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Unscientific American
Science journalism surrenders to progressive ideology.

James B. Meigs

https://www.city-journal.org/article/unscientific-american

Michael Shermer got his first clue that things were changing at Scientific American in late 2018. The author had been writing his "Skeptic" column for
the magazine since 2001. His monthly essays, aimed at an audience of both scientists and laymen, championed the scientific method, defended the need
for evidence-based debate, and explored how cognitive and ideological biases can derail the search for truth. Shermer's role models included two twentieth-century thinkers who, like him, relished explaining science to the public: Carl Sagan, the ebullient astronomer and TV commentator; and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote a popular monthly column
in Natural History magazine for 25 years. Shermer hoped someday to match Gould's record of producing 300 consecutive columns. That goal would elude
him.

In continuous publication since 1845, Scientific American is the country's leading mainstream science magazine. Authors published in its pages have included Albert Einstein, Francis Crick, Jonas Salk, and J. Robert Oppenheimer—some 200 Nobel Prize winners in all. SciAm, as many readers call it, had long encouraged its authors to challenge established viewpoints. In
the mid-twentieth century, for example, the magazine published a series of articles building the case for the then-radical concept of plate tectonics.
In the twenty-first century, however, American scientific media, including Scientific American, began to slip into lockstep with progressive beliefs. Suddenly, certain orthodoxies—especially concerning race, gender, or climate—couldn't be questioned.

"I started to see the writing on the wall toward the end of my run there," Shermer told me. "I saw I was being slowly nudged away from certain topics." One month, he submitted a column about the "fallacy of excluded exceptions,"
a common logical error in which people perceive a pattern of causal links between factors but ignore counterexamples that don't fit the pattern. In
the story, Shermer debunked the myth of the "horror-film curse," which
asserts that bad luck tends to haunt actors who appear in scary movies. (The actors in most horror films survive unscathed, he noted, while bad luck sometimes strikes the casts of non-scary movies as well.) Shermer also
wanted to include a serious example: the common belief that sexually abused children grow up to become abusers in turn. He cited evidence that "most sexually abused children do not grow up to abuse their own children" and
that "most abusive parents were not abused as children." And he observed how damaging this stereotype could be to abuse survivors; statistical clarity is all the more vital in such delicate cases, he argued. But Shermer's editor
at the magazine wasn't having it. To the editor, Shermer's effort to correct
a common misconception might be read as downplaying the seriousness of
abuse. Even raising the topic might be too traumatic for victims.

The following month, Shermer submitted a column discussing ways that discrimination against racial minorities, gays, and other groups has
diminished (while acknowledging the need for continued progress). Here,
Shermer ran into the same wall that Better Angels of Our Nature author
Steven Pinker and other scientific optimists have faced. For progressives, admitting that any problem—racism, pollution, poverty—has improved means surrendering the rhetorical high ground. "They are committed to the idea
that there is no cumulative progress," Shermer says, and they angrily resist efforts to track the true prevalence, or the "base rate," of a problem.
Saying that "everything is wonderful and everyone should stop whining
doesn't really work," his editor objected.

Shermer dug his grave deeper by quoting Manhattan Institute fellow Heather
Mac Donald and The Coddling of the American Mind authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, who argue that the rise of identity-group politics
undermines the goal of equal rights for all. Shermer wrote that
intersectional theory, which lumps individuals into aggregate identity
groups based on race, sex, and other immutable characteristics, "is a
perverse inversion" of Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind society.
For Shermer's editors, apparently, this was the last straw. The column was killed and Shermer's contract terminated. Apparently, SciAm no longer had
the ideological bandwidth to publish such a heterodox thinker.

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