A Biologist Confronts Wokeness

Outspoken atheist and evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has written a column for the Wall Street Journal in which he states his reasons (and those of fellow atheistic scientists Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker) for resigning from the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF).

Coyne explains that the organization has abandoned science by capitulating to those who insist that a woman is "whoever she says she is." Coyne wrote a letter rebutting transgender ideology, which the Foundation published but then removed from their website because, they declared, its publication was "an error of judgment," “does not reflect our values or principles,” and had caused “distress.” The FFRF, they insisted, stands “firmly with the LGBTQIA-plus community.”

Coyne sees this as misguided and the Foundation's censorship as a betrayal of science.

There's an irony in Coyne's complaint, however. As David Klinghoffer relates at Evolution News, Coyne has omitted two relevant points from his WSJ article. Here's Klinghoffer:

First, he has himself been an enthusiastic censor, seeking, if I may borrow his own words, to “silence critics who raise valid counter arguments.” In fact, he won the Censor of the Year Award from the Center for Science in Culture back in 2014 for his efforts to silence a Ball State University astrophysicist, Eric Hedin, for teaching a course on “The Boundaries of Science.” The course pointed students to, among other things, some literature on intelligent design.

In his war on Dr. Hedin — a younger, less powerful, and untenured scientist — Dr. Coyne joined forces with none other than his good buddies at the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRP). They went over Hedin’s head and succeeded in getting the course canceled. Hedin tells the story in his book Canceled Science.

Has Coyne come to regret any of this, now that he’s winning plaudits as a defender of free speech? As recently as 2022, nine years after the fact, he was still mocking Hedin at Coyne’s blog, "Why Evolution Is True" (“Eric Hedin beefs about being ‘canceled’ at Ball State by the FFRF and me”).

Using his power and the prestige brand of his university to bully someone like Hedin was nothing less than loathsome. Coyne was a pioneer of “cancel culture” well before the term came into vogue.

Indeed, Darwinians, so far from being champions of free speech, have been among the most censorious people in our culture, demanding that all university instructors toe the Darwinian line or suffer unhappy professional consequences.

Klinghoffer continues:

And second, what about the gender binary position that Coyne also champions? If it’s mistaken to believe a man can become a woman, fairly competing against women in women’s sports, using women’s locker rooms and restrooms, demanding to be housed in women’s prisons, and all the rest, how did this mistaken way of thinking arise? What forces in the culture help us understand where it came from?

In his op-ed, Coyne blames existentialism, postmodernism, and critical theory. He complains that “some forms of feminism” hold that “sex is a social construct.” Coyne harrumphs, “This is a denial of evolution.”

Klinghoffer wants to argue that transgender ideology is not at all a denial of evolution but rather is perfectly compatible with it which is true, but I'd go one step further. I'd agree with Coyne that transgenderism is a product of existentialism, postmodernism, and critical theory, but these are all, in many respects, outgrowths of the atheism Coyne himself embraces.

Atheism leads to skepticism about the possibility of absolute truth, and that epistemic skepticism manifested itself in the 20th century in existentialism, postmodernism, and critical theory. If Coyne believes that transgender ideology is a betrayal of science, perhaps he should examine how and why the atheism on which he stands has resulted in the ideas that have produced it.

You can read the rest of Klinghoffer's piece at the link.

Why Would Anyone Oppose This?

What reasons does anyone have for opposing any of the following:

• deporting non-citizen supporters of terrorist organizations
• deporting non-citizen rapists, child molesters, and murderers
• exploiting natural gas and nuclear energy to meet our electrical needs
• eliminating waste and fraud in the government
• removing ineligible recipients from social security and medicare rolls
• tightening border security and vetting immigrants
• measures to insure that only citizens vote
• measures to enable minority kids to get out of failing inner city public schools
• protecting girls and women from men who delude themselves and others into thinking that they're really women and should be able to compete against girls in sports and who demand to dress in female locker rooms and be incarcerated in women's prisons.

If you have a friend or family member who thinks any of these should be opposed and who votes accordingly, you might ask them why.

Why Taiwan Matters

There's much in the news about a possible conflict between the U.S. and China over the island of Taiwan, and a lot of us might wonder why we should risk WWIII over an island thousands of miles away from us but only about 100 miles off the Chinese coast.

In his book Seven Things You Can't Say about China (see yestrday's post on VP), Tom Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, lays out the importance of Taiwan for our future well-being in a chapter titled China Could Win.

The Taiwanese people are mostly descendants of Chinese refugees fleeing from the mass murderer Mao Zedong in the wake of the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s. Under their leader Chiang Kai-shek these refugees formed their own government and declared themselves to be independent of China. We guaranteed their safety then and have guaranteed it ever since, despite the fact that China sees Taiwan as part of China and threatens to take it by force.

Cotton writes that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would precipitate a stock-market crash causing millions of Americans to lose their jobs. The severing of ties with China would result in depleted goods on store and pharmacy shelves, and soaring prices. All of this would lead to a worldwide "Great Depression."

Our automobile industry, along with all the supporting industries and businesses - steel, aluminum, dealerships, parts stores, etc. - would be devastated. As would everything, such as agriculture, that depends on transportation to get goods to market.

The tech industry and every industry that relies on electronics would also be ruined since Taiwan is the dominant producer of the world's most sophisticated computer chips. Anything that uses these chips, which is almost everything, would soon be unavailable.

If the U.S. failed to come to Taiwan's aid against China, or even if we did but failed to prevent the invasion, our alliances would weaken as other countries reassessed our willingness or ability to meet our commitments.

Controlling Taiwan would permit China to project power into the Pacific and cut off the sea lanes that run through the South China Sea, virtually isolating Japan and South Korea from their main suppliers of oil. The Philippines and Southeast Asia would be in even greater peril from Chinese military and economic domination.

Once America's military protection from China was no longer seen to be reliable, nations would feel the need to develop their own nuclear deterrent, and nuclear weapons would proliferate.

Totalitarians around the globe would be energized to increase the repression of their people and invade their neighbors knowing that the U.S. was no longer the economic and military threat to them that it once was.

China would be in a position to dictate economic terms to much of the world, including, perhaps, the U.S., and demand that other countries stop trading in dollars, which would wreak havoc upon Americans seeking loans to buy homes and whatever else was still available.

There are numerous other consequences of a Chinese assault on Taiwan that Cotton addresses in his book, but he closes the chapter with this:

China could defeat America in the global struggle for mastery; it all starts and really ends in Taiwan. No one can predict with certainty how a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would end up, especially without knowing how the United States would respond. But however it turns out, it would set off a catastrophic chain of events. The only winning strategy to preserve American primacy is to deter Chinese aggression in the first place.

Much of the world is focused on Ukraine and the Middle East at the moment, but the bigger threat to world peace is China, and we need to understand why. Buying and reading Senator Cotton's book is a good way to help us do that.