> I enthusiastically applied to various PhD programs, but was unceremoniously rejected, and upon reaching out was met with “…engaging in outdated notions of environmental determinism.” “…you’re playing with fire by suggesting evolved cognitive differences… ” “The political climate on our campus is highly unfavorable for these areas of research.” “…this is probably the worst time in history to be studying such topics.” “…you will likely encounter extreme difficulties in securing grants.”
Sorry, I don't follow. The man has no track record of previous research and applied to several Ph.D programs; of course he was rejected.
Good on him for sticking with his hypothesis far enough to research it thoroughly, write it up, and publish it in a peer-reviewed journal, and now that he has done that work, he might start to turn heads in a Ph.D program. But otherwise, rejection from Ph.D programs after applying with an idea and no credentials is a bit like saying "Based on my new theory of radiation-proof ultra-thin materials, I applied to NASA, ESA, and JAXA for a head researcher position but was unceremoniously rejected." Of course you were, mate. You have no demonstrable history in the field. They want to see at least a working spacesuit prototype first.
> The man has no track record of previous research and applied to several Ph.D programs; of course he was rejected.
He was specifically told he was rejected for doing forbidden research. Sure he might have been rejected anyway even if he had been researching something else, but let's not overlook the reasons he was given.
Or it could be they found his hypothesis completely without merit.
Although I found his paper interesting, he handwaved Confucianism away as the explanation for East Asian personality traits.
No matter the origins of Confucianism, it was the Chinese state religion for almost two thousand years and heavily influenced Korea, Japan, Vietnam etc.
Sure, but that doesn't really modify the point. Those fields are "forbidden" (the publication of his paper demonstrates they are not; they are unpopular having generated significantly negative outcomes and no shortage of dead-ends) for a reason.
"The secret to my radiation-proof space suit was interspersing microscopic mercury-selenium pellets in the fabric of the suit with quantum properties that match the wavelength of ionizing radiation at a ~"
"Oh, you're using mercury. In fabric. That goes on human skin. Okay, now we really need to see a prototype. And your health trials."
It's not so much ridiculous as "There are ways to do it safely. History strongly suggests that the default should be to assume it's unsafe, so treat it with heightened scrutiny."
There may be some specific ways in which Lamarckian genetics is correct, but given that trusting too much in it has already resulted in one crippling famine, it's fair to hit claims founded on it with a larger skepticism bat than theories based on Mendelian inheritance.
> He was specifically told he was rejected for doing forbidden research.
Or, that's what he told us. Also, I've done my PhD and I don't think I've ever seen a graduate program telling a candidate why they were rejected. It is always the standard "There are more qualified candidates than we can accommodate and we could not accept everyone, I hope you understand."
...which makes me a little bit suspicious about the whole tale.
For me personally I require more evidence than a few quotes that do not appear to actually be direct quotations to accept his conclusion that the reason he was rejected was PhD programs were too "woke". It is possible, but it's also possible that he misunderstood what they were trying to tell him.
Here is the additional (circumstantial) evidence you requested:
The leading journal Nature Human Behaviour recently made this practice official in an editorial effectively announcing that it will not publish studies that show the wrong kind of differences between human groups. [..] the National Institutes of Health now withholds access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may wander into forbidden territory - https://www.city-journal.org/article/dont-even-go-there
I can't find a publicly available copy of the Nature Human Behavior editorial. If you can share it I'd be happy to read it and form an opinion on it. I personally won't take City Journal's opinions at face value.
I can't find it either. What I did find was that that article may have been published by City Journal, but was written by James Lee, of the University of Minnesota, with a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard [1].
If you still suspect he's lying, his statements are corroborated [2] by Stuart J. Ritchie (has served as a lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London) [3], who directly cites a rule:
Please note that these summary data should not be used for research into the genetics of intelligence, education, social outcomes such as income, or potentially sensitive behavioral traits such as alcohol or drug addictions.
