Why Elon Musk Shouldn’t be Expelled From the Royal Society
In my latest Spectator column, I take aim at Dorothy Bishop, an Oxford professor, who has resigned from the Royal Society because it has refused to expel Elon Musk, whom she regards as beyond the pale because of his views on climate change, among other things. I point out that if challenging the prevailing scientific orthodoxy in a particular field is a reason to expel someone from the Royal Society, that would mean having to retrospectively cancel Sir Isaac Newton, who was the Society’s President from 1703 to 1727. Here’s how it begins:
In a notorious interview in the Sunday Times in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist James Watson said, among other things, that aborting babies with gay genes was “common sense” and that “all our social policies are based on the fact that their [blacks] intelligence is the same as ours [whites] – whereas all the testing says not really”. He also defended the explanation offered by Larry Summers of why there are fewer female professors in Stem subjects than male – there are more men at the right-hand tail of the IQ distribution curve. It caused such a furore that Watson was forced to cancel a forthcoming book tour, Nature ran an editorial saying his remarks were “beyond the pale” and the trustees of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory suspended him from administrative duties, forcing him to retire shortly afterwards. Yet at no point did anyone suggest he should be expelled from the Royal Society.
Contrast Watson’s treatment with that of Elon Musk. In August, 74 fellows wrote to the institution asking whether the owner of X was a “fit and proper person” to be a member of the society – a distinction he’s enjoyed since being elected in 2018 – for his technological achievements in space travel and electric cars. The president consulted m’learned friends and was told that Musk wasn’t in breach of the society’s code of conduct – an important consideration, since if he’s excluded because of his political views he might be able to sue for discrimination under the Equality Act. When this advice was communicated to the fellowship, there was a good deal of grumbling, intensified when Donald Trump won the US presidential election and announced he would appoint Musk as co-director of the Department of Government Efficiency.
The discontent came to a head last week when Dorothy Bishop, an Oxford professor and one of the signatories of the original letter, wrote a blog post announcing her resignation from the society. After cataloguing Musk’s sins – “promoting vaccine hesitation”, “downplaying the climate emergency” and “spreading deep fakes and misinformation” – she said she could no longer comply with the code of conduct, which required her to ‘treat all individuals in the scientific enterprise collegially and with courtesy’, and that she did not wish to be associated with “someone who appears to be modelling himself on a Bond villain”.
Bishop’s resignation has prompted the president to look again at whether Musk can be got rid of. But in the society’s 364-year history, only two fellows have been expelled, one in 1709 for not paying his dues, and one in 1775 for embezzlement. If Musk was kicked out for his controversial views, why not Watson, who is still alive? Indeed, if failing to treat fellow members “collegially and with courtesy” is a breach of the rules, shouldn’t the other 73 signatories of the letter be given their marching orders? In 2020, Francis Collins, a fellow of the society and then head of the National Institutes of Health, called for a swift “takedown” of the Great Barrington Declaration. The three original signatories included Sunetra Gupta, the recipient of the Royal Society’s Rosalind Franklin Award. Not exactly collegial behaviour. Wouldn’t he have to go, too?
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Are Watson’s views “controversial”?
And WTH are “gay genes” when they’re at home? 🤔 I didn’t know you could get gay genes, though I’ve certainly seen some gay jeans in my time. Dutch men seem to have a penchant for mustard and pink ones. I like to think it reflects a sense of humour more than homosexuality though. My genetics knowledge is a bit rusty, mind… 👩🔬 🤓
I would need to see the remark in context and I don’t know if “gay genes” exist – but if they did, what he says might have some sense to it (not saying I agree with him).
I don’t think such a remark has any sense to it at all. I think the bloke sounds like a nasty arsehole. Actually, as far as society as a whole goes, it would be much more useful to test for ‘arsehole genes’ and ‘psychopathic genes’, but then you’d have to prove just how accurate such testing was. So I think my idea will never come to fruition, alas.😈
Being serious though, I think this idea is firmly in Nazi territory, dispatching of so-called “undesirables” and such. The guy basically stated gay people don’t have the right to life, let alone just bog standard equal rights, which is a given for all nowadays. Totally unethical on every level.
It seems like an odd thing for him to focus on but I would need to see the context. From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense. But agree it’s not a good avenue to go down.
