“Merit-Based Science Is Effective and Fair”: How Such a Banal Idea Has Become Controversial

with video and transcript

This is a re-recorded keynote lecture I presented at the retreat of the USC Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology on November 10, 2024. In response to many requests to share the slides and references, I re-recorded my talk. The transcript of the presentation is given below.

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

The title of my talk is “Merit-based science is effective and fair”: How such a banal idea has become controversial.

I will start with a story about our paper titled “In Defense of Merit in Science.” The paper is long, but the thesis presented in it is simple. It is: “Merit based science is effective and fair” and “abandoning merit-based policies does not bode well for science and society.” So why such an obvious, even banal, idea needs to be defended? In the paper we document current attacks on merit that we witness in all STEM disciplines and show the alarming trends of how the universalist, merit-based practices are replaced by ideology.

The paper was written by an international and interdisciplinary group of 29 authors. The reason we all came together is that we are alarmed by what we see is happening in our institutions—at universities, funding agencies, publishing houses.

Given the broad significance of the topic, we submitted the paper to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was rejected by them. And then it was rejected by a few other outlets. Eventually, it was published in a new journal, called the Journal of Controversial Ideas.

Despite this unusual outlet, the paper has generated some interest. According to the editor, Peter Singer, it was read more than 100,000 times in the first three weeks after publication. Say what you want about its content, but you cannot deny that the topic is of broad interest.

Merit-based science is effective. It gave us vaccines, antibiotics, fertilizers, computers, and iPhones.

Science transformed the lives of humankind worldwide. This plot shows life expectancy, broken down by different parts of the world. Before industrial revolution, human life was short. Very short. This steady increase came on heels of the Enlightenment and industrial revolution. It is a result of new technologies — such as production of fertilizers and modern, science-based medicine.

I can relate to this plot personally. I grew up hearing family stories from my grandma. The recurring theme was death of women at childbirth, deaths of bread-winners from tuberculosis and other maladies, deaths of many children in every family. And, of course, famine and hunger. It is because of merit-based science that these stories of suffering are a thing of the past in most parts of the world.

Merit-based science is fair. It allows people like myself, who came to the U.S. with nothing but the clothes on my back, to build successful careers. There are more impressive examples than me. So many Nobel Laureates who work in the USA or in Europe came from abroad—including our own Arieh Warshel and the late Gorge Olah. Here is Ugur Sahin, the man who gave us the COVID vaccine and is now super rich. He came to Germany from Turkey and built a successful career there. Here is an American example, Steve Jobs, the man who gave us Apple computers and the iPhone. He was raised in a poor adoptive family and had no access to regular education. Yes, the playing field is not equal, but meritocracy is the best that we have to ensure equal opportunity.

So why does this idea need to be defended? And how a paper with such a mundane title has ended in the Journal of Controversial Ideas?

If you cannot wrap your head around it, you are not alone. Here are some expressions of incredulity on social media. Ben Gibran writes: “It’s crazy enough that an article entitled “In Defense of Merit in Science” needs publishing; it’s mind-blowing that it’s published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. What next, “In Defense of Not Drinking Battery Fluid”?

But PNAS editors had a different opinion.

Here is the feedback we received following our initial inquiry. The board was concerned with the word MERIT in the title of the paper. They wrote: “The problem is that the concept of merit, as the authors surely know, has been widely and legitimately attacked as implemented…” They finish with an advice: “If the authors could use a different term, I would encourage that.”

We considered to change the title to this: “In Defense of M**** in Science,” but ultimately we were not able to address all editorial concerns. So this is how we ended up in the Journal of Controversial Ideas.

Let me tell you why we decided to write this paper. To set things in context, I will start with a brief personal introduction and then show some exhibits illustrating the current attacks on merit and offer my view on why undermining merit in science is perilous.

I was born in a country that is no longer on the map—the USSR. I grew up in Ukraine and studied at Moscow State University. The life of people under socialism was different. This is my picture from my school album after the first grade, and this is me with my classmates in the 6th or 7th grade—I am on the right. The picture at the bottom shows me and my friends from Moscow State University. We are doing mandatory potato duty, digging potatoes from mud, to help the collective farm workers to save the harvest. We did not smile often.