And an e-mail from NIAGADS:
…the association of genetic data with any of these parameters can be stigmatizing to the individuals or groups of individuals in a particular study. Any type of stigmatization that could be associated with genetic data is contrary to NIH policy.
He links to the page containing the rule [4], but unfortunately the page has since changed ("This dataset is temporarily unavailable"), and archive.org doesn't have an old version. So it could be that two Ph.D.'s working in the field are both lying - as you observe, sources that report things you don't like are untrustworthy.
I found their policy after a very quick search on the 'net so I'll share it with those who for whatever reason can not or do not want to perform this search:
This is quite a long piece of text so I won't quote it - just read it. It does support the premise of that City Journal article in that NHB will not publish research which they deem to trespass on 'forbidden territory' regardless of the scientific validity of such research.
I found that page, but it is labelled as editorial guidelines and not an editorial article, which is what I was expecting to find from the previous description. From my reading then, what is being labelled here as "forbidden territory" is this:
"Non-maleficence and beneficence are two fundamental principles in research ethics requiring the maximization of benefits and minimization of potential harms. These principles form a core part of general frameworks for the ethical conduct of research across the sciences and humanities (for example, The World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki; The Belmont Report; the International Ethical Guidelines for Health-related Research Involving Humans; Ethics in Social Science and Humanities)."
Which I see as more along the lines of the Hippocratic Oath rather than totalitarian thought crime. If this self-described neophyte didn't understand the risks for harm created by his research, that's his fault and not that of the PhD programs.
> it is labelled as editorial guidelines and not an editorial article
Editorial Policies
As part of the Nature Portfolio, the Nature Research journals follow common policies as detailed in the Nature Portfolio journals’ authors and referees policy pages, and we request that our authors and referees abide by all of them. Nature Portfolio journals take publication conduct seriously. We reserve the right to decline publication of a paper even after it has been accepted if it becomes apparent that there are serious problems with the scientific content or violations of our publishing policies. Particularly, we want to draw your attention to the following policies and guidelines.
I'd say they're very clear on what these are and what the consequences of violating these guidelines are. They assume their readers and potential authors understand what they mean as well. I think they are correct in their assumption that those who are interested in this publication understand both the meaning as well as the reach of these guidelines.
It is also clear from these guidelines that the City Journal article as well as the self-described neophyte (your words) were right when they said research into these areas is shunned no matter the validity of such research, that as far as this publication is concerned this is 'forbidden territory'.
> ...didn't understand the risks for harm created by his research, that's his fault and not that of the PhD programs.
No, that is an incorrect characterisation of the circumstances. There is no harm created by this research per se, what harm there might be is in the eyes of the editors of NHB in that this research enters a territory that they deem to be off-limits because it might produce outcomes that undermine the basic tenets of their world view. In reality this research and any outcomes it produces can be used both for good as well as for bad purposes just like nearly all research. The editors at NHB would rather not have to contend with research which undermines their basic tenets of all humans being identical - the 'tabula rasa' or '0% nature, 100% nurture' - so they want to keep it out of their publication (which in itself is their right although it undermines their credibility) as well as out of academic discourse (which is where they are wrong).
I'm sorry, I don't see anywhere in either the editorial or the guidelines where they push nature completely out the window in favor of 100% nurture.
They do appear to be putting nature-based explanations under heightened scrutiny. Probably because attempts at those explanations in the past have proven not only wrong, but served as the foundation for extremely anti-human policy.
And if they don't want to be complicit in that, good on them. This isn't the only scientific field where that's the case. Go try to find the precise calculations necessary to get all of the chemistry and physics right to build a hydrogen bomb with a city-busting yield. Not a dirty bomb or enough tactical nuke to blow up a block or three, something more powerful than what was dropped in World War II. Let us know how that goes. Hint: What you will discover is that some constants used in the scientific community and published in widely circulated documents don't quite add up precisely right... And have different values if you can find documents from the United States and from the old Soviet Union.
