{"id":1461,"date":"2026-08-29T18:11:38","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T17:11:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vitormsalmeida.pt\/?p=1461"},"modified":"2026-08-29T18:11:38","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T17:11:38","slug":"science-versus-political-correctness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vitormsalmeida.pt\/index.php\/2026\/08\/29\/science-versus-political-correctness\/","title":{"rendered":"Science versus “political correctness”."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The sciences (the natural sciences, not the “pseudo-human sciences” and the like) prioritize empirical evidence, falsifiability, and description of the world as it is; politically correct ethics prioritize narratives of fairness, offense, and social justice, and when the two collide, the latter often attempts to subordinate the former.

What are sciences? <\/mark>
Physics, chemistry, biology, geology, neuroscience, and related disciplines operate through observation, experimentation, mathematical modeling, and testable prediction. The criterion for success is correspondence with reality (not with what would be socially desirable). Sex differences in the brain and body, heritability of cognitive traits, genetic variation among populations, evolution by natural selection, and biological limits to human plasticity are results that emerge from the data\u2014regardless of whether they are convenient.
Traditional scientific ethics demands intellectual honesty, replicability, openness to criticism, and rejection of fraud. It does not require that results be “inclusive” or that they avoid “emotional harm.”

Where Political Correctness Intervenes:<\/mark>
The contemporary version of political correctness treats certain findings as morally suspect a priori if they threaten strong egalitarian assumptions (group differences are merely \u201csocial constructs,\u201d sex is a fluid spectrum without a strong binary basis, intelligence is almost entirely environmental, etc.).

Practical consequences include: <\/mark>
– Pressure to redefine biological terms (\u201csex assigned at birth,\u201d \u201cperson who menstruates\u201d) to accommodate subjective identity, even when developmental biology, gametes, and chromosomes remain binary in the vast majority of cases.
– Research taboos in behavioral genetics, sex differences in interests and abilities, or population variation in traits, under accusation of \u201cessentialism\u201d or risk of \u201cstigmatization.\u201d
– Preference for environmental or \u201csystem\u201d explanations even when evidence of heritability or biological predispositions is robust (twin studies, adoption, GWAS).
– Extreme historical (Lysenkoism) and contemporary cases where peer reviews, funding, and publications are filtered by ideological alignment rather than methodological rigor.

This is not \u201cethics\u201d in the classical sense of not harming or seeking truth; it is a consequentialist group ethic that sacrifices descriptive accuracy to protect narratives of power and identity.<\/strong>

Real, not invented, tensions <\/mark>
– Evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology explain why men and women, on average, differ in interests (things vs. people), variability, and certain risk profiles\u2014patterns that appear early, in diverse cultures, and have hormonal and neurological correlates. Denying this in the name of \u201cequity of outcomes\u201d does not eliminate the patterns; it only distorts educational and career policies. Similarly, human genetics documents both species unity and population structure and allele frequency differences; treating any mention of this as \u201cscientific racism\u201d confuses description with moral prescription.
– Science does not dictate values. Knowing that there are average sex differences does not imply that women should be excluded from STEM; knowing that intelligence has a hereditary component does not justify individual discrimination. But denying data to protect an absolute egalitarian ideal produces worse policies and public distrust in science itself.

Real example of “data manipulation”: <\/mark>
In Portugal, everyone knows that crime has increased dramatically in the last 10 years, especially in the last 5. We also knew 10 years ago that the country was safe (anyone could walk the streets at night without any problem), and that the prison population of prisoners who were foreigners or of non-Portuguese ethnicity (these groups represented about 3-5% of the population) varied between 25% and 50% (variation depending on the time of year, etc.).
For the past 10 years, due to “politically correct” policies, data considered “sensitive” to that policy, such as nationality, ethnicity, ideology, religion, etc., have no longer been collected. At the same time, a policy of “tolerance to complaints” was created, where police and judicial authorities are encouraged (obviously not directly or assertively) not to intervene or register complaints against these groups.
As a result, the data is falsified and adulterated, completely out of step with the sentiment of the population (it is common for foreigners to commit crimes in public and the “authorities” do not react and ignore the complaints), creating politically correct “statistics” in which the data that originate them are false because they are incomplete and out of step with reality (just follow the national news).

Correct hierarchy<\/mark>
When evidence and ideological preference conflict, the evidence should prevail. The alternative \u2014 “decolonial,” “feminist,” or “anti-racist” science that starts from moral conclusions and filters data \u2014 has already been tried and failed (and continues to fail) to produce reliable knowledge.
The ethics that serve the natural sciences are those of epistemic honesty: to say what the data show, with the appropriate uncertainties and nuances, and to let society debate the political implications without censoring the description of reality. Political correctness is not the enemy of ethics; it is often the enemy of descriptive truth. The sciences thrive when they refuse to be held hostage by it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The sciences (the natural sciences, not the “pseudo-human sciences” and the like) prioritize empirical evidence, falsifiability, and description of the world as it is; politically correct ethics prioritize narratives of fairness, offense, and social justice, and when the two collide, the latter often attempts to subordinate the former. What are sciences? Physics, chemistry, biology, geology, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitormsalmeida.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitormsalmeida.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitormsalmeida.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitormsalmeida.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitormsalmeida.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1461"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vitormsalmeida.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1462,"href":"https:\/\/vitormsalmeida.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461\/revisions\/1462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitormsalmeida.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitormsalmeida.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitormsalmeida.pt\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}