Kerby Anderson

Social justice warriors and their woke philosophy are taking over nearly every academic discipline, even biological science. A presentation by Williams College biology professor Luana Maroja illustrates what is happening on college campuses.

She said, “As an evolutionary biologist, I am quite used to attempts to censor research and suppress knowledge.” She explained the threat used to be from the right, now “the threat comes mainly from the left.”

She is rightly alarmed at what science professors are teaching. She points to an obvious fact of biology: “sexes are defined by the size of their gametes—that is, their reproductive cells. Large gametes occur in females, small gametes in males. In humans, an egg is 10 million times bigger than a sperm. There is zero overlap. It is a full binary.”

But professors aren’t teaching that. She explains that “in some biology 101 classes, teachers are telling students that sex – not gender – are on a continuum.” She talks about one college where they teach with the “gender unicorn” and informs students that it is bigoted to think that humans come in two sexes. And she reminds us that the distinction between male and female is the “bedrock insight” of biology.

Research grants are also affected by social justice. She reports that, “Some grants focus almost exclusively on identity, as federal agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, now offer a surplus of grants with the purpose of ‘broadening the participation of members of groups that are . . . currently underrepresented’—instead of funding research to answer scientific questions.”

The world of science cannot last long with this unscientific approach to science. We cannot subjugate science to political whim.