I’m actually surprised that the article below was published in The Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS), one of the more high-quality science journals, just a tad below Science and Nature in prestige. It has had a reputation for being “progressive” (e.g., woke), one that I discussed last year when Steve Pinker had an email exchange with National Academy of Sciences (NAS) President Marcia McNutt.

After McNutt, along with the Presidents of the National Academy of Medicine and of the National Academy of Engineering, issued a pro-affirmative-action and pro-DEI statement on June 30, 2023, Pinker wrote McNutt pointing out that such statements are incompatible with the NAS’s mission. His email (reproduced at the link above) contained this bit:

I would like to express my disquiet at the recent NAS Statement on Affirmative Action. The desirability of racial preferences in university admissions is not a scientific issue but a political and moral one. It involves tradeoffs such as maintaining the proportion of African Americans in elite universities at the expense of fairness to qualified applicants who are rejected because of their race, including other racial minorities such as Asian Americans. Moreover it is a highly politicized policy, almost exclusively associated with the left, and one that majorities of Americans of all races oppose.

It’s not clear to me how endorsing one side of a politically polarizing, nonscientific issue is compatible with the Academy’s stated mission “providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology”.

The problem is worse than being incompatible with the Academy’s mission; it could substantially harm the Academy’s goal of promoting politicians’ and the public’s acceptance of science. Extensive research has shown that rejection of the scientific consensus on evolution, anthropogenic climate change, and other scientific topics is uncorrelated with scientific literacy but predictable from political orientation: the farther to the right, the greater the rejection of evolution and climate change.

McNutt wrote back, but declined to have her answer reproduced on this site. Nevertheless, from Pinker’s response to her response, you can gather that she defended the stand of the original three-President statement, apparently written to criticize the Supreme Court’s decision that college admissions could not be based on race.

Steve said this, among other things (again, see the whole of his email at the site):

Even more concerning, the statement could have been lifted out of the pages of any recent left-wing opinion magazine, since it reiterates the current conviction that racial inequities are primarily due to “past and current racial discrimination and structural, systemic, and institutional racism in education” and to “individual bias and discrimination.” Entirely unmentioned are other potential causes of racial discrepancies, including poverty, school quality, family structure, and cultural norms. It is surprising to see a scientific organization attribute a complex sociological outcome to a single cause.

Finally, the statement, and your letter, equate diversity of ideas with diversity of race. The advantages of intellectual diversity are obvious (though I have not seen any statements from the Academy addressing the shrinking political diversity among science faculty, nor the increasing campaigns that punish or cancel scientists who express politically unpopular views). The assumption that racial diversity is the same as intellectual diversity was exactly what the Supreme Court decision singled out and struck down, since it carries with it the racist assumptions that black students think alike, and that their role in universities is to present their race-specific views to their classmates.

Dr. McNutt replied, but again did not give permission for her letter to be reproduced.

I have to give McNutt credit, then, for allowing the two-page piece letter to be published, as it contains a pretty explicit criticism of McNutt, especially of a later piece by McNutt and Crow, “Enhancing trust in science and democracy in an age of information,” published in Issues in Science and Technology. McNutt and Crow bemoan the detachment of science from society and society’s ethical values and make this statement, which is debatable:

Therefore, we believe the scientific community must more fully embrace its vital role in producing and disseminating knowledge in democratic societies. In Science in a Democratic Society, philosopher Philip Kitcher reminds us that “science should be shaped to promote democratic ideals.” To produce outcomes that advance the public good, scientists must also assess the moral bases of their pursuits. Although the United States has implemented the democratically driven, publicly engaged, scientific culture that Vannevar Bush outlined in Science, the Endless Frontier in 1945, Kitcher’s moral message remains relevant to both conducting science and communicating the results to the public, which pays for much of the enterprise of scientific discovery and technological innovation. It’s on scientists to articulate the moral and public values of the knowledge that they produce in ways that can be understood by citizens and decisionmakers.

While the good part of McNutt and Crow’s message is their call for scientists to explain the scientific results of their work to the public, it’s a different matter to ask scientists to “produce outcomes that advance the public good.” That can be an explicit aim of science, as in producing golden rice or Covid vaccines, but many scientists doing “pure” science are motivated by simple curiosity. That curiosity, too, can have salubrious social outcomes, but most of the time it just enriches our knowledge of the universe.

Further, it seems excessive to asks scientists to also “articulate the moral and public values of the knowledge that they produce.”  Are scientists experts in morality? And what are “public values”—the latest ideology of the times? One might think from this piece, and the correspondence above, that McNutt does favor the politicization of science, but along the lines of “progressive” politics.

Thus I was pleased to see this letter, by evolutionary molecular biologist Ford Doolittle, appear as an opinion piece in the latest PNAS.  Here he takes issue not only with the politicization of science, but explicitly with McNutt and Crow’s article. You can read the letter by clicking on the screenshot below, or read the pdf here:

But Doolittle begins with a thesis that I find dubious: that “group selection”—the differential reproduction of genetically different human groups—has led to our drive to understand nature—indeed, to selection on many species to “understand” their environment. But, says Doolittle, group selection has not led to the drive to integrate science and social values. (Other species don’t really have “social values” anyway). Bolding is mine:

Most humanists and scientists now agree that science is special in its relationship to the real world, more special than are other human activities—religion and politics, for instance. But philosophers of science keep arguing about why that should be. There is, I believe, a good evolutionary explanation of why—one that incorporates what is often called group selection (1). But group selection will only move humans closer to the truth if researchers and others take care to ensure that social values don’t distract or mislead.

