More wokeness in biology

I thought I was clever when I decided that an alternative word for a woke person could be a “Passive Progressive”, but then was told that woke people aren’t passive because they create a lot of noise and kerfuffle. I still like my new term, though, as by “passivity” I meant “performativeness”.  That is, a woke person espouses progressive Leftist ideals but does not do anything to enact them, ergo the passivity.

But I digress. While poring through some scientific literature yesterday, I came upon an issue of The American Naturalist from July 2022. This used to be one of the go-to journals for publishing evolutionary biology, and I was a corresponding editor for a while, but in my view it’s slipped a bit. This issue, with its special section on “Nature, data, and power” is about as ideologically captured as you can get. And this was three years ago! Well, capture started well before that. If you want to read any of these articles, just click on the screenshots below (there are two because the section is so long. There are other real science papers not soaked in politics, but I haven’t put them down.

Which paper is your favorite?