In 1991, The Wall came down and we fled to Israel. I received my PhD at the Hebrew University in 1996 and then went to do my postdoctoral training at Berkeley. In 1998, I took my job at USC.

In 1996, I was blown away by the American culture. By culture I do not mean McDonalds, Disneyland, drive-through movies, and Hollywood. By culture I mean how people interacted with each other. How organizations were run—merit based, open to different ideas and people from different backgrounds, tolerant, pluralistic. It was quite a contrast to what I experienced in the USSR. So things were good for a chemistry postdoc back then.

Until 2020, I was living a typical life of a chemistry professor—teaching, writing grants and chemistry papers. But then things changed. For me and many other STEM faculty, the change appeared sudden, but now I understand that the poison was brewing since the eighties.

So in 2020 I felt de javu—like being thrown back to the USSR. The old books that I thought lost their relevance to contemporary affairs all of the sudden became relevant again. That is what prompted me to start writing non-chemistry papers. I wrote the essay, “The Peril of Politicizing Science,” where I highlighted these parallels.

The most important one is the invasion and omnipresence of ideology. A very peculiar ideology.

This is what its tenets are:

• Everything (including science) is racist, sexist, and colonial.

• The existing social inequalities and unequal representation are due to systemic racism and sexism in the present.

• Everything (including academia) is about a power struggle between the oppressors and oppressed.

• Everything (including science and education) needs to be dismantled and rebuilt to ensure “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”

• “Those who are not with us are against us” and must be punished.

Here are graphics communicating these ideas—a cover from Science magazine and a picture from Nature Geoscience.

The name of this ideology is Critical Social Justice (CSJ), colloquially called Wokeism.

Subject to small adjustments, this sounds remarkably similar to what I was taught back in the USSR. The philosophical origins of CSJ are postmodernism, critical theories, and ultimately Marxism. I feel almost nostalgic because I heard these things before. I was schooled in them.

We were told that the world is the struggle between oppressors and oppressed, and that everything should be viewed through this lens.

We were told that there is bourgeoisie science and proletariat science. The proletariat science is good because it serves the cause of the world revolution. And bourgeoisie science is bad because it is a servant (or a whore) of capitalism.

Here is a cartoon from the Soviet satirical magazine, Krokodil. It shows bourgeoisie science and a boat full of revisionists — those philosophers who dared to upgrade Marxist doctrine to fix its most obvious failures.

This is a poster from Soviet times. It says “Lenin is dead but his cause is alive.” Unlike many other Soviet slogans, this one turned out to be true.

This ideology is literally EVERYWHERE. The disdain of meritocracy is in its core. DEI is the name under which it operates. Most concerning to me is intrusion of DEI into science and science education.

STEM education literature is now full of articles dedicated to DEI.

In 2022, the Journal of Chemical Education, formerly a respected journal published by the American Chemical Society, published a special collection of 67 papers dedicated to DEI. Read the titles to get an idea.

I naively thought that your identity does not matter in the chemistry lab.

If you add water into acid, instead of acid into water, you will get burns regardless the color of your skin.

If you climb to the top of the chemistry building and jump off, gravity will take you down to the well-defined outcome, regardless of your pronouns.

Here are more examples beyond this collection.

A special topic class on “Feminism and Science as a tool to disrupt the dysconcious racism in STEM.” One module of this class explores “the development and interrelationship between quantum mechanics, Marxist materialism, Afro-futurism/pessimism, and postcolonial nationalism. To problematize time as a linear social construct, the Copenhagen interpretation of the collapse of wave-particle duality was utilized.”

It sounds like an article from the Onion or AI-generated gibberish, but it is for real. This is a real class, taught in an American university—at East Carolina University. Some students took it for credit towards their degree. Some parents paid tuition for their children to be educated in this. This is concerning.

Another example from biology—how students should be taught the biology of sex using fungus that does not have gametic sexes instead of mammals in the name of inclusivity.

And for good measure, an example from physics: “Observing whiteness in introductory physics, A case study.” The authors analyze a lesson in physics class. Whiteboard is mentioned as one of the exhibits of “whiteness”. I am not making it up, you can read this paper by yourself.

