Michael Shermer: How Scientific American Got WokeThe science writer and journalist talks identity politics, wokeness, trans athletes, and why his goal is to find out what is true rather than to "be right."
NICK GILLESPIE
8.16.2022
"I think the second-wave feminists I've talked to are very worried about the kind of woke, gender-identity movement because it's reducing women to just body parts," says Michael Shermer. "A guy can say, 'Well, if I just get breast implants [and] then I can have a vaginal plastic made out of a piece of my skin, I'm in. I'm a woman, right?' Well, no, because women are not just tits and ass. There's more to it than that, a lot more."
For decades, Shermer has been one of the most popular—and provocative—explicators of science to popular audiences, having authored bestselling books such as Why People Believe Weird Things, Why Darwin Matters, The Moral Arc, and The Mind of the Market. He founded Skeptic magazine in 1992 and hosts a video podcast with leading activists and intellectuals. For nearly 20 years, he authored a widely read column for Scientific American in which he debunked beliefs in UFOs and other paranormal phenomena, explained the rise of the "new atheism," and showed how evolution systematically informs human behavior. Shermer's work is deeply and explicitly rooted in libertarian and Enlightenment ideas about individual responsibility, free market economics, rationality, and the search for something approaching objective truth.
In 2019, Scientific American cut him loose, a move he ascribes to the publication's suffocating embrace of the sort of identity politics and wokeness that he says dominates academic and intellectual circles and, increasingly, the culture at large.
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Source:
https://reason.com/video/2022/08/16/michael-shermer-how-scientific-american-got-woke/
