Scientific American Loses Its Bold Leader
The resignation of Laura Helmuth, editor-in-chief of Scientific American and a powerful social-justice warrior, makes me fear for science journalism. Photo from Wikipedia.
HOBOKEN, NOVEMBER 15, 2024. Well before Scientific American’s editor vented her despair over the election, social injustice warriors were bashing the magazine for its political views. Critics include anti-woke bros Jordan Peterson, Charles “The Bell Curve” Murray, Pinker wannabe Michael Shermer, Dawkins wannabe Jerry Coyne and the right-leaning Wall Street Journal and City Journal.
On election night, Sci Am editor Laura Helmuth called Trump voters “racist and sexist” and “fucking fascists” on the social media platform BlueSky, a haven for Twitter/X refugees. Yeah, she lost her cool, but Helmuth’s labels apply to Trump if not to all who voted for him.
Although Helmuth apologized for her remarks, Elon Musk (perhaps miffed that Scientific American recently knocked him) and others called for her head. Yesterday Helmuth announced she was stepping down.
Trump spews insults and wins the election. Helmuth loses her job. Critics of cancel culture cheered Helmuth’s cancellation. I’m guessing we’ll see more of this sickening double standard in coming months and years.
I’m writing this column, first, to express my admiration for Helmuth. She is not only a fearless, intrepid editor, who is passionate about science (she has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience). She is also—and I’ve heard this from her colleagues and experienced it first-hand--a kind, considerate person. That’s a heroic feat in this mean-spirited age.
I’d also like to address the complaint that Helmuth’s approach to science was too political and partisan. Yes, under Helmuth, Scientific American has had a clear progressive outlook, ordinarily associated with the Democratic party. The magazine endorsed Joe Biden four years ago, shortly after Helmuth took over, and Kamala Harris this year.
Sci Am presented scientific analyses of and took stands on racism, reproductive rights, trans rights, climate change, gun violence and covid vaccines. Critics deplored the magazine’s “transformation into another progressive mouthpiece,” as The Wall Street Journal put it. Biologist Jerry Coyne says a science magazine should remain “neutral on issues of politics, morals, and ideology.”
What??!! As Coyne knows, science, historically, has never been “neutral.” Powerful groups on the right and left have employed science to promote their interests and propagate lethal ideologies, from eugenics to Marxism. Science journalists can either challenge abuses of science or look the other way.
I became a staff writer at Scientific American in 1986, when Jonathan Piel was editor. The magazine bashed the Reagan administration’s plan to build a space-based shield against nuclear weapons. I wrote articles linking behavioral genetics to eugenics and evolutionary psychology to social Darwinism. I got letters that began: “Dear Unscientific Unamerican.” My point: the magazine has never been “neutral,” it has always had a political edge.
Under Piel, as well as successors John Rennie, Mariette DiChristina and Helmuth, the magazine published plenty of articles with no political ramifications. But if you just stick to uncontroversial science, and you decline to take a position on topics like climate change or reproductive rights, you aren’t “neutral.” You are just looking the other way.
Robert Kennedy, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health, has linked vaccines to autism, and he has conjectured that the covid virus was engineered to attack Caucasians and African Americans and spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” Trump says some Mexican immigrants have “bad genes” that make them killers, and as recently as 2022 he called climate change a “hoax.”
Meanwhile, Trump is vowing to cut federal aid to schools “pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content.” And The Guardian reports that Trump is filing lawsuits against The New York Times and other media “that have been critical of him.”
Using your power to silence your opposition sounds pretty fascist to me. Will the next editor of Scientific American have the guts to challenge Trump and his minions? Will anyone?
ADDENDA:
Laura Helmuth, I’m happy to report, has not been silenced. See her blistering Nov. 21 article for Slate on what we can expect if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. becomes our next Secretary of Health.
My friend and former SA colleague Corey Powell writes: It's amazing to read these ignorant comments about how SciAm has suddenly turned into a left-wing rag, as if the modern post-war incarnation of the magazine was not born out of progressive politics and a sense that science has a social mission. Out of curiosity, I went back and read Oscar Lewis's 1966 SciAm article “The Culture of Poverty,” which ends with this thought:
"In underdeveloped countries where great masses of people live in the culture of poverty, such a social-work solution does not seem feasible. The local psychiatrists have all they can do to care for their own growing middle class. In those countries the people with a culture of poverty may seek a more revolutionary solution. By creating basic structural changes in society, by redistributing wealth, by organizing the poor and giving them a sense of belonging, of power and of leadership, revolutions frequently succeed in abolishing some of the basic characteristics of the culture of poverty even when they do not succeed in curing poverty itself."
Author George Dyson writes: I saw your piece on Laura Helmuth via Dave Farber. If there’s any letter or other show of support being circulated for signatures by former Sci Am writers (although I only contributed one article, in April 2000) count me in. And it is worth remembering that [George’s father] Freeman Dyson, a frequent contributor going back to 1953, much preferred (and often defended) editors who voiced strong opinions--especially if they were opinions with which he disagreed. — George Dyson
Further Reading:
I Am One of Those Evil Woke Professors
Advice to Aspiring Science Writers: Remember Marx
Dear Student Protesters, Please Oppose All War
Dear Feminists, Please Help End War!
Thanksgiving and Scientists’ Slander of Native Americans