A domestic dog, wolf and coyote can all breed together and all produce fertile offspring. Then you look at genetic variation between the three species.
I see regularly comments along those lines on the Internet. I’d like some examples of “unpublishable scientific theories” that are not obviously bunk, as opposed to just controversial. Otherwise it is mostly a convenient bogeyman for bunk mongers.
Also, replicability seems a strange concern for this field. We’re never going to have an Earth Mk2 to test hypotheses.
https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p...
To stay on topic, this is not an example of career-ending article, because he’s already retired, and nevertheless still affiliated with both Georgia Tech and California Polytechnic State University. He also himself says that the un-acceptance of his article is unprecedented, so this is hardly representative of anything.
Piddling about the taxonomy of extinct species isn't problematic, but I could see a mob misinterpret this as him saying that not all living humans belong to the same species, and go on a witch hunt over the misunderstanding.
However, if some evidence started emerging that modern humans were not all the same species (whatever that actually means in practice) then I think the above comment applies. No one with a reputation to protect would touch that bit of truth with a ten foot pole.
The website also has similar articles, for example "How Human Are We?":
I like to think that if he hadn't died so young his personal tastes might have matured.
The NYT opinion article that popularized the term said:
> Affirmative action is politically correct. So too are women's studies, gay and lesbian studies, and African-American studies, all of which are strongly represented in the scholarly panels at such professional meetings as those of the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association. [...] Biodegradable garbage bags get the p.c. seal of approval. Exxon does not.
And Bush Sr. gave a speech shortly thereafter decrying it:
> The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones.
They and all the other media figures and conservative politicians and so forth in the early '90s would have all looked at you confused if you claimed that racism and sexism, themselves, were forms of political correctness.
If your argument is that public pressure to conform to racist and sexist cultural consensuses was bad for scientific research, it does not actually help the cause to defend opponents of "political correctness" who advocate for the freedom to express now-unpopular racist and sexist viewpoints.
My argument is that public pressure to conform to the political norms for its time is always bad for scientific research, regardless what the political norms are. The political norms are what is called "politically correct", things that you should believe because otherwise society will become hostile against you.
Political correct pressure on science is similar to banning all smoking health research that isn't funded by tobacco companies. Sure tobacco funded research is still research, but it will be extremely biased. The same about politically pressured research. The pressure to confirm racist ideas lead to a lot of bad science in the past. The pressure to confirm modern political ideas lead to a lot of bad science today. Those two works in exactly the same way. However since I live today and not in the past I care about the problems science face today rather than the problems it had a long time ago that are no longer relevant.
That is, I agree with you that public pressure to conform to political norms is bad for scientific research, but I am arguing that a specific focus on avoiding "political correctness" means that you in fact succumb to a lot of other (present-day) political norms, which is the actual thing that is bad for scientific research.
Taking your tobacco-funding example - you are, of course, correct, that tobacco-funded research is extremely biased. Suppose someone says that this research cannot be taken at face value, and Philip Morris accuses that person of anti-tobacco bias, of succumbing to anti-cigarette political correctness, of conforming to political pressures about how terrible Big Tobacco is. Who do you side with? There are two accusations of bias here; how you do determine which one is correct?
The heuristic "Political correctness is bad" is clearly unhelpful in this scenario; it cannot guide you to the correct decision. If you want a more meaningful principle, you have to look deeper at things. Even your phrasing "conform to the political norms for its time" is a more meaningful phrasing - but then an obvious consequence is that opposition to political correctness was the political norm of the early '90s when the president and the Gray Lady were telling people how bad political correctness was.
Right, this is a really hard topic. I didn't say I had a solution, just saying it is a problem. There will always be a lot of political influence in research topic related to controversial things and people living under that influence will have a hard time identifying it. The racists 70 years ago probably didn't think they were doing anything bad etc. But today we recognize it as bad.
> but I am arguing that a specific focus on avoiding "political correctness" means that you in fact succumb to a lot of other (present-day) political norms, which is the actual thing that is bad for scientific research.
Yeah, you have counter movements and resistances. But if the context is non-stem non-economic researchers at universities then it is pretty much only in one direction. There is no allowance for the other side to do much research in those areas, meaning research in those areas is a one sided politically correct story.
If we let tobacco companies publish research, and other people publish research, then people can look at the two and make their own decisions. But if you basically only let one side research then you will get bad research.
> Political Correctness- the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes, of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.
> In 1934, The New York Times reported that Nazi Germany was granting reporting permits "only to pure 'Aryans' whose opinions are politically correct".[2]
The definition you read there is just what is politically correct today, it isn't what the term really means. Racism was politically correct back then, it isn't politically correct today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness#Early-to...
> the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes, of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.
Aren't you taking an arbitrary definition (un-sourced from google/Oxford Language) to win your argument?
Here is Merriam-Webster's
> conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated
Seems like both are acceptable modern-day usages... like other terms a difference between capital vs lowercase might help here like... "republican" vs "Republican", "democrat" vs "Democrat"
"opponents of "political correctness" who advocate for the freedom to express now-unpopular racist and sexist viewpoints."
I can understand the hesitancy to do so but I think most people, including scientists, are not aware of the likely cost. It is possibly to classify humans into races/subspecies without resorting to racial discrimination or animus - the same way we currently celebrate so called diversity.
I do believe it would likely have implications for the interventions which certain pockets of our society are attempting to install to correct for racially correlated inequities.
> Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic
> Biologists now think there is a larger spectrum than just binary female and male
> “My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter,” says Vilain. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the...