Scientists fear deportation, withdraw paper on evolution
A colleague just alerted us to an article, Fearing paper on evolution might get them deported, scientists withdrew it, in the April 10 edition of the Washington Post. According to Mark Johnson, the author of the Post article, the paper “described ways in which evolution unfolds in both living and nonliving systems, a subject relevant to the search for life elsewhere in the universe.”
Michael L. Wong, an astrobiologist and the editor of the paper, confirmed that the paper had been withdrawn because two of the authors who are based in the United States feared retaliation, including possibly deportation. Dr. Wong told the Post,
“I was so looking forward to reading this paper because I think the ideas in it are potentially transformative,” Wong said. “But the fact that people, scientific researchers, are afraid of just engaging in normal scientific discourse, putting their well thought out ideas into the public sphere so that everybody can see them, read them, come to their own conclusions about them and then debate them ― it is so disheartening.”
As I suggested in an earlier article, quoting the Righting America blog, this is where we are, 100 years after the Scopes trial.