If you think this examples are limited to some backwater schools or some loony proposals from education literature, you are wrong. Here is a recent example from Rice University. A course in AFROCHEMISTRY is offered under chemistry listing. In this course, students will explore the intersection of racial justice and chemistry. 

Here is a more-concerning example. A Paper in Nature Chemistry argues that Critical Race Theory is important for chemistry education and proposes strategies for redressing and mitigating structural racism in chemistry. That structural racism exists is taken as an axiom. As an item of faith.

I was curious who the author is. I looked up his profile. He is Assistant Professor at University of Illinois in Chicago. He lists his funding support on his website. 13.5 million dollars! CRT pays well indeed.

NSF is our major funder. Very competitive and difficult to get money for research. Excellent proposals are declined, budgets are cut. But infusing CRT into chemistry education—that is another matter.

Where does our intellectual leadership stand on this?

Learned societies, such as the National Academy of Sciences, have adopted the CSJ narrative and changed the way they operate. For example, NAS now penalizes the nominating committees if their nominations are not sufficiently diverse. Here is what the president of NAS says in her own words: “Not so long ago, the NAS might have naively argued that its membership could not reflect the diversity of the American public … until universities fixed the ‘leaky pipeline’ …. or until … schools started motivating more students of color to study STEMM … and prepared them for success … But in 2021, it is simply not acceptable to wait for ‘bottom­-up’ solutions.”

That is, the idea of solving the problems at the bottom, where they exist, is passe.

One can argue that membership in NAS is not something to be concerned about, that it is irrelevant to the practice of science. But NAS is an influential organization—it provides recommendations to the government, universities, and funding agencies. In 2023, NAS released a report (360 pages long) titled “Advancing Antiracism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in STEMM Organizations: Beyond Broadening Participation.” Here is a quote for your enjoyment. The report describes merit as a non­objective, “culturally constructed” concept used to hide bias and perpetuate privilege. It refers to objectivity and meritocracy in STEMM as myths and calls for merit-­based metrics of evaluation to be dismantled.

Funding agencies are also taken by the ideology. Now if you wish to apply for DOE funding, in addition to the technical proposal you must include a plan how to incorporate and advance diversity, equity, and inclusion through your research.

You have a brilliant idea how to solve the energy problem? Don’t get too excited—DOE wants to know what is your plan for advancing DEI.

In a truly Orwellian manner, DOE promises to “update the DOE Merit Review Program to improve equitable outcomes for DOE awards.”

Equitable does not mean fair. Equitable means equal outcomes for each identity group.

Here is how NASA describes its goals: “We’re committed to building a workforce that reflects the diversity of the American people.” Not to building a workforce that will excel in space exploration, but a workforce that reflects American demographics.

Scientists seeking funding from NASA should now include an Inclusion Plan in addition to the technical proposal.

Here is what NASA wants to see in these plans:

The PIs must devote time, effort, and money to DEI activities and also hire DEI experts as consultants to advise the team on the proposed DEI activities. “Consider paying them well, too!”—says the document.

The assessment of the Inclusion Plan will be based on “the extent to which the Inclusion Plan demonstrated awareness of systemic barriers to creating inclusive working environments that are specific to the proposal team.” That means the applicants must confess that there are systemic barriers in their teams, regardless of whether this is true or not.

The plans will be evaluated by panels made by 50% scientists and 50% DEI professionals.

Other agencies, such as NIH and NSF, are doing it too as we documented with many examples in this paper.

Perhaps the most striking example of the ideological subversion of science is scientific publishing.

The telos, or purpose, of a scientific publisher is to facilitate the communication of valid scientific research. This is accomplished through rigorous peer-review and by editorial work aiming to identify and rectify possible flaws in submitted papers. This process serves as an epistemic funnel—it accepts numerous ideas and propositions, but only those that withstand the scrutiny of the reality-based community of experts emerge out the other end.

Now publishers augment or even replace their core mission by CSJ. It manifests itself by Orwellian language games, by suppression of ideas and research findings, and by infusing DEI criteria in the editorial process.

Publishers are quite upfront about it. We have written a paper documenting these issues, and will share a couple of examples.

