Jul 28, 2021 04:37 PM
(This post was last modified: Jul 28, 2021 07:32 PM by C C.)
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2021/...riculture/
INTRO: Stanford, which consistently ranks among the top U.S. colleges and universities, is one of the great research institutions in the world. But it is also the source of profound paradoxes — superb science in academic departments, but often uncritically defaulting to embrace trendy, socially attractive notions that actually contradict its well-earned reputation as a cutting-edge, science-grounded institution.
Hardly a month passes without news of a genuinely significant breakthrough in some field of science or technology. One week it might be the discovery of an unorthodox arrangement of wind turbines that increases energy output; the next, a new healing and antibiotic compound from scorpion venom or the application of artificial intelligence to enable people who are paralyzed to communicate by text.
But too often, the university allows its relentless virtue signaling to overwhelm rationality and a commitment to science.
Consider the issue of ‘sustainable agriculture,’ a fungible, feel-good term that allows anyone of any ideological persuasion to endorse enthusiastically; after all, who doesn’t want an ecologically healthier world? (MORE)
Med schools now denying biological sex (i.e., Woke owns science like religious fundamentalists never could)
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/07/2...gical-sex/
EXCERPT (Jerry Coyne): . . . This is part 2 of [Katie] Herzog’s series on the wokeification of med schools; part 1, about the silencing of people out of fear, is here.
Herzog begins with an example of an obese transgender man who died because he went to the hospital, did not know he was pregnant (and there was nothing about his natal sex in his records), and the fetus died because the staff took a while to recognize the pregnancy. But most of the article is about the pressure applied to professors in medical school to conform to prevailing terminology and opinion, and how that is inimical to the practice of good medicine. I’ll give a few quotes from a few areas...
The denial of sex doesn’t help anyone, perhaps least of all transgender patients who require special treatment. But, Lauren says, instructors who discuss sex risk complaints from their students — which is why, she thinks, many don’t. “I think there’s a small percentage of instructors who are true believers. But most of them are probably just scared of their students,” she says.
And for good reason. Her medical school hosts an online forum in which students correct their instructors for using terms like “male” and “female” or “breastfeed” instead of “chestfeed.” Students can lodge their complaints in real time during lectures. After one class, Lauren says, she heard that a professor was so upset by students calling her out for using “male” and “female” that she started crying.
Then there are the petitions. At the beginning of the year, students circulated a number of petitions designed to, as Lauren puts it, “name and shame” instructors for “wrongspeak.”
One was delivered after a lecture on chromosomal disorders in which the professor used the pronouns “she” and “her” as well as the terms “father” and “son,” all of which, according to the students, are “cisnormative.” After the petition was delivered, the instructor emailed the class, noting that while she had consulted with a member of the school’s LGBTQ Committee prior to the lecture, she was sorry for using such “binary” language. Another petition was delivered after an instructor referred to “a man changing into a woman,” which, according to the students, incorrectly assumed that the trans woman wasn’t always a woman. But, as Lauren points out, “if trans women were born women, why would they need to transition?” (MORE - details)
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