I don’t think it makes sense from any standpoint. It’s not like the steady decrease in the birth rate across the Western world over the last few decades is caused by an increase in gay people. Also, lesbians can have babies via artificial insemination or IVF and gay men can donate sperm, so that puts paid to that argument. My daughter’s best friend has two mothers and two siblings and her mothers underwent artificial insemination. No father on the scene but same sperm donor. If you go by the many news stories I share on here, how many heterosexual people ( almost always men ) are running around murdering people and basically behaving like full-on psychopathic maniacs, intent on snuffing out others lives or making them suffer in other ways, such as abuse? I’d rather have a society with more decent people who just so happen to be gay as opposed to people with loads of kids who are wicked, anti-social psychos, most likely only having a multitude of kids because the state is supporting them as they’re on benefits. There’s gay people who choose to procreate while there’s straight people who choose not to. But that’s yet another consequence… Read more »
From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense.
Gay people in mixed-sex marriages with children of their own exist.
Male and Female Sodomites paying someone else to carry out their reproductive functions for them have nothing whatsoever to do with evolution, which doesn’t exist anyway.
It’s a bit unclear what from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense is supposed to mean, eg, shouldn’t evolution take care of it on its own if this were the case? I’ve taken it as Won’t contribute to the biological survival of the species due to not procreating. But this isn’t really true: People may well describe themselves as gay but also have a man – woman marriage including offspring at the same time and/ or sire children as side effect of casual sexual encounters with members of the other sex. That’s a disingenious argument, anyway and it could well also be formulated as It would be common sense to abort male embryos with autistic genes as these will likely never have a relationship with a woman for long enough to actually produce offspring. But that’s guesswork highlighting the prejudices of the person doing the guesses based on educated guesses about other prospective people’s DNA. Nobody can claim to know how the life of an aborted embryo would have worked out hadn’t it been aborted based on its DNA. It’s simply impossible to design a scientific experiment to gain reliable knowledge about this. Hence, Watson’s statements is really nothing but… Read more »
In terms of his views on there being fewer female professors in STEM subjects because there’s more men towards the right hand end of the IQ curve he’s correct. Studies involving a very large number of people have shown that the average IQ of men and women is pretty much the same, however there’s more men at both ends of the spectrum whereas women tend to cluster more around the average. This could well be due to our evolution if for most of our time as hunter gatherers men and women had different roles in society and were therefore subject to different evolutionary pressures. Since women would of been almost constantly pregnant or nursing a young child this would slow them down, mean they couldn’t travel long distances from camp, and make them poor hunters whereas they would still be able to gather a lot of plants, roots, nuts etc. close to camp while carrying their infant.
More ill thought out, lightly put. So-called IQ testing is not a reliable measurement of anything and “all our tests” have only included a laughably small subset of the population of earth. That’s thus a textbook example of both a non-sequitur and a hasty generalization based on that.
Talking about a gay combination of nucleobases is just nonsense. There’s no reason to discuss that as if it would make any sense. It doesn’t.
The supposed quote from Wolfgang Pauli comes to mind: “That is not even wrong.”
The Society gives the reason for not expelling Musk as “if he’s excluded because of his political views he might be able to sue for discrimination under the Equality Act”.
One would have hoped the answer would have been “because it would be wrong”.
Lets not forget that Musk was once a darling of the Left, that is the likely reason why he got in to the RS, but they can’t say that directly, so BS was invented about technological achievements. I suspect that his engineers may be a bit peeved about Musk getting the credit for their work, but anyway he should be in the Royal Academy of Engineering, not the RS.
I always thought of him as an entrepreneur with enough understanding of science, technology and engineering to succeed with business ventures in those areas. He apparently has a degree in physics and a masters in economics but I don’t think he himself is a remarkable scientist or engineer.
There are times when not being invited into or expelled from the club is an accolade, so rotten has its membership become.
There was a time when ‘Orthodoxy’ believed the earth was flat and was at the centre of the universe, many truths have changed since then and will carry on doing so no matter what this trollop wishes and believes
Good f-ing riddance to her!
Just to correct a commonly repeated myth – it hasn’t been orthodox that the earth was flat since the Babylonians many centuries BC, and even then it wasn’t a belief so much as an unexamined assumption, like our assumption that the universe is probably spherical, beause we’ve never given it much thought.
In Christian history, only two notable figures ever advocated a flat earth. Lactantius (tutor to Constantine) learned from the best Greek minds, and seems on his conversion to Christianity simply to have rejected everything Greek and pagan on principle.
