Mick Hartley

Jerry Coyne has been outspoken on his blog about the Gaza conflict, and his support for Israel. He's currently in Amsterdam, preparing to give a talk on the ideological subversion of biology – a subject on which he's also outspoken. 

Well, not any more. He's been cancelled:

Our discussion was supposed to center on a paper I wrote with Luana Maroja for The Skeptical Inquirer, ‘The ideological subversion of biology“, which dealt with the distortion of six areas of evolutionary biology by well-meaning people whose ideology did not comport with biological reality.  It had nothing to do with war in the Middle East….

Everything was fine until we were informed yesterday on WhatsApp that the discussion was cancelled. The organizers didn’t contact me directly, but sent the cancellation to one of my hosts, so I’ve redacted his/her name in the indented message below, which is otherwise exactly as my host received it. “Dr. Boudry” is Maarten Boudry, a Belgian philosopher with whom I collaborated on a paper about religious belief several years ago.

Here is the official cancellation:

Hi NAME REDACTED,

I’m sorry to inform you that unfortunately we will have to cancel the event on Friday. I’m sorry it’s so last minute, but in light of the information from Dr. Boudry, many of the members in the committee did not feel comfortable giving Dr. Coyne and Dr. Boudry a platform given their stances on the Palestine/Israel conflict. Another fear is how it would reflect on us as a committee and that we might be blackballed at UvA/AUC. We understand the irony of this considering this is the very issue that Dr. Coyne wrote his article about, however the group decided we can’t host this event given the current political climate. Again, I’m very sorry that we have put so much time and effort into organizing this for nothing, I’m disappointed as well.

If you look at the Coyne/Maroja article (link is above), you’ll see it’s all about science, so “the very issue” of our article is not the war in the Middle East, but about the danger of distorting science by infusing it with politics.

Yes indeed…they get the irony, but they still go ahead and deplatform. So brave…