Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution Is True (2010), in some ways helps define an era in popular science. For many people, science was, up until recently, a source of materialist truth, based on evidence. That includes the truth of Darwinism — the fully materialist view of evolution that Coyne espouses in his book and on his blog — as the creation story of materialist atheism.

But here is what’s changed now

Materialist thinking has survived for quite a while because, while it is wrong, it is wrong not so much in what it accepts but in what it leaves out. However, there is a new intellectual sheriff in town, private truth. Truth, for many people now, is based on the social, emotional, or political needs of designated groups.* And major science publications, sensing the change in the winds, are buying in.

It’s as hard for Coyne to watch what is happening as it is for anyone else. Perhaps harder, because he doesn’t seem to understand it at all:

The authors [of an article in top science journal Nature] give eight ways to rectify the “colonization”, all of them involving sacrificing merit for ethnicity, replacing modern science with “other ways of knowing,” and demanding both professional, monetary, and territorial reparations, even from those who never oppressed anybody. There must be equity in everything, they say: all ethnic groups must be represented in science jobs and funding in exact proportion (indeed, sometimes in higher proportion) than their presence in the population. Further, the authors demand that indigenous science be taken on intellectual par with modern science (or, as they say, “Western science”), despite the local nature of indigenous knowledge and its lack of tools used by modern science (hypothesis testing, controls, and so on) that severely limits the ambit and value of indigenous knowledge.

“The journal Nature calls for “decolonization” of modern science,” August 15, 2025

How does that work out?

In Canada, the ascendancy of private truth has resulted in a years-long national hysteria over claims about long ago murders at Indigenous residential schools. Doubting the sensational claims is treated as evidence of racism even though no human remains of missing children have ever been produced. But — this is critical — evidence is no longer the standard. The new standard, as proposed in the Nature article, of honoring indigenous knowledge has replaced it. And some even propose federal laws against doubt.

Then, yesterday, Coyne wrote,

Well, Laura Helmuth may no longer be at the helm of Scientific American, but the magazine seems to have again again dipped its toes into the waters of unscientific ideology. To wit: they’re posted a 14-minute podcast emphasizing that nature—and that includes humans—is “non-binary”. The problem is that, as usual, they get what is binary (biological sex) deeply confused, conflating it with behavior and morphology of animals, features that, while they may be bimodal, are not nearly as nonbinary as biological sex, which, as I’ve explained ad nauseum, defined on the basis of gamete types.

“Scientific American reverts to unscientific wokeness,” August 20, 2025

Seeking a word with Dr. Coyne…

Dr. Coyne, in the world of private truth, we are whatever we believe ourselves to be (unless, of course, our belief happens to be forbidden by law). Statements such as yours about the sex binary nature of human biology are a good example of the public truth that private truth now displaces.

Image Credit: Africa Studio - Adobe Stock

Ironically, the ultimate origin of private truth is the materialism that you yourself, Dr. Coyne, espouse. If there is no standard of truth beyond the material world, there is no reason that powerful actors cannot somehow reshape fact, as well as truth, to be whatever they designate. There is, after all, no reckoning beyond this world; only a battle for group supremacy over oppressors, real and imagined.

What’s that you say? It will impede progress? But the new Establishment gets to define progress as it chooses. It gets to define science and progress in science as it chooses too. It took your materialist bricks and repurposed them into something you never intended.

Science, as you and I understand it, is one forlorn casualty of late-stage materialism.

• Private truth activists would, of course, argue that public truth has only ever been the triumph of one group over another. They are mistaken but that is an argument for another time.

You may also wish to read: Canada’s Residential Schools: A Saga of Journalistic Wrongdoing. Even as the story is collapsing for lack of evidence, there is a move afoot to criminalize doubt about what happened (denialism). Could it happen in the United States? Of course. It can happen anywhere where people are willing to ignore the demands of evidence in favor of private truth.