All publishers now engage in the war on language. The list of forbidden words is growing exponentially. “Master password,” “strawman argument,” “black market,” “smart phones,” “dummy variable,” “long-time-no-see,” and “picnic” are verboten. “Field” as in “field of study” is verboten. Here are screenshots from the American Chemical Society author guide that add to this: “double blind studies,” “suffers from cancer,” “nursing mother,” and “dark cloud.”

CSJ has made it to the editor’s contracts. Here is what Wiley asks their editors to sign: “The editor will endeavor to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in the editorial process… In particular, the Editor will endeavor to ensure the best possible diversity, equity and inclusivity in its Editorial Board, reviewer pool, and authorship.” I refused to sign this because the role of Editor is not to promote diversity. It is to execute the peer-review process to ensure that valid scientific research is published and garbage is rejected. I was able to negotiate a customized contract with Wiley from which this clause was removed.

So what does it mean to promote DEI in the editorial process?

Here is how PNAS is doing it. This is a screenshot from the PNAS website—instructions to authors on what they should consider when suggesting potential reviewers of submitted manuscripts. Here is what they say: “PNAS believes diversity is an important factor in ensuring a balanced manuscript review.” What kind of diversity? Intellectual diversity? Diversity of technical expertise? They clarify: “Please consider gender, race/ethnicity, and country of origin when suggesting potential reviewers.”

One may say that perhaps this type of social engineering is not damaging to the actual science. Perhaps editors and reviewers chosen by DEI criteria can still do their job with competence. Perhaps…

But DEI does not stop at social engineering.

Have you heard of “citation justice”? This is a hot topic in certain circles. The idea is that your citations should be chosen to be racially and gender balanced. If adopted, this will directly affect the content of the published papers. Rather than providing a background to your findings and supporting your arguments, the citations will be advancing CSJ. There are already software tools to evaluate gender balance in your citations and some journals encourage authors to use them.

CSJ does not stop at social engineering. Or at silly word games and inclusive language guides. A more sinister aspect of it is suppression of ideas. Just two examples:

The late Thomas Hudlicky, a Canadian chemist, published an article in a chemistry journal. Its content upset some people on Twitter. And the published, peer-reviewed paper was removed from the journal. Not retracted—removed.

Hudlicky was subjected to a relentless and brutal public abuse. He was called names—for example, a distinguished professor and a future Nobel laureate called him a “slithering insect.” Citations to his work were removed from scientific papers. Collaborators were pressured to denounce him.

Social ostracism is a very powerful tool, as many authoritarian regimes know. This case scared many people in the community and resulted in broad self-censorship.

The second example is from astronomy. Professor Kormendy wrote a paper in which he attempted to develop quantitative metrics by which the merit of junior astronomers can be evaluated. He submitted the manuscript to PNAS and to a preprint server. The goal was to make the hiring process less capricious and more fair. But the idea that merit exists and can be evaluated enraged CSJ warriors. In response to Twitter outrage, Kormendy retracted the paper and removed it from the preprint server.

Some publishers now explicitly say that they will censor valid research as they see fit. Here are quotes from an editorial in Nature Human Behavior. “Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded.” “Advancing knowledge and understanding is a fundamental public good. In some cases, however, potential harms to the populations studied may outweigh the benefit of publication.” Then they go on and say that they will use their judgement to decide what to publish, in consultation with a bunch of kibitzers.

This is not a hypothetic threat. The cases of censorship are growing. Here is a recent example of a research paper retracted in response to input from “advocacy groups”—or, in plain English, Twitter mobs.

CSJ does not stop at censorship of research results. There are proposals go further—to squash research before it is done, at the funding stage. This paper in PNAS proposes to establish Ethics and Society Review Boards that will be given the power to block your funding applications if they decide that your research might be harmful to groups and societies.

What sort of harms do they envision? Here are examples from the paper:

• “Risks that arise due to the technology being coopted for nefarious purposes—such as governments employing mass surveillance.”

• “Potential harms to any population—such as job loss due to automation.”

• “Potential harms to specific subgroups—such as technical barriers to using technology that is prohibitive to poorer populations.”

Let’s consider my research in computational chemistry. It can lead to new solar energy technology, which will result in job loss in the coal industry. Our algorithms for high-performance computing can be co-opted for nefarious purposes. So based on this proposal, my research can be banned for good.

