Equality or absurdity?

Read in Science News, issue of September 26 2020:

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin. Carolus Linnaeus. Gregor Mendel. They’re all men. They’re all white. And their names appear in every biology book included in a recent analysis of college textbooks. According to the survey, mentions of white men still dominate biology textbooks despite growing recognition of the scientific contributions of women and people of color.

The good news, the researchers say: Scientists in textbooks are getting more diverse. The bad news: If diversification continues at its current pace, it will take another 500 years for mentions of Black scientists to accurately reflect the number of Black college biology students.

This article is one more example of the tyranny of political correctness and the degree of madness or folly in our society. That a serious high-profile magazine like Science News also makes these blunders shows that the situation is rapidly degenerating. So fast, that it is possible that I may well see the total collapse of our civilization, which I believed would take place long after my death.

Let’s look at what the article says: In virtually every textbook on biology, scientists like Darwin, Linnaeus, and Mendel are mentioned. Apparently, mentioning them is wrong and should be corrected, because all three were white men. None of them were women, and none were black.

Is it strange that most of the scientists mentioned in textbooks were white men? Not at all, as modern science arose in Western civilization, where the population was overwhelmingly white, and before the twentieth century women had almost no part in scientific work. Any cast of scientists from any branch, not just biology, were white men. That is a historical fact, and trying to hide it for reasons of political correctness is a blatant hoax.

In my book 1000 grandes científicos, which contains that number of biographies of famous scientists, I noted in the introduction that of the 1000 scientists biographed in the book, 985 were men, and only 15 were women. Why? Was it discrimination on my part? Absolutely. What we have is what we have. Historical facts should not be manipulated to adapt to spurious interests. Although now that I think about it, perhaps if the book had been written now, the publisher would have insisted that the number of women be artificially increased, introducing a few dozen, or even hundreds of women scientists with very little production, instead of an equivalent number of men with much greater achievements. I doubt if I could have found them.

In a previous post I said that there are different types of equality, usually incompatible with each other, so that if you try to get one, you lose the other. That happens, for instance, with numerical equality and equal opportunities. The list of scientists we are talking about offers us one more example: numerical equality between men and women (which is probably impossible, given the history of science) could only be achieved at the cost of equal opportunities, since men with a much more important activity would have been left out, to make way for women with far fewer inventions or discoveries. And I don’t even consider what would happen if we tried to achieve numerical equality between black and white scientists.

But the last straw is that the Science News article does not even seek to make the distribution of scientists named in textbooks fit the current distribution among current scientists between men and women, white, black or yellow: it claims that the criterion should be the current number of students in each group. A criterion that, in addition, changes continually. Will the scientists mentioned in science textbooks need to be modified every year, to accommodate to the proportion of students? On the other hand, what scientific work have the students performed? Wouldn't it be better to wait for them to do something, as Obama said when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?

We are getting closer and closer to the kind of society that Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four describes. At any moment we may find ourselves controlled by a Ministry of Truth, whose sole mission is to change history, to adapt it to the interests of the ruling class. In fact, in some country, like Spain, that Ministry practically exists now.

It is a bad prognosis for the future of science that its teaching begins to be based on considerations totally unrelated to the scientific method.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca