Yesterday, it was physicist Sabine Hossenfelder for the offense of criticizing her own field. Also yesterday, Casey Luskin pointed out the campaign being advanced by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne to pressure a mainstream Elsevier journal, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, over the publication of a peer-reviewed article expressing skepticism about Darwinian theory.
Dr. Luskin writes, “Coyne’s whole point was to gin up harassment of the journal so they won’t publish critiques of evolution in the future.”
Defining “Settled Science”
Yep. Now this: Marty Rowland, an editor at the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, has been fired for publishing an article arguing for climate science heresy, “Carbon dioxide and a warming climate are not problems.” From The College Fix:
“The standard response of the mainstream climate science community these days to papers that somewhat challenge the CO2-is-dangerous-narrative is to immediately ask for retraction,” Marcel Crok, a co-author of the paper and director of the climate science group Clintel, told The College Fix.
“It’s a strategy because it gives the signal that the paper is really bad and most people don’t have the time and knowledge to assess the situation,” Crok said in an email Tuesday.
Again, yes. An email correspondent points out that a commenter under the article offers a neat definition:
Q: What do you call a situation in which a small group of researchers make bold predictions but won’t share their data, try to get contradictory articles blackballed from journals, lash out at critics with lawsuits, and see most of their predictions fall by the wayside?
A: Settled science
Cancellation is in the air in other spaces in the culture: Jimmy Kimmel is out today at ABC over a false comment on Charlie Kirk’s murder. Given Kimmel’s ratings, ABC was probably not grieved to see Kimmel go.
A Vast Difference
There is, needless to say, a vast difference between canceling a comedian over bad taste, insulting half the country, and not being funny (the case of Stephen Colbert), on one hand, and canceling legitimate science over ideological differences, on the other. The entertainment industry is in the business of entertaining us. Science is, or should be, in the business of finding out what’s true.
Canceling science has been going on for more than two decades, going back to how biologist Richard Sternberg was savaged by his institution, the Smithsonian, for publishing a peer-reviewed article by Stephen Meyer. (See my book Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome for that story and for the further evolution of Dr. Sternberg’s thinking since then.) The damage to science as the pursuit of truth has been compounding yearly, now it seems even daily.
Nothing great is at stake in what happened to Kimmel. In the domination of science by ideology, by the myth of “settled science,” the stakes couldn’t be more profound.