I showed many exhibits of how CSJ changes how scientific institutions operate. An important question is how these initiatives are justified. What rationale is given to the community by the proponents of these changes. Their argument is this: The current institutions are systemically racist and sexist. This precludes women and minorities from full participation. Therefore, new practices are needed.

Is this true? Do we have evidence of the existence of isms in the present-day institutions? Racism and sexism in the past are well documented, but the question is about today.

In our merit paper we argued that we do not have evidence supporting these claims.

The numerous statements about existence of systemic isms are most commonly supported by anecdotes. Consider this paper from Nature Geosciences: “Scientists from Historically Excluded Groups Face a Hostile Obstacle Course.” The title claim is supported by a tweet and by a peer reviewed paper that is “based on an interpretation of a dream of an African-American woman”.

Our statement that we do not have evidence supporting the existence of systemic isms was one of the main reasons for rejection. Here is what the editor said in the rejection letter: “One of the most egregious examples ... is the claim that “one would be hard pressed to give examples of institutional features today that foster discrimination and are responsible for the dearth of minority scientists in STEM.” The editor says, “Not only is this statement patently false and contradicted by an abundance of sound educational research, but it is downright hurtful to the legions of minority scientists who are (or are not but wanted be) in STEM. Many such individuals were kept out precisely because of those exclusionary institutional features that are claimed to be absent from the Western scientific enterprise.”

This is a strong statement. In the framework of this talk, I cannot fully address it. However, I will discuss one example: claims of sexism in chemistry publishing.

I myself have published over 300 papers. In my capacity as a reviewer and an editor, I have handled thousands papers. Based on my personal experience, I was incredulous when I first saw the claim that chemistry publishing is gender biased. But—as I said just a few minutes ago, one cannot rely on anecdotes. We need data.

And here is a report published by the Royal Society of Chemistry which says that their data “show differences in the likelihood of article acceptance depending on gender of authors, reviewers, and editors.” They say that women are at disadvantage when disseminating their research. So I looked at the data. The data are presented in this paper, solicited by RSC and authored by 3 computational chemists. The paper is peer-reviewed. It is based on vast dataset of more than 700,000 published papers. It is long and has many tables and figures. So let us take a look at the data.

This figure shows how often the editor agrees with reviewer recommendations depending on the gender of the editor and the reviewer.

Female editors on the left, male editors on the right; at the x-axis, there are male reviewers and female reviewers.

You see there is a big gap, much larger than statistical uncertainties shown by these error bars. If you do not know what to make out of it, the authors will guide you.

Here is how they describe this plot: “[T]he interaction of editor gender and reviewer gender shows that the relationship is significant. Female editors agree with female reviewers significantly more than male reviewers.”

So let’s zoom in and see what are the actual values.

In plain words, this data means that female editors agree with female reviewers 84% of the time and with male reviewers 82% of the time. Male editors agree with reviewers 83.5% of the time regardless of gender. The difference is statistically significant but of zero importance. But this did not prevent the authors from making grand claims, that women are at great disadvantage.

I asked a statistician to analyze this paper for me, and here is a concise summary.

First, the paper is a pure descriptive study—it just assesses differences in outcomes. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the authors found differences in outcomes, such as paper acceptances. This alone means nothing. What the authors should do to draw conclusions from this observation is to control for confounding factors. For example, seniority of the researchers. Or type of institution. Only when you control for all possible confounding factors can you claim that there is a bias.

They’ve done none of this.

Second, as I just illustrated, the differences they observed were miniscule.

But they nevertheless conclude that “at each step of publication we see small but significant drops in the female percentage of authors,” and describe it as “death by a thousand cuts.”

In plain words, this study is garbage.

And it does not show what the Royal Society of Chemistry claims it shows.

Yet, the RSC uses this study as the basis for their Framework for Action, which comprises a usual set of social engineering, such as quotas for editors and reviewers. This study is now lauded by the ACS.

I discussed only one paper, but perhaps there are other, more serious papers presenting evidence of biases and discrimination?

