaries, and teaching ratings) found convincing evidence of bias only in teaching ratings, and the oft-­cited gender pay gap of 18% was reduced to 4%. In the other five domains, the authors concluded that there has been “no systematic gender bias in the last 10–20 years.” Similarly, a recent encyclopedic review of the literature on gender gaps in  STEM found that “the evidence for endemic anti­female bias is inconclusive at best,” and that, instead, “the main cause of the gender gaps in STEM appears to be average sex differences in people’s vocational preferences.”…

In hiring at many universities, faculty applicants are now required to write DEI statements. In recent faculty searches in the life sciences at UC Berkeley, three­quarters of the candidates were eliminated solely on the basis on their DEI statements. Putting aside separate objections that the use of DEI statements to screen applicants constitutes a political litmus test and a form of (possibly illegal) compelled speech, by reducing the viable applicant pool, it likely undermines the quality of science. Thus, a brilliant mathematician (or physicist or cognitive scientist) may be filtered out by virtue of having expressed insufficient enthusiasm or familiarity with the particular version of DEI that the institution supports

The paper concludes:

Imbuing science with ideology harms the scientific enterprise and leads to a loss of public trust. If we continue to undermine merit, our universities will become institutions of mediocrity rather than places of creativity and accomplishment, leading to the loss of the competitive edge in technology. Thus, we need to restore our commitment to practices grounded in epistemic humility and the meritocratic, liberal tradition.

This is a full-throated attack on the ideology of critical social justice and its encroachment on the liberal values of science. As such I’m sure the authors will be given the full treatment from those whose only response to criticism is to attack the critics as racists, misogynists, etc. Still, it’s good to see some people are still willing to stand up to the bullies.