Minorities in the Sciences: Fully Welcome?

As I wrote previously, us whites (or, in my case, almost-white) have a burden of responsibility to make the world better for all races—we have to work for good, not merely not be evil.

Academia, and in particular science, prides itself for being progressive in all ways. In particular, we proclaim ourselves (I am a botany professor) to not be racist. And, compared to many other areas of society (government, business, religion) we are correct. But it is not quite so simple. Here are three examples that show that work remains to include all races in the scientific enterprise.

First example. I heard an interview on the radio. A black ornithology student (he studies birds) said that he had been confronted by white groups because he was looking in the trees with binoculars. Of course, that’s what ornithologists do. (Embarrassingly but not surprisingly, this example came from my state of Oklahoma.) Right away, you see the problem. White people seeing blacks looking through binoculars might assume they are up to some criminal activity. Do ornithologists need to carry ID cards saying that they are ornithologists, and be prepared to show those cards to whoever comes along and confronts them? Or is it that black, not white, ornithologists need to do this? See the fascinating article in Orion magazine.

Second example. A couple of decades ago, I was one of the faculty judges of student presentations at the national meeting of the Botanical Society of America. I watched several undergraduate student presentations, and kept numerical scores on each. By keeping numerical scores, the other judges and I did the best we could to avoid bias. When our judging committee met, it was clear from our scores and our overall impressions that the best paper was one that had been presented by a black female. She got the prize and we were all happy. I hope she went on to a great career. However, one prominent botanist, at a major university, was quite upset. He told the chair of our judging committee how upset he was. The chair did not tell us about it until just before the awards banquet, by which time it could not influence our decision. The racist was a prominent enough botanist that, had he known who I was and that I was still a junior professor, he might have talked trash about me and held my career back, had he chosen to.

Third example. This same prominent botanist mentioned above had a brilliant mixed-race undergraduate student who later entered the same graduate program that I was in, with the same advisor, and who went on to a distinguished career. This unnamed senior botanist told my advisor that this student was just fine, the only problem was that he was black.

Incidentally, the Botanical Society link above includes Black Botanist Week.

Racial prejudice persists against scientists of color, both from the general public and among scientists. The main difference is that us scientists (at least, botanists, about whom I know) are doing our best to solve the problem.

Trump Thinks He Is a Scientist

And millions of his followers believe it. Trump can say anything He wants, without discussing it with even his close admirers, without even thinking about it in advance, and it becomes Scientific Truth. This is what happened when Trump speculated that, since Lysol works so well to kill the coronavirus outside the body, it might also work inside the body. All scientists and educators (including me), and the Lysol corporation, issued immediate warnings to everyone we could. In my case, this was to about a hundred students in my classes.

Here is a link to one article that reported Trump’s statement.

Trump believes that whatever pops into his brain is The Truth. His millions of followers believe it too, even though few of them probably rushed off to drink Lysol. Scientists, on the other hand, examine evidence, which is why no true scientist actually publishes or announces his or her very first thoughts on any subject.

An Open Letter to the NRA

To: Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President, National Rifle Association

Today, April 28, 2017, you made a statement at the National NRA meeting to the effect that “academic elites” were one of the three most dangerous threats to the safety of the United States of America. The others were political and media elites. I am an academic, and you must therefore consider me to be a direct threat to the United States. In particular, I am a scientist.

I realize that you did not actually say that your followers, unrestricted by firearms legislation, should actually start shooting us academics. But clearly some of your followers must have assumed that, at some unspecified time in the future, it might be necessary for them to take up their precious firearms against people like me. Since you verbalized no restrictions on your condemnation of academics, and offered no qualifying statements, I can only assume that you have given your followers permission to be ready to start shooting scientists and other academics at a time of their choosing and with their own judgment. If this is not what you meant, you should have clarified it! I realize that you and other NRA enthusiasts do not plan to violate laws by shooting us, but at some future time of social disruption, there appears to be nothing to stop you from doing this. Some of your followers may think that, if the government cannot protect us from those academics, then we might have to ourselves.

I realize that you envision a future in which those whom you consider to be the enemies of the United States will be swept away by those whom you consider to be patriots. And I assure you that I am planning, at some point in the future, to leave the United States so that you and your wild followers can exercise control over it as you see fit. With many of us academics leaving the country, there will be a massive brain drain, of which Europe, China, Japan, and many rapidly developing countries will be the beneficiaries. Right now China is buying expensive advertisements to invite us to move to China. You don’t want us; you have guns; we get it. I only ask that you give us a little time so that we can exit in an orderly fashion and in a manner that does not disrupt our lives too much. With viewpoints such as yours being so prominent, and having the complete support of the President, it is inevitable that there will be an exodus of academics; we just do not want to be refugees.

For reasons that are obvious, I am not signing my name to this letter.

Welcome, Science!

With the inauguration of a federal administration that is more hostile to scientific research and understanding than perhaps any in American history, scientists are beginning to feel anxious. Not all scientists; medical research will probably do okay. But climate scientists, ecologists, and evolutionary scientists now feel like a persecuted minority. As a participant in all three areas of research and writing, I feel like I do not want the new government to even know what I think. Fortunately, unlike some climate scientists such as Michael Mann, who has been repeatedly persecuted by the Republicans, I am a small target.

Many other countries are much more open to scientific insights. Make no mistake: they are opening their arms to American scientists. One of these countries is China. In the fall of 2016, at least four Chinese cities bought two-page spreads near the front of Science magazine depicting themselves as wonderful places for scientists to live and work.