Some people have looked into it. A recent paper by Professor Ceci from Cornell and his coworkers carried out a massive meta analysis of the literature on biases against women in STEM. In their analysis they did control for confounding factors. They looked at six domains: hiring, grants, teaching, paper acceptance, and salaries. And they found no evidence of bias in five of these domains. The previously reported salary gap shrank [after control for confounding factors] from 18% to 4%. In hiring they found evidence of bias favoring women. The only domain where bias may exist is teaching evaluations.

I think this is great news! It means that we made progress. That biases are gone and women can engage in academia without worries of a “glass ceiling.” The glass ceiling is no more! What a great message to communicate to the young generation.

But not everyone shares this sentiment. Ceci and his co-authors were criticized for daring to publish the results that show no bias. They were likened to climate denialists.

This is a paper in which they respond to these accusations and reiterated the obvious—that a dream of an African American woman is not sufficient to prove that systemic isms exist.

Our paper showed many more exhibits of these ideological attacks on merit.

I want to emphasize that this struggle between enlightenment and critical social justice is not about philosophy or academia. It is not a culture war. The outcome of this struggle will determine where we will be. It would serve us well to learn from history. Merit-based science leads to progress and wealth. Ideology-based science leads to decline.

To conclude, I find the current situation precarious. CSJ ideology is pernicious and it must be stopped. But to stop it, people must act.

Currently, the majority is against DEI, but most keep silent.

Some say, it is not important, it is just a pillow fight among academics. To this I say, it is not. The ideology is already undermining our research, education, and funding in a major way.

Some say, it is a pendulum, it will swing back. To that I want to remind about the USSR. The pendulum that was set in motion in 1917 never came back. Is it coming back now? Let’s not deceive ourselves—politicians in Washington may roll back some of the most outrageous DEI policies, but they won’t fix our universities, our professional societies, our publishing houses. We should do the work ourselves.

Some say they want to stay out of trouble. To them I want to remind that trouble will find them, if the ideological takeover will continue. The only way to stay safe is to stop the spread of this ideology.

On a positive side, despite all worrisome signs, we are still living in a democracy. You can write an op-ed and not fear being jailed or exiled, like Soviet dissidents were. You can speak up at a faculty meeting and not fear being put in psychiatric asylum. So we have agency and we should use it to fight. We are not living in a totalitarian society, but unless we act, it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I conclude with the words of the great Glenn Loury: “The stakes are high, and the hour is late.”

References and further reading:

1. D. Abbot, A. Bikfalvi, A.L. Bleske-Rechek, W. Bodmer, P. Boghossian, C.M. Carvalho, J. Ciccolini, J.A. Coyne, J. Gauss, P.M.W. Gill, S. Jitomirskaya, L. Jussim, A.I. Krylov, G.C. Loury, P. Nayna Schwerdtle, L. Maroja, J.H. McWhorter, S. Moosavi, J. Pearl, M.A. Quintanilla-Tornel, H.F. Schaefer III, P.R. Schreiner, P. Schwerdtfeger, D. Shechtman, M. Schifman, J. Tanzman, B.L. Trout, A. Warshel, and J.D. West, In defense of merit in science, Journal of Controversial Ideas  3, 1 (2023) Abstract  Full text  Supporting info. See also:

   https://indefenseofmerit.org/

2. A.I. Krylov and J. Tanzman, Critical Social Justice subverts scientific publishing, European Review 31, 527 (2023) Abstract  Full text  Preprint

3. A.I. Krylov and J. Tanzman, Fighting the good fight in an age of unreason—a new dissident guide, A chapter in The Free Inquiry Papers book edited by Robert Maranto, Lee Jussim, and Sally Satel, and published by AEI, in press (2024) Abstract  Preprint

4. I.R. Efimov, J.S. Flier, R.P. George, A.I. Krylov, L.S. Maroja, J. Schaletzky, J. Tanzman, and A. Thompson, Politicizing science funding undermines public trust in science, academic freedom, and the unbiased generation of knowledge, Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics  9, 1418065 (2024) Abstract  Full text 

5. A.I. Krylov, From Russia with Love: Science and Ideology Then and Now, HxSTEM (2022)

6. A.I. Krylov, The peril of politicizing science, J. Phys. Chem. Lett.  12, 5371 (2021) Abstract  Full text 

7. A.I. Krylov and J. Tanzman, Spotlight on Scientific Censorship: A Virtual Collection, HxSTEM (2023)