And also, if you dig deeply enough in the States, eventually some very nice folks from the Department of Energy will show up and express some curiosity and excitement about your project, wondering how they can help. Because, the thing is, almost nobody is doing the kind of physics that requires those numbers to have extremely specific values, and the kind of equipment you have to buy or build to really investigate those numbers in detail is rare and unusual. Rare and unusual enough to show up on some very inexpensive tracking of who is purchasing it. So they just want to make sure that they help you get exactly. The. Right. Numbers.
Many people who get into PhD programs have some level of undergraduate research (typically performed in a lab, alongside grad students and a professor). When a graduate acceptance committee is evaluating applications, signals like "I have worked with a professor", "wrote an undergrad thesis", and "was coauthor and published in a peer-reviewed journal" cause applicants to be ranked more highly than peers who lack those signals.
Is it? Maybe this is just a terrible paper that reads like 19th century theories about Aryans. Those responses sound like they are pointing to a climate of intellectual repression, but...there's a reason we don't have endowed chairs in phrenology or palmistry or astral projection. And if someone proposed such a thing, the responses might not look too open-minded.
As they say, it's good to be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brain falls out.
What you're doing by comparing it to phrenology and astral projection is just reductio ad absurdum.
It's not controversial that some personality traits might have genetic roots. It's also not controversial that humans who evolved in different regions have slightly different genetics.
But at first glance at the thesis of the research project, there's every reason to doubt the two combined would make any sense here. Among the immediate initial questions it raises is "Most East Asians don't live in subzero temperatures any more, so why do they still act that way?"
One has to remember how many absolute crackpots institutions of higher learning have write in every year. Now that he's done the heavy lifting on his own, there's a paper that can be discussed, but no shame on any institution that saw a nobody in the field coming in with an idea likely to fail to hold any water that went "Yeah, we're going to invest zero resources into that."
Comparison to phrenology, for an unknown quantity, isn't absurd; it's kind of the status quo for universities getting solicitations from strangers. That channel of communication is where the perpetual motion machines, time cubes, and proposals to go find the resting place of Atlantis come from.
Yeah but ‘racism bad’ and even suggesting that race might have any meaningful impact on anything at all is unacceptable politically, even if obviously true or impossible to disprove.
He's setting up a choice between the content of his paper vs. intellection repression. And I'm choosing not to take the bait. It's possible that he is experiencing intellectual repression AND his paper is not great.
It's not really a 'climate', but official policy that that area of research is off-limits, to the point that tax-funded genetic datasets are withheld if it is suspected one is doing said research: https://www.city-journal.org/article/dont-even-go-there
The claims are poorly substantiated, it’s not enough to make assumptions about something and read about it. You must directly validate a claim by rigorously defining the traits in question, and then find some way to perform measurements—indirect evidence isn’t appropriate to make statements about psychological and personality similarities.
Note that genetic testing or evidence will be insufficient for proving the type of claim this paper is making because there are too many confounding factors which override biological similarities—that’s the whole issue with nature vs. nurture.
> Testing this hypothesis requires (a) understanding human psychosocial adaptations to arctic environments, (b) showing that East Asians and Inuit possess these traits, and (c) making the case that the existence of these traits in modern East Asians is primarily the result of natural selection and/or gene–culture coevolution having acted in the Late Pleistocene on East Asians’ ancestors rather than other factors.
That’s the main part of the paper, and what follows is essentially a literature review, which is an inherently flawed way to prove a hypothesis.
A hypothesis is a testable claim, which can be independently verified if it is validated. There is no process in the paper, other than a review of other literature, to substantiate the paper’s new claims. So, this person is essentially doing science journalism, not science.
I think the two main problems are that they didn’t provide sufficient work for (b) or (c), but they’re laboring under the misconception that a background review of literature is enough. But instead a background review is used to justify the structure of measurements and analysis which usually follows in scientific papers. So, the claim is poorly substantiated.