Cosmas Indicopleustes was a 6th century navigator (and accurate cartographer) turned monk, whose novel cosmology depended on an interpretation of Genesis that, as I flatter myself with discovering, anticipated recent understandings of its genre by 1400 years.
Everybody else with an education has known the earth was spherical since the Greeks invented the concept of “cosmos.” Geocentrism was a tougher nut to crack…
Thanks for that, but I’m sure you get the gist of what I meant?
Oh yes – it’s just that it’s repeated so often, usually to suggest that Christianity held back science (when it actually invented it!).
Anaximander is usually considered to be the first Scientist, just after Thales, but, infuriatingly, it takes a long time for Science to flower.
And he lived before Socrates, and Jesus:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaximander
I refer to the empirical project with its obvious basis in Francis Bacon’s novel approach.
Hasta La Vista Dorothy 🤣🤣🤣
Well done to our fearless leader Toby for calling out Dorothy the Marxist Harpy for her ridiculous attempt to get Elon Musk expelled from the Royal Society.
She’s done the RS a favour; the average IQ of the remaining members has slightly increased.
Dorothy Bishop’s resignation, by showing her preference for politics and social control over science, improves the RS by a small degree. Watson lived at a time when it was still possible to believe that there were genes determining same-sex attraction. Since then it has not only been shown that there is no such genetic determination of sexuality (only a loose correlation with general traits such as agreeableness and so on), but it is now clear that genes determine no complex human behaviours. That should have been obvious decades ago, given how it would require more information than the protein-coding genes contain, even if it corresponded to population genetic principles, which it doesn’t. Furthermore, in Watson’s own field of evolutionary biology, it is increasingly clear that genes as biological determinants (“selfish genes”) is an outdated concept. Rather, as researchers like James Shapiro have pioneered, the genome is a read-write database utilised by organisms for their own purposes, much as an academic can build and employ his personal library for a range of projects. The controversial question of racial intelligence differences needs to factor in (a) that intelligence itself is an spectrum across populations, (b) that race too is an indefinable spectrum… Read more »
For as long as we don’t have a way to measure intelligence which doesn’t depend on the voluntary cooperation of the person whose intelligence is to be assessed, there’s no point even discussing intelligence as some sort of abstract property like someone’s height or weight.
Almost historic article by Toby, exposing the swing of morality within a short period of time. In 2007, people could express authentic Nazi views on eugenics and no one would ask for their removal. Maybe, that was free speech stretched to extremes. Seventeen years later, the pendulum has swung to the other extreme and the Marxists want to exterminate a world champion of free speech. Will a happy medium ever be achieved? Perhaps, Toby has the answer.
The eugenics is much more effective now, and goes under the names of “pandemics” or “proxy wars.”
The latest winner of the Nobel prize for physics has denounced the climate scare; it’s really high time for every scientist to abandon the groupthink. There is no climate emergency.
As for “vaccine hesitancy”, every school child used to know that there is absolutely no point in taking a vaccine if you’ve already had the virus. By the time the covid vaccines came along, amost everyone’s immune system had already seen the virus and learned how to deal with it.
Just goes to show how really ignorant people like Bishop are. She should be the one expelled
Who cares it is just a bunch of narrow-minded prats arguning within parameters that they don’t even understand. You care about him because he has a lot of money. That says more about your inadequacy than his.
“downplaying the climate emergency”
What climate emergency?
The Royal Society has strayed from science for many years now. Newton would have a fit and probably turns in his grave. Musk probably doesn’t care a jot, in fact it would prove that they are not interested in proper science!
There are people arguing for Newton to be erased posthumously because of ‘slavery’. I’ve forgotten the exact details of the accusation but it was demanded that Newton’s laws are to be renamed because he had been found unworthy of having anything named after him. This nicely illustrates the woke mindset: POLTITICS! POLITICS! POLITICS! NOTHING BUT POLITICS AND MORE POLITICS! NOTHING MATTERS BUT POLITICS! NOTHING BUT POLITICS EVEN DESERVES TO EXIST!
I’m very much inclined to call this the déformation américaine: That’s what too much so-called democracy causes people to degenerate into. Stupid people at least, ie, most of them.
Sort of grateful this woman made her own decision to resign from the Royal Society. The brightest minds in the world are aware manmade climate change does not exist. Please read or listen to anything about climate change, Professor Willie Soon, astrophysicist, has published, or spoken about. It makes this woman look quite foolish.