I’ve written about the fact that atheist zoologist Richard Dawkins is no longer Cool. See, “Not with a Bang: How the New Atheism Fizzled.”

Atlantic staff writer Ross Andersen checked Dawkins out recently for objecting to the idea that Māori myths should be taught in science class alongside the Big Bang and evolution. He thinks — and this is a classic Woke position — that Dawkins should lighten up:

I suspect that kids can hold those two things in mind. I suspect also that the project of science — no innocent bystander in the treatment of Indigenous people — will be best served if its most prominent voices address themselves to the Māori, and other such groups, in an imaginative spirit of synthesis and reconciliation. 

“Richard Dawkins Keeps Shrinking,” September 26, 2024

Does Andersen Believe What He Is Saying as a General Principle?

Of course he doesn’t! I would be surprised if he had anywhere near as much sympathy for teaching, just for example, that the Big Bang theory was developed by a Catholic priest, physicist Georges Lemaître, and that it has been widely disliked because it provides evidence for the divine origin of the universe.

The “imaginative spirit of synthesis and reconciliation” would likely be the latest victim of Cancel Culture in that case. End of story. Because, while those are facts, they are not Woke.

To understand the Woke approach to education, it is helpful to see that facts — and truth in general — play little or no role in the question of what should be taught. The deciding question is whether a given statement advances an approved agenda.

Is the National Academy of Sciences Going Woke?

University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, a Darwinian and an atheist, has had a fair bit to say against the recent move of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine to “braid Indigenous knowledge” into the hard sciences in the United States:

College Fix talked to Coyne about that recently. He sees the New Zealand case as a proof of concept:

The professor cited a July 31 post on his blog, “Why Evolution is True,” about efforts at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand to use “decolonialist” and “feminist” methods to “decolonialize” the university.

He told The Fix that New Zealand is a kind of “ground zero” for the prioritization of indigenous beliefs over modern science.

Now, it’s being “pushed” by the National Academies, “a powerful, dominant organization in academia,” he said.

Coyne noted that most of the people on the committee were “not minorities or indigenous people at all, but they have decided that better make a gesture towards indigenous knowledge, because it’s almost considered sacred in a way.” 

Kate Roberson, “Efforts growing to ‘braid Indigenous knowledge’ into science, UChicago biologist warns,” September 28, 2024

The braiding lobby appears to have received a temporary setback; The Fix has been told that on May 14 the committee in charge of a study on how to do it was disbanded, “due to concerns about the study’s approach.”

Some academic scientists may have discovered that if Indigenous beliefs are “almost sacred,” it is offensive to probe them in the way that hypotheses in science can be probed.

What the Triumph of Woke Cancel Culture Means

Atheist evolutionary biologists like Dawkins, Coyne, Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002), and others were once so culturally dominant that they could shut down discussions of the evidence for design in nature simply by refusing to participate. But now they are increasingly the targets, not the archers.

What happened? Basically, as I said last summer, the Woke have a message for science: Scram. Remember, truth is whatever benefits their causes. Insistence on truths that somehow exist apart from political benefit is perceived as a threat. Thus they respond with hostility.

The Woke don’t care about Dawkins’s or Coyne’s improbable claims that the eye could develop without design. Improbable or fanciful claims are never a problem in principle for them. Everything depends on the political usefulness to them of the persons making the claims.

If Dawkins and Coyne want to prevent mythologies whose promotion is currently useful to the Woke from being taught in science class alongside, say, the water cycle or the Krebs cycle, they present a problem. And the Woke swing quickly into action when Dawkins and Coyne say that human beings, like all primates, are either male or female, so concepts like “multiple genders,” however they function elsewhere, have no place in biology. That amounts to the unpardonable sin: claiming that truth has some existence apart from politics.

If the National Academies of Science continue to embrace Woke culture, many former lions of atheism in science may experience a hard landing. It won’t be Fr. Georges Lemaître they will be expected to treat with obedient respect but a variety of primeval beliefs. And if Ross Andersen is any guide, they will likely feel deeply discouraged when they learn where the current cultural elite stands in the matter.

Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.