Have you noted the parallel between speech codes on college campuses, at places like Yale (most notoriously), applying to discussion of racial and sexual matters — and those that apply to scientists on more technical topics? (Review the video above of last year’s Yale Halloween tantrum if you’ve forgotten; warning: foul language.) In a BreakPoint commentary kindly citing Stephen Meyer and myself, Eric Metaxas reflects on the recent #Creatorgate story. That’s where Chinese scientists writing in PLOS ONE on the architecture of the human hand brought an angry Internet mob down on their own heads by referring to the design of a “creator.”

The reference was superfluous and in passing. The paper could easily stand without it. Yet instead of being satisfied with a minimal editorial fix, the hysterical online mob demanded and obtained a retraction from the journal. That is, of course, a damaging and embarrassing result for the scientists, who claimed that it was all due to a translation error anyway.

Says Metaxas:

The panic over this translation goof says a lot about the state of science. Not only does it call into question the peer review process, but it shows how averse the gatekeepers of published research are to anything that challenges the status quo. Writing in the London Times, Melanie Phillips suggests we’ve entered a kind of scientific “dark age.”

Much of what passes for scientific literature today, she writes, is simply untrue. Peer-reviewed journals have lately published a slew of embarrassing hoaxes and fabrications.

Why the sloppiness? The scientific rat-race is partly to blame. Mounting pressure to meet publication quotas and win grants makes researchers prone to error. But Phillips points to something else that might explain the bizarre panic over PLOS ONE’s inadvertent nod to a Creator: “Underlying much of this disarray,” she writes, “is surely the pressure to conform to an idea, whether political, commercial or ideological.”

From the Christian view, that idea is called “scientism,” the notion that science alone offers truth about our world. And it’s poisoning not only the peer review process, but the way the public views science itself.

“Scientists [today] pose as secular priests,” writes Phillips. “They alone, they claim, hold the keys to the universe…The resulting absence of openness and transparency is proving the scientists’ undoing.”

If nothing else, “Creatorgate” reinforces her point. If scientists can look at the wonders of creation and still insist there are no explanations beyond nature, we ought to question their judgment and objectivity.

Compare the “panic” sparked by Creatorgate to the phenomenon of PC college student bullying of those holding even slightly heterodox views. In a fascinating essay, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says this dynamic actually takes hold in high school, in particular among girls. He recounts speaking at a prestigious West Coast academy where young people (again, girls especially) showed their displeasure with his critique of PC culture by threateningly snapping their fingers at him during his speech:

I had never heard the snapping before. When it happens in a large auditorium it is disconcerting. It makes you feel that you are facing an angry and unified mob — a feeling I have never had in 25 years of teaching and public speaking.

The Chinese scientists probably felt the same way when they first heard the finger-snapping response, or what amounted to that, from readers of their PLOS ONE paper.

What’s the solution? According to Haidt:

The only hope for Centerville High — and for Yale — is to disrupt their repressively uniform moral matrices to make room for dissenting views. High schools and colleges that lack viewpoint diversity should make it their top priority.

One amusing journalist, Milo Yiannopoulos, proposes to visit Yale and “give a lecture on cultural appropriation in full Native American garb and headdress right before Halloween.” The purpose is to deliberately incite something just short of a riot and thereby inspire second thoughts about the intellectual manacles imposed by PC.

What would be an equivalent gesture in the “repressively uniform” world of evolutionary biology and origin-of-life studies? I’m not sure. Your thoughts? Drop me a note by clicking on the Email Us button at the top of this page. Some brave soul, the Milo Yiannopoulos of Darwin skeptics, should give it a try.