I wrote about the author list of this book months ago.
Coyne's position is the same as that American Enterprise Institute stooge Thomas Chatterton Williams: the left and right are equally to blame for everything but the left is doing the real damage, no matter that the entire American government is now controlled by extreme fascism out to completely destroy the American education system.
That's what happens when you ally with freaks like Peter Thiel - and probably, in all these cases, take his money.
As always the question is: are Jerry Coyne and his network stupid, evil or some combination of the two?
From the New York Magazine review by Sarah Jones:
In 1994, Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education coined the phrase Gish gallop to describe a debate tactic common among creationists. Practitioners would “spew out a ton of information, accurate or not,” that opponents had “no possibility of refuting in the time available,” Scott told the Los Angeles Times in 2023. Trump is prone to the Gish gallop, and so is Kennedy. It’s not hard to see why: An opponent has to decide, quickly, which bullshit to respond to and which she must table for another time. She usually cannot rebut each lie point by point, as Mehdi Hasan pointed out in his recent book, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking. I thought about the Gish gallop probably a dozen times while I read The War on Science. Though I cannot refute each lie or sloppy argument in a single essay, in the tradition of skeptics I will highlight a few additional howlers that compose the book’s primary case. In a chapter on the dangers of “desexed language” in research and science communication, the professor Karleen Gribble says that some organizations “avoided giving any indication a procedure might be sex-specific,” like when the Canadian Cancer Society “simply said” that “if you’ve ever been sexually active, you should start having regular Pap tests by the time you’re 21.”
As proof, Gribble cites a page on the society’s website that does not use sex-specific language to explain who might need a Pap test, and who might not. The webpage is real, but Gribble excludes context that substantially weakens her broader point. The same boilerplate text appears in a 2014 Facebook post by the society, where it’s attached to a graphic that quite prominently refers to “women.” Some social-media manager probably assumed that the average reader would see the graphic, read it, and understand that women get Pap tests, and that appears to be consistent with the society’s language overall. The society’s website often mentions “woman” or “women” in its communications. A different page on cervical cancer and the importance of Pap tests addresses “lesbian, bisexual and queer women.” Pages on breast, uterine, and fallopian tube cancers mention women, too.
In another chapter, Christian Ott, a former Caltech professor, writes about his 2017 “cancellation.” After an investigation characterized by “postmodernist intersectional social theory,” Caltech found that he had violated Title IX and university policies by harassing grad students. Then BuzzFeed News came calling, as it would later do for Krauss. The site’s reporting “was sensationalized, superficial, and biased towards the perceived victims,” Ott complains, and it ruined him. What did BuzzFeed actually report? Ott never fully explains, but Google still exists. Ott, it turns out, had fallen in love with one of his grad students, and then fired her, and he complained obsessively about the woman to a different female student. Caltech knew this because it had Ott’s messages along with his Tumblr account, where he had published 86 poems about the student he loved. Ott does not mention his poetry, but at the end of his chapter, he does thank his wife for her support.
The bullshit doesn’t end here. Boudry, the philosopher, begins a chapter on the illiberalism of pro-Palestine activists by quoting former Harvard president Claudine Gay. When Representative Elise Stefanik asked Gay if “calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment,” Gay said that “it can,” before adding, “it depends on the context.” It’s Gay’s use of context that enrages Boudry, who desires the unequivocal condemnation of something that did not actually happen at Harvard. He does not include a single example of students calling for the extermination of Jews there or anywhere else, nor does he prove one of his central claims, which is that there is a systematic pattern of antisemitism on campus after campus. Israel is the only “liberal democracy” in the Middle East, he insists, though by what metric, he never says. He can offer only canard after canard — sophistry that, in the case of Gaza, is both intellectually and morally obscene.
So much for New Atheism, sic transit gloria mundi. Though New Atheism as a brand had mostly devoured itself by 2016, the ideas it professed, and conflicts it waged, have become more relevant than its individual celebrities. The long road to MAGA and the present war on science winds through the work of New Atheism, at least in part. To be an atheist, as I am, a person concludes there is no God. Atheism is not a political position on its own, even if it does have ideological implications, but New Atheism is something else altogether. As the historian Erik Baker wrote for Defector last year, the brand, or tendency, was “about science,” not theology, and it was political from the start. Their first enemies were not creationists “but a group of atheist Marxist biologists” in the 1970s, as Baker wrote. The conflict was ideological. Sociobiologists said that our genes explained our behavior, choices, and capacity to reason. Opponents like the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould identified sociobiology as biological determinism by another name and linked it to eugenics.
Sociobiology goes by evolutionary psychology these days, but whatever you want to call it, the basic creed is still around, and it appears repeatedly in The War on Science. If biological differences can explain the underrepresentation of women in science, as several writers suggest, then DEI is a solution in search of a problem. Race and IQ are scientific categories and therefore “real” in this world; that’s how someone like Amy Wax, who contributed to the volume, can say that the U.S. “would be better off with fewer Asians” while calling herself a “race realist.” The New Atheists never limited themselves to discussions of science, either. There’s something of Christopher Hitchens in Boudry’s one-sided defense of Israel against the slavering Islamic horde. As Baker wrote, “disagreeing with the New Atheists — opposing the War on Terror, doubting their just-so-stories about how evolution explained this or that human behavior — meant rejecting capital-S Science, and maybe even rationality itself.”