• September 9: Foshan “has an obvious advantage of industrial cluster.” The advertisement proudly displayed the data about how prosperous this city is, its 7.4 million residents and its 170,255 private enterprises.
• September 23: Nanhai advertised itself as close to the Hong Kong economically-open region, and “a highly civilized city worth visiting. It is also considered as the national sanitary city…and one of the highly-educated cities in Guangdong.”
• September 30: Sanshui promoted its industrial potential, but mainly depicted itself as a wonderful place to live. “The southern scenery is coquettish and graceful,” says the advertisement. “Here, with picturesque scenery, people live and enjoy the peaceful and prosperous environment as well as the wonderful and leisurely moment. Here, has got the breeze, drizzle and canoes on the river form the beautiful scenery of three rivers in the misty rain.” Thank God for Google Translate.
• October 7: Shundei advertised itself as a growing hub of manufacturing.

Of course, they mostly want to attract the same scientists that American corporations want. But it has escaped nobody’s attention that China does not officially denounce scientists who study evolution, ecology, and climate science. If I were young and mobile and with a freshly-minted Ph.D. I would give China some serious consideration.

Many American cities could, and do, promote themselves in similar terms, and they are right to do so. Tulsa, where I live, has as its slogan “A new kind of energy,” meaning the promotion of entrepreneurship instead of just the continuation of Tulsa’s twentieth century image as an oil town. The difference is at the national level, where Beijing promotes science and Washington is antagonistic toward it.

In order to prevent the “brain drain” of scientists out of the United States, it is not necessary for the government to spend a lot of money. All we need is for the Republican leaders to quit making scientists sound like traitors. The Republican Congress has relentlessly pursued investigations of climate scientists in order to discredit them, and now they have a president who has proclaimed that global warming is a hoax.

I do not foresee a massive exodus of scientists out of America. But certainly more scientists will leave America than at any time in the past.

Dark Shadows of Altruism

There are some dark sides to altruism, some of which I have written about before. One of them is rage against cheaters. And another is guilt.

All humans—except the one percent who are psychopaths—feel shame at doing something that hurts other people who are not hurting them; and more shame when they get caught. Shame is a feeling that reinforces altruism. In fact, the intensity of shame might be a rough measure of altruism. People who do not experience shame, and maybe do not even try to fake it, are a public menace.

A Japanese research team in 2013 announced that they had discovered a way to induce body cells to turn into stem cells. If this report had been true, it would have revolutionized medical science. It seemed too good to be true and, of course, it was. I don’t know why scientists sometimes try this, because they will always get found out eventually, often sooner than later. And that’s what happened in this case in 2014.

In the summer of 2014, one of the researchers hanged himself in a stairwell.

This level of remorse is excessive, but is understandable for someone who has not just abused research funds but abused the public trust. Remorse, occasionally extreme remorse, shows that the person has a functioning instinct of altruism, absent which the person may be clinically psychopathic.

The point I would like to make is that I have never heard of a politician or business executive or preacher or lawyer committing suicide in shame over deliberately faulty conduct that is just as abusive of the public trust as anything that any scientist has ever done (except for the Nazi doctors and Stalinist creators of mass famine).

Scientific fraud is relatively rare, compared to the countless illegal actions so common among politicians, lawyers, preachers, and business executives. The prodigious discrepancy between sincere acts of remorse—and it doesn’t get much more sincere than suicide—among scientists and among politicians, preachers, etc., is a clear measure that scientists are much more sincerely altruistic than politicians, business leaders, preachers, and lawyers. I trust scientists—while keeping my eyes open for the remote possibility of fraud—while I assume outright that preachers, politicians, and business leaders are liars—while keeping my mind open for the possibility that individual ones are not.

Might I suggest that some business and political leaders who have blatantly abused the public trust—such as the CEO who oversaw the illegal activities of Bank of America, for which the corporation recently had to pay a $16.65 billion fine to the government, the largest settlement in history between the federal government and a single corporation—consider the suicide option. The same for tobacco corporation executives, who knowingly profit from marketing deadly products. Maybe they should consider seppuku (hara-kiri, which is ritual Japanese suicide). It would make a great YouTube vid.

I Humbly Suggest that Scientists Should Rule the World

Politicians rule the world. They claim that they know how the world works, how to get things done, how the economy runs, and that is why they should be the ones to rule the world. Well, I guess this is why everything is just fine in the world—because it is in the competent hands of politicians.

But politicians consider us scientists to be impractical. Our scientific minds focus on the natural world, whether it is human brain cells or the growth of forests. They think we do not know what “the real world” of laws and political deals is really like.

This is, however, blatantly untrue. Politicians live in a fake world—in which “truth” is determined by whatever will get them elected, which means that “truth” is whatever their major corporate donors want them to believe. Politicians do rely on data from the real world, but then they filter and twist it into a pretend-world, for example a world in which we can dump our carbon dioxide and Nature will clean it up for us. Will Rogers said, as I recall, “My jokes don’t hurt nobody. But when Congress makes a law it’s a joke, and when they tell a joke it’s a law.”

Here are some reasons why scientists could competently run the world (at least, more competently than politicians):

· Scientists base their assertions on verifiable facts.
· Scientists demand to do things that have been previously proven to work.
· Scientists follow a protocol that (almost always) ensures honesty.
· Scientists really do know how the world works, from atoms to organisms to societies.
· Scientists have had international cooperation for centuries; American and Soviet scientists worked together (not, of course, on war-related topics) even during the Cold War.

The Obama administration is noticeably more open to input from scientists than any preceding Republican administration, especially the Bush administration that was openly hostile toward science. But Obama’s administration is still mostly politicians doing political things based on their pretend-world of political rules. Even Obama listened a lot more to Rahm Emanuel than to his cabinet-level scientists.

Would a society run by scientists be a utopia? I don’t know, but it might. It would certainly be an improvement over what we have.