#Politics and #Advocacy Are Tainting #Science #LongReads

This is a great research report showing how Politics and Advocacy are tainting Science and Academia.  A sad story. 

"advocacy is not scholarship; the former is specifically concerned with advancing human rights, the latter with the production of knowledge. To insist that scholars of a particular discipline adhere to and even advance preordained social politics looks to me frighteningly like the situation Galileo found himself in."

Darkness's Descent on the American Anthropological Association

A Cautionary Tale

Author: Alice Dreger

Human Nature September 2011, Volume 22, Issue 3, pp 225–246

Open AccessArticle

SpringerLink

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-011-9103-y

Abstract

"In September 2000, the self-styled "anthropological journalist" Patrick Tierney began to make public his work claiming that the Yanomamö people of South America had been actively—indeed brutally—harmed by the sociobiological anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticist-physician James Neel. Following a florid summary of Tierney's claims by the anthropologists Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) saw fit to take Tierney's claims seriously by conducting a major investigation into the matter. This paper focuses on the AAA's problematic actions in this case but also provides previously unpublished information on Tierney's falsehoods. The work presented is based on a year of research by a historian of medicine and science. The author [Alice Dreger] intends the work to function as a cautionary tale to scholarly associations, which have the challenging duty of protecting scholarship and scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges in the era of the Internet and twenty-four-hour news cycles."

…

"if the life's work of your colleague is on the line, can you not take some extra time to produce a report you feel comfortable showing to the membership of your supposedly democratic scholarly organization? Apparently not if you think your job is utilitarian public relations damage control."

…

"justice that is meted out according to politics and not according to facts is the justice of the Middle Ages. If justice is not based on the facts, if principles of justice are not applied universally, there is no real justice. Forms of "scholarship" that deny evidence, that deny truth, that deny the importance of facts—even if performed in the name of good—are dangerous not only to science and to ethics, but to democracy. And so they are dangerous ultimately to humankind."

Read the full research report here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-011-9103-y