I too have read Never in Anger, the ethnography mentioned in this blog post, and the way I found it was by reading a survey of egalitarian societies called Hierarchy in the Forest, by Christopher Boehm. Many of the personality traits that the author seems to think are special about people who share the East Asian phenotype are actually common amongst fiercely egalitarian societies. It is normal to highly police socio-emotional expression and to regard angry tribe members with suspicion. The !Kung San live in a hot climate and are like this. The Montenegro Serbs live in the Balkans, a rather different climate, and are also like this. I finished Hierarchy in the Forest with the strong impression that no member of any modern society could tolerate the lack of personal expression required to suppress any would-be chiefs.
This person could've spent a lot less time going down a rabbit hole with a couple introductory anthropology classes and by asking themselves if there were any societies with these same traits in a warm climate. It is poor scientific reasoning not to check for examples of this personality type in hot climates. Not exactly PhD material.
> Many of the personality traits that the author seems to think are special about people who share the East Asian phenotype are actually common amongst fiercely egalitarian societies.
This is an obvious mischaracterization of the hypothesis, though.
The author says nothing about whether other cultures and groups share this egalitarian tendency.
Just that East Asians tend to share this tendency and that it must transcend cultural specifics such as Confucianism, by comparing East Asians to Inuits who predate Confucianism by at least 8000 years, and positing that cold environment adaptation was the driver.
Whether the paper’s data and analysis is PhD worthy is a different matter, but it’s an interesting hypothesis.
As a Brit, I thought "are they just describing the 'stiff upper lip' or something?".
Which is doubly odd, because here that is more associated with upper-middle-classes. That cold stoicism that causes people to act 'gentlemanly' regardless of circumstance, or parents to pressure their children to be upwardly mobile, generals to describe an unwinnable position as "a bit of a pickle" etc. etc.
In Britain this is definitely seen as a class characteristic rather than a climatic one (we all live in a similarly temperate environment).
Something can be special without being unique. That there exist a handful of other cultures with similar traits, does not disprove those traits are not also selected-for by cold climates, or (in at least some cases) genetic in origin.
> I then wondered, is this mere coincidence, or do extreme cold/polar environments cause this in people? I recalled Russia had gas workers in the Arctic regions and tried to look up papers on it. It led me down a rabbit hole of discovering entire troves of scientific literature from various nations that had polar programs, with tons of data on polar personnel psychology, most conveniently refined into personnel selection criteria that shows which traits are the most desirable in candidates for polar work or expeditions.
Cause it in individuals? Or select for it through evolution?
If the former, there's no genetic component here, and the effect should vanish as soon as you get somewhere warm.
If it's the latter, then it can't cause it in individuals who happen to work there over local-winter, right?
The author did themselves a disservice by not filtering some of the bitterness of their journey, because the opening story was fascinating and hints at something worth exploring.
The constructive criticism would be better served as a follow-up post.
I can't judge whether this is a good paper or not, and I think it's really cool that someone with only a bachelors degree (like myself) can get a paper published without first doing a PhD.
However, the anti-"woke" part of this article seems so odd to me. Given all the wacky "science" from Nazi scientists that "research" differences between races leading to genocide, it seems completely logical to me that you jump through several hoops and make sure your research is really sound before you publish a paper that explores exactly that topic.
I don't understand your comment -- are you implying the holocaust didn't happen or wasn't genocide? I want to steelman your argument but it's pretty hard.
Your other point is that you wonder whether a paper review is going to protect against mass killing. I'd say yes, that's quite possible. Anyone can post almost anything they want on any kind of blog or 4chan sub or reddit sub, and that's fine. But scientific papers are what people quote as "truth", and publishers have some responsibility in making sure that what they publish is based in evidence. This is especially true when it concerns topics that have, historically, led to genocide.
This is incredibly sad.