So, my plea is that scientists and others ensure that science remains independent from social values. Social values are constraints—limitations on the evolutionary process. I worry that mixing science and social values hampers scientific progress.

and this from Doolittle’s piece:

My evolutionary argument starts with the contention that there is a selective advantage at all levels to having a better map of reality. Having a better understanding of the world promotes fitness. Living things at all levels (genes, cells, multicellular organisms, species, multispecies communities, tribes, nations of humans, and even broader cultural frameworks) that have such a better map of the world leave more progeny or last longer than living things that don’t, all else being equal. This has been true from the beginning of life.

. . . And, of course, human groups—tribes, nations, and broader cultural collectives—that have better knowledge of the natural and cultural world have a better chance, all else being equal, than those that have less adequate knowledge.

This is a bit mixed up, for evolutionary group selection is a genetic phenomenon, not a cultural one, and in this case would argue that some groups of humans genetically endowed with better knowledge of the environment would survive and reproduce better than less-informed groups. And, over time, this would spread the genes for acquiring more and more accurate knowledge about the universe.

The problem, as always with group selection, is that, because it depends on the differential survival and reproduction of groups, it is much slower than selection acting on individuals harboring genes producing an ambition to know. Those genes would spread within groups and there is no bar to having individuals with such genes. (I think Doolittle’s misconception here is that only groups can differ in their urge to understand.) Group selection is usually invoked to explain the evolution of traits that are advantageous to groups but not individuals, like pure altruism towards nonrelatives. But over time, group selection has fallen out of favor; see this eloquent critique by Pinker on Edge: “The false allure of group selection“).

Doolittle notes that occasionally Darwin was a group selectionist, but in fact A. R. Wallace, in his first exposition of natural selection, published simultaneously with Darwin’s, was even more of one!

But I digress; natural selection acting on genes (Dawkins’s “replicators”) and the bodies bearing them (the “vehicles”) is sufficient to produce the drive to know.  Still, in the end it hardly matters. Humans are curious creatures, and there’s doubtlessly a big effect of evolution on that trait.

And it doesn’t even matter whether our drive to know is evolutionary rather than purely social if one argues, as Doolittle does, is that mixing science and politics is bad for science. Here’s Doolittle’s peroration about why mixing science and ideology is bad:

But outside certain limits, society is not ethically uniform, and important values are not shared. We are so politically polarized now that there is an ever-present danger of “weaponizing” the pursuit of knowledge, and thus of the results of earnest inquiry being dismissed by those whose social values disagree with those of scientists. We embrace political polarization to the detriment of both scientists and the scientific enterprise.

Science is based on the assumption that our collective understanding of the world, though always imperfect, generally improves over time and that there is no trade-off between what we think we should do and the scientific truth. As the 18th-century philosopher David Hume noted, you can’t derive “ought” from “is.” The consilience of scientists’ personal social values (which surely have changed over time) and modern, fundable science is precisely why I see current trends in politicization as dangerous to the scientific enterprise—a worry underscored when these trends are viewed through an evolutionary perspective going from genes to individual cells to tribes to broader cultural frameworks.

We scientists should be even more careful not to allow what we think is “right” (what we ought to do) to influence what we think is “true” of the world. What we think is right changes with time and context, but what we think is true should be our eternal goal.

Doolittle notes that “it is inevitable that science which does not agree with some aspect of society’s current value system has little chance of getting funded,” but that isn’t 100% true. Sure, if you want to show that there is “structural racism” in an academic field, then your grant may well get funded, but it could also get funded if you’re studying the systematics of ants, or string theory, or the migration distance of Drosophila. Those kinds of studies get funded based on merit, not on “society’s current value system”—unless, that is, you define “value system” tautologically as “what people want to fund”.

In the middle of the article, though, he’s careful not to go too hard after McNutt. But, again to her credit, she let this be published:

As an ethical constraint, the sentiments of Marcia McNutt, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, and her coauthor Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, might serve as a contemporary example (10). They write that science must “produce outcomes that advance the public good,” citing the Columbia University philosopher Philip Kitcher to remind us that “science should be shaped to promote democratic ideals.” Science, in other words, should be constrained by human social values. Perhaps they meant by this that science functions best (that is, provides better understandings of the world) in democratic societies, rather than arguing that democracy is best for our species. The former is an epistemic value, but the latter is a social value and thus an unnecessary constraint.

McNutt and Crow’s social values are mine, too, and those of many scientists, I hasten to add. . . .

As I said, if you want to stretch “ethical values” to become “the idea of what sorts of questions need answering,” then of course the science that people do, and especially the science that gets funded, will generally comport with social values. But McNutt, Crow and Doolittle are talking, I think, about prioritizing science that matches our current ideology (i.e., justifying DEI initiatives, documenting inequities, or trying to show that indigenous “ways of knowing” are coequal to modern science). Alternatively, McNutt and Crow might urge us not to do forms of science carrying any possibility that they could have bad social consequences (the classic example is studying group differences in IQ).

But it would have behooved Doolittle to give more examples of the kind of science that people are objecting to now. I’ve written a lot about the ways that ideology is intruding in science in detrimental ways: two examples are my paper with Luana Maroja on ‘The ideological subversion of biology” and also the Abbott et al. paper “In defense of merit in science.”

I see this has been a rather rambling post, involving group selection, the debasing of science by politics, and debates in the scientific literature.  So be it, and again I’m pleased that NAS President McNutt has allowed an op-ed to be posted in “her” journal that explicitly takes her to task. That is in the finest tradition of allowing open discourse in the literature.

h/t: Anna, Luana