It’s not a shock that Postmodernism has taken hold of subjects such as Literature or Social Anthropology. The more subjective the subject is, the easier it is for ideology to infiltrate it. But surely quantitative science—like genetics and physics—will survive as a fortress of logic? Wrong. An article this week in The New York Times interviewed “woke” geneticists, whose findings manifestly show that race and psychological racial differences are biological, revealing them clutching at the most desperate reasons why their research doesn’t prove what it clearly does. [Why White Supremacists Are Chugging Milk (and Why Geneticists Are Alarmed), By Amy Harmon, The New York Times, October 17, 2018] Hard science has fallen to the latter-day Communists.
If someone excels in math, they excel in logical reasoning so, in general, you can expect them to possess an almost robotic ability to see through the emotion and dogma that props up Postmodernism. This may well be one of the reasons why SJWs had to make an example of CERN physicist Professor Alessandro Strumia earlier this month. [Cern physicist suspended over 'highly offensive' presentation on sexism in science, by Tom Embury-Dennis, Independent, October 2, 2018]
Strumia was sufficiently “Aspie”—the better at math you are, the more Autistic you tend to be [Superior math skills may accompany autism, study suggests, By Emily Anthes, Spectrum, October 3,2013]—to remark, completely accurately, that, “Physics [was] invented and built by men”, adding—by presenting a series of charts and statistics—that there is no discrimination against female physicists, indeed there is unwarranted positive discrimination in their favor.
Feminists responded by citing female physicists who nobody’s heard of, citing random anecdotes of sexism, and twisting his words—illogical arguments, in other words. [Science doesn’t belong to men. Here’s the proof, By Afua Hirsch, Guardian, October 2, 2018]. If Strumia was less good at math, and so less narrowly focused, he would have understood that academia has now returned to the Dark Ages and you can only reason until you reach the prison bars of the new Church of Equality’s dogmas.
It’s a pattern. American mathematician Ted Hill told the infidel world of his dealings with the Church the previous month in the online magazine Quillette. [Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole, By Theodore P. Hill, Quillette, September 7, 2018] Hill had submitted a paper applying mathematics to make sense of the “Genetic Male Variability Hypothesis” (“GMVH”)—that males tend to be over-represented at the extremes, both high and low, of IQ, hence more male Nobel laureates but also more male vagrants. [An Evolutionary Theory of the Variability Hypothesis, by Ted Hill, August 2017] The Mathematical Intelligencer accepted it after peer review and it was “pre-published” online. But a vigilante group called “Women In Mathematics” accused it of sexism, a co-author was subject to accusations of “scientific racism” in his own department, a math professor called Amie Wilkinson [Email her] complained to the journal about the paper—noting that her statistician father didn’t think it was very good—and the journal pulled the already-accepted article. Crowing about her victory on Facebook, Wilkinson stated that the journal’s editor, “ended up rescinding the paper (good, although why did she accept it in the first place)”.
However, an editor of the online New York Journal of Mathematics, having read the paper online and having heard about Hill’s shocking treatment, got in touch to say that he’d be interested in publishing it. It was sent out for peer review, received positive reports, and was published on November 6, 2017. But three days later the article simply vanished from the website—“down the memory hole”. Benson Farb [Email him] who was on the journal’s editorial board, had demanded that the journal’s editor-in-chief, Mark Steinberger, remove Hill’s paper at once. He also demanded that the sub-editor be fired.
It turned out that Farb’s wife was none other than…Amie Wilkinson. So this pioneering feminist mathematician not only went running to Daddy to stop the naughty boy’s heretical paper being published but to Hubby as well.
Hot-headed Farb—clearly shaken up criticism due to the Quillette article—put out a statement on September 11, 2018, publicly accusing the dying Steinberger, who passed away four days later, of being unethical for not including a retraction note when Hill’s paper was remove…despite the fact that it was Farb who pressured him to un-publish the paper in the first place [What really happened when two mathematicians tried to publish a paper on gender differences? The tale of the emails, by Ivan Oransky, RetractionWatch, September 17, 2018]
Clearly, the Church of Postmodernism has managed to evangelize far beyond the easy pickings of Humanities subjects, all the way to pure Mathematics itself. Its control of the universities is, therefore, pretty much complete. Mathematics must only deal with empirical questions that do not cast doubt on the Church’s dogmas. Like the Scholastic St Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274), it will have to examine the equivalent of such questions as “Can several angels be in the same place?” [Summa Theologica, Question 52:3] something which was later exaggerated, though not by much, to become, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”
Like Galileo, when scientists discover the equivalent of the heliocentric universe, they will find that their publications are burnt (withdrawn from the journal) and they are ordered by their university not to teach anything about it. Or they will have to distance themselves from their own findings by asserting that though these are their findings, they are nevertheless confident in the Church’s dogmas.
This is happening especially in the field of human genetics. There, findings unequivocally show that there are genetic race differences, including in intelligence. As a result, the New York Times’s Amy Harmon [Tweet her] found geneticists whose findings manifestly show that race and psychological racial differences are biological—so that doctors must treat patients differently based on their “race”—virtue-signalling concern about the “Far Right” “misusing” their findings.
“Misusing” findings in this context seems to mean “reading them and understanding their implications.” These Politically Correct geneticists appeal to complexity—their results are “wrapped in numerous caveats”, racialist interpretations are “a very deep-rooted misunderstanding,” great care…should be taken in communicating results of these studies to general audiences”—or simply to dogma: “There is no genetic evidence to support any racist ideology”.
Harmon, who has naively admitted her purpose was “not to give credence to racist ideas,” conducted a lengthy interview with Italian anthropologist Davide Piffer, one of infidel academics who note that race differences in the frequency of gene forms associated with high IQ neatly explain race differences in IQ. Piffer refuted the criticisms of the PC geneticists. So Harmon didn’t use him in her article at all—something he’s drawn attention to on Twitter.
@amy_harmon interviewed me for 2 hours and I generously lectured her on genetics and anthropology. She completely failed to give me credit, because she is scared the hard truth will emerge.
The Victorians had a solution to the problem of university being controlled by the Church—independent scholars: gentleman scientists such as Charles Darwin, researchers with patrons, like Karl Marx, enthusiastic amateurs like Scottish shoemaker and naturalist Thomas Edward.
Now, fortunately, we have the internet and crowd-funding. So it may be—for the time being—that serious, inquisitive scientific research will leave the universities and migrate to the modern equivalent of men like Darwin and Edward.
Because when even Mathematics departments are ideological, the Church of Equality is unquestionably running the university show.
Lance Welton [Email him] is the pen name of a freelance journalist living in New York.