The Demise of Scientific American
3rd January 2022
One week ago, E. O. Wilson—the legendary naturalist and conservationist, and man who was universally acknowledged to know more about ants than anyone else in human history—passed away at age 92. A mere three days later, Scientific American—or more precisely, the zombie clickbait rag that now flaunts that name—published a shameful hit-piece, smearing Wilson for his “racist ideas” without, incredibly, so much as a single quote from Wilson, or any other attempt to substantiate its libel (see also this response by Jerry Coyne). SciAm‘s Pravda-like attack included the following extraordinary sentence, which I thought worthy of Alan Sokal’s Social Text hoax:
The so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.
There are intellectually honest people who don’t know what the normal distribution is. There are no intellectually honest people who, not knowing what it is, figure that it must be something racist.
Scientific American has been a Woke Narrative Media rag for some time now.
January 3rd, 2022 at 12:12
When I was a child, Scientific American was my favorite magazine. An older relative had a subscription and would give me the month-old copies. Discussions of quarks and electrets still resound in my head. Then without warning the magazine became another standard bearer for the Left. At first it was just a sentence here and there and it was pretty easy to ignore. Now, the content is controlled by how closely it matches “the narrative”. My father loved National Geographic and would renew a subscription to it every year until I had to tell him to stop. I could no longer read the magazine without sending my blood pressure soaring. “The planet is dying because of the evil republicans and capitalists!” An in-law gave us a subscription to Readers Digest. Again, “the narrative” took over. Instead of jokes and inspirational stories, it became a propaganda rag. They say print media is dying, and I hope that I’ve had some small part in killing it off.
January 3rd, 2022 at 13:58
And we appreciate it.