Book Burners, Coming to a Campus Near You

I've heard of an old trick for killing wasps. Place a pot of water near the nest. Wasps flying overheard will see their own reflections, move to attack the intruders, and end up drowning themselves in the pot. It sounds implausible, but I've been told it's effective, by someone who would know.

Recently, the New York Journal of Mathematics was pressured to retract an article it had published (source), not because the article had been proven wrong in any way, but because it was found to be offensive. The article considered the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis, a proposed mechanism that explains why those at the top of fields like math and physics are nearly all men. The theory can be traced all the way back to Darwin himself, who noted that males tend to exhibit greater variability across the animal kingdom. There is a logical explanation to Mr Darwin's observation. Males can engage in some genetic gambling because there is a strong upside to high fitness. A successful male can mate with many females, and, indeed, we humans have two times more female ancestors than male, for that very reason. Females don't enjoy the same upside. They can't become simultaneously impregnated by many parters, or increase their rate of gestation, so they play conservatively at the genetic gambling table. This variability means that the extreme tail of the IQ distribution is male-dominated, which accounts for why the tiny minority of super geniuses are, almost universally, men. Conversely, the strong majority of prisoners and the homeless are also men. It's a double-edge probability distribution. [Note that this isn't exactly the theory of the author, who proposes that greater sexual selectivity by females drives the gender variability differences. But that still boils down to females being less inclined to take reproductive risks.]

Well, it's clear why such a theory would be offensive to progressives. It violates their primary tenet, which is that all unequal outcomes must be caused by hatred, oppression, and quasi-mystical forces like "whiteness" and patriarchy. Thus the article isn't merely a banal discussion on the effects of variance on probability distributions, but heresy! When the elite of Athens became uncomfortable with Socrates' philosophy, what did they charge him with? Why, heresy and corrupting the youth, of course.

On August 16, a representative of the Women In Mathematics (WIM) chapter in his department at Penn State contacted him to warn that the paper might be damaging to the aspirations of impressionable young women.

Well, there you have it. Some things never change. They pretend to defend women by lobbying for the suppression of scientific literature on the grounds that girls are too naive and helpless to co-exist with it. I certainly hope my young daughter - who claims to want to program computers like dad - is never exposed to these damaging probability models! After the controversy arose, the National Science Foundation insisted their name be removed as funders. Golly, can't have the taxpayers knowing what they paid for. The paper had previously been accepted at another journal, but then rejected by the editor prior to publication because of the "very real possibility that the right-wing media may pick this up and hype it internationally." Those damn right-wingers and their mathematics journals! No matter, the author can always be forced to drink the hemlock.

The paper was rejected on purely political grounds. This is the modern-day book burning, but it's even worse. 80 years ago burning books certainly was a means of censorship, but its effect was ceremonial. As Helen Keller noted,

You may burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas those books contain have passed through millions of channels and will go on.

It is true (although many great works of antiquity have been lost to us by similar actions). Still, the modern censorship is much more pernicious because it cleanly strikes the work from the scientific record. It's memory-holed as if it never existed. Apparently, the paper can't even be republished. I had trouble finding the "damaging" research. I believe that this may be it, although it doesn't list the co-author, so possibly it's just an exploratory pre-cursor to what was actually published.

The damndest thing has been seeing the left become the side opposed to science, Darwin, and intellectual freedom. They now carry the banners of censorship, of discrimination, of imperial foreign policy, of anti-democratic governance, of rogue intelligence agencies, of devout faith in the corporate media, of the subjugation of rationale to personal beliefs. This is precisely what we are accused of! They destroy literature while calling us Nazis. Like the wasp, they attack furiously at their own reflection. Will they shortly come to the same end as the wasp, or will they manage to proceed, like their book-burning forbearers, to inflict unimaginable horrors the moment they are empowered to do so? I, for one, am hedging my bets.