RUTHFULLY YOURS

The re-election of Donald Trump earlier this month provoked predictable outrage from the usual Chicken Little celebrities, politicians and activists. Mainstream-media outlets, which long ago abandoned any objectivity in their reporting of Trump, have reacted with unbridled hysteria. What might have been more surprising to some, however, was the meltdown experienced by Laura Helmuth, who was, until recently, the editor of the once sober and august Scientific American magazine.

Shortly after Trump’s re-election, Helmuth, in a now-deleted post on Bluesky, took aim at the ‘racists’ and ‘sexists’ she grew up with in her Trump-voting state. She wrote:

‘Every four years I remember why I left Indiana (where I grew up) and remember why I respect the people who stayed and are trying to make it less racist and sexist. The moral arc of the universe isn’t going to bend itself… Solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high-school classmates are celebrating early results because fuck them to the moon and back… I apologise to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists.’

You might think Helmuth’s diatribe hardly fitting for the editor of an internationally recognised science journal. The post gained widespread attention and within days, it led to her stepping down as editor after four-and-a-half years in post. Strikingly, Helmuth’s parting shot was not a one-off. In recent years, the widely respected and nearly 200-year-old publication embraced a number of woke shibboleths, often jettisoning science in the process. Notably, Scientific American became a cheerleader for gender ideology, the Black Lives Matter movement and the establishment narrative around Covid-19. This trend even predates Helmuth’s arrival in the editor’s chair.

One of the first signs that all was not well at Scientific American came in June 2019. An article by Simon(e) D Sun, who identifies as a ‘transgender nonbinary woman’, claimed that ‘actual research’ shows that ‘sex is anything but binary’ and that ‘Biological sex is far more complicated than XX or YY’. Apparently, referring to XX chromosomes as female and XY chromosomes as male is a ‘tired simplification’, which ‘betrays the true nature of biological sex’. ‘The truth is, your biological sex isn’t carved in stone, but a living system with the potential for change’, Sun argued. Needless to say, there is no scientific basis for such an outlandish, ideologically driven claim. Sexual dimorphism in humans is a scientific fact. And no amount of hormones or surgery can change someone’s biological sex.

In June 2020, Scientific American raised eyebrows again, this time by publishing an uncritical interview with Shi Zhengli, a senior virologist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and lead researcher into bat coronaviruses. Unsurprisingly, Shi was quick to dismiss the possibility that Covid-19 originated in a lab. For the next two years, Scientific American derided the ‘lab-leak theory’ as a ‘conspiracy theory’, driven by ‘anxiety’ over the ‘rise of China’. Like much of the content published on Helmuth’s watch, this claim hasn’t aged well. Indeed, recent hearings into the origins of Covid-19 revealed that Shi herself was concerned about the dangers posed by so-called gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

It may well be the case that Covid jumped from one species to another in the Wuhan wet market as so many have hypothesised. But there is still no proof or convincing evidence of this. The lab-leak theory, in contrast, is not only plausible, but is now considered by numerous US government departments to be the most likely explanation for the pandemic.

It’s clear that for a long time now, Scientific American has merely reinforced the dogmas of the new clerisy, rather than subjecting them to serious scientific inquiry. It confirms Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel’s recent observation that science today has become ‘as dogmatic as the Catholic Church in the 17th century’.

The scientific method is one of the great intellectual achievements of the Enlightenment. It served as a powerful countervailing force against the stultifying effects of religious doctrine and received wisdom. It has enabled us to gain a deeper understanding of the natural world and the reality we inhabit. Science deserves its prestige and all the trust people place in its methods. Sadly, however, the institutions that are supposed to champion it have not been immune to some of the most dogmatic and unenlightened movements of our times. We should not allow this type of reactionary thinking to undermine half a millennia of progress and free thought.