From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here.
Hello!
It might be funny, if it weren’t so worrisome. Recent weeks have seen some absurd new instances of science beset by would-be censors operating under the banner of “inclusion.”
Examples are many, and they come from all over the globe. We’ll look at an ongoing controversy in New Zealand, where a new government policy requires science students be taught that Māori “Ways of Knowing” share equal standing with so-called “western” science. Richard Dawkins wrote a stirring rebuttal in The Spectator, stating “The true reason science is more than an origin myth is that it stands on evidence: massively documented evidence, double blind trials, peer review, quantitative predictions precisely verified in labs around the world.”
Then again, the phrase double blind wouldn’t be used at all if the EEB Language Project had its way. This small group of U.S. and Canadian academics wants to eliminate “potentially harmful terms used in ecology and evolutionary biology.” Incredibly, their list of potentially harmful terms includes basic descriptors such as male and female, as well as, yes, blind/double blind (because it implies ableism, of course). Dawkins had some choice public comment for this group, as well.
A recent incident involving a dropped Qur’an in a U.K. high school led to an outsized show of anger from (and apology to) the local Muslim community. At least one of the students involved even reportedly received death threats. We’ll look at the recent response from the U.K. Home Secretary, who is looking to restore some sanity and sense of scale to the way schools respond to future controversies.
The good news is there are still plenty of people willing to stand up for science, reason, and rationality, without acceding to oversensitivity or a veto based on hurt feelings. The CFI Investigations Group recently doubled down on its long-running Paranormal Challenge, offering a $500,000 prize to anyone who can prove they have supernatural abilities under scientific test conditions. And the recently released video of Richard Dawkins’s conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson from CSICon 2022 is an inspiring reminder of the questions great minds can explore—and debate—when they are given a space to do so.
Attempting to enforce speech restrictions or limit what is considered “acceptable” lines of inquiry is a dark and dangerous path. Whether one is motivated by extreme religious fervor or an extreme interpretation of “tolerance” and “inclusion” makes little difference; the result is the same. Science and reason suffer when ideas can only be explored through the prism – or more aptly “prison”– of contemporary orthodoxy.
As a community of scientists, skeptics, and freethinkers, it’s incumbent upon us to remain committed to the principles of free expression. We cannot promote a greater understanding of our world by limiting the ways in which we explore and describe it.
Robyn E. Blumner,
CEO and President, Center for Inquiry
Executive Director, Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science