Contributors include Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, and Jordan Peterson; others, like the skeptic and philosopher Maarten Boudry, may be less familiar. Many are atheists, while others, like Ferguson, have converted to Christianity. All are convinced of their own brilliance.
You will never find a more self-impressed group than race pseudoscience promoters. This is the source of their endless bitterness - they are so impressed with themselves, and yet very few others, outside of crackpot racist billionaires are as impressed by them.
And so even if they don't agree with race pseudoscience (although it's likely most of them do) they gladly promote that slop in exchange for money and for prizes given to them by well-funded racists as in the case of Claire Lehmann receiving the biggest gutter-racist of journalism award from the International Society for Intelligence Research.
Also great:
The writers are too caught up in their resentment to acknowledge reality; they do not grasp their own role in the global rise of the illiberal right. They want a debate as long as they dictate the terms. The War on Science is not remarkable for what it gets wrong, then, but for the work it is trying to do. In Krauss’s more recent writings, he does not accept Trump’s war on research wholesale, but he can’t escape himself, either. As he notes in his introduction, he once complained in The Wall Street Journal that “the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health spent hundreds of millions of dollars on social justice initiatives instead of fulfilling their mandates of supporting scientific research.” He got what he wanted. So did his friends. Now what?
Coyne illustrates Jones' point "they do not grasp their own role in the global rise of the illiberal right" by responding:
No Ms. Jones, I am not a sycophant of Trump—I detest the man, as you would know if you did your homework. And perhaps you should recognize that nobody should be immune from criticism in a society that has free speech.
Neither Jones nor Coyne mention that Boudry is an enthusiastic contributor to race pseudoscience rag Quillette and was recently seen at a gathering of gutter racists, including neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, at the "Heterodox" conference. I'd bet good money that Kirkegaard helped fund the conference.
Coyne does mention that the contemptible Boudry is a friend of his. Because those racist ghouls like to stick together.
UPDATE: I went to the Defector link that Jones provided in her article and I was glad I did because the 2024 article by Erik Baker, The Ghosts of New Atheism Still Haunt Us, contains an excellent thumbnail description of the role that New Atheism has played in the development of 21st century race pseudoscience:
The important thing to understand about New Atheism is that it was never primarily a theological position. Plain old-fashioned atheism is hard to innovate on in that respect. If one does not believe in God, there is not really much more that needs to be said about one’s religious beliefs. In fact, New Atheism was, at its root, not about religion at all. It was about science, and its original enemies were not fundamentalists of any faith but a group of atheist Marxist biologists. Before Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett—the oldest of the group—were best known as professional atheists, they came to fame as defenders of the idea now known as evolutionary psychology, which began its life in the 1970s as “sociobiology.” Dawkins and Dennett championed the perspective of the biologist E.O. Wilson, which held that Darwinian evolution by natural selection was able to explain the reasons for a wide range of human behaviors, social patterns, and habits of thought, which were in turn thought to be significantly determined by a person’s genetic makeup. Their opponents, including most famously the leftist Harvard scientists Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, maintained that sociobiology was built on shoddy scientific foundations and downplayed the importance of history, not just biology, in explaining why our societies are the way they are. To them, sociobiology was the rebirth of eugenics and social Darwinism in a kinder, gentler disguise.
Around the turn of the millennium, Dawkins, Dennett, and allies like Steven Pinker came to a very clever realization. Fundamentalist Christians also disagreed with them about evolutionary science—because they denied human evolution outright. As a result of the political power the religious right had accumulated since the 1970s, evolution had become a hot-button culture war issue. The sociobiologists (now rebranded, savvily, as evolutionary psychologists) had an opportunity to cast themselves as staunch defenders of science and rationality in debates about high school science education, stem cell research, and the like. Gould and Lewontin, despite their materialist commitments, refused to embrace this framing: Gould, for instance, argued that science and religion were “non-overlapping magisteria” that, properly understood, provided answers to fundamentally different questions and therefore couldn’t be said to be in “conflict.” The evolutionary psychologists exploited their enemies’ weakness for nuance. Any refusal to join Team Science in the fight against Team Religion, they charged, revealed that the supposedly scientific criticisms of sociobiology were really symptoms of an ideologically driven disloyalty to Darwin and the evolutionary paradigm. To “believe in evolution” meant to agree with Dawkins, Dennett, and Pinker—which meant to disagree not only with Jerry Falwell, but also with Lewontin and Gould.
New Atheism came into its own during the Global War on Terror, when secular neoconservatives like Hitchens realized that the arguments being used against Anglo religious fundamentalism could be wielded very conveniently against Islamic radicalism. This offered a way to challenge the common antiwar framing of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and other Bush-era military operations as a new Christian crusade against the Muslim world. Instead they could, against all odds, depict Bush as an almost unwitting agent of a great campaign to defend the Western Liberal Enlightenment Tradition (which reached its height in the great discoveries of modern science) against the cave-dwelling barbarians who wanted to reinstate the Dark Ages. The New Atheists of the aughts constructed an insidious conceptual conveyor belt: rejecting creationism meant believing in capital-S Science, which meant believing in Western Civilization, which in turn meant supporting or at least tolerating imperialist American wars in west Asia. Conversely, disagreeing with the New Atheists—opposing the War on Terror, doubting their just-so-stories about how evolution explained this or that human behavior—meant rejecting capital-S Science, and maybe even rationality itself.
