Springer Nature bought venerable SciAm. in 1986 but sold it this last summer to Canadian-based LabX Media Group. Recently, prominent figures in science writing are sounding the alarm rather loudly about its direction.

Early last Friday morning, Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, author of seven psychology bestsellers, weighed in at X:

Scientists & science journalists decry the public’s rejection of science, but are oblivious to the major cause: the perception, sometimes correct, that scientists are just another political faction. Among the guiltiest perpetrators are the recent editors of Scientific American, who turned this once-beloved treasure into a left-wing propaganda rag. This absolutely does not justify the Trump administration’s unconstitutional meddling, but the new owners are right to restore it to its mission of explaining science to Americans. The Nation reports on The Fall of “Scientific American”

The magazine he refers to, The Nation, is a leftwing American publication that offers the subhead: “When the Trump administration objected to the magazine’s political coverage, its corporate owners stepped in. Now its future is uncertain.”

But wait. A charged political atmosphere like that might sharpen the conflict. But a question that will interest more of us is, how has SciAm found itself to the left of Steven Pinker?

Then, on Friday evening, professional skeptic and champion of materialism Michael Shermer also jumped in:

Emmet Fraizer picks up the story where I left off a few years ago, as this once great national institution of publishing went full woke, and as always happens, wokness poisons everything.

Here, Shermer’s referring to the Nation story that Pinker noted. But several commenters jumped in to point out that they sensed a drift in this direction going back decades.

One, in particular, writes,

Growing up our family got Smithsonian and friends family got SciAm, the dads would routinely swap issues.

Home one year on break from college – maybe 1985 or 1986 – sorting through a stack of issues and came to the realization that both pubs had gone hard left in obvious and intentional manner.

They have been woke for decades, now they are just rotten.

Both Shermer, who wrote the “Skeptic” column for SciAm for nearly twenty years, and Pinker assume that Woke is not the inevitable direction of leftism. That, of course, is for political thinkers to argue about. But in any event, it seems that the general direction of many publications these days is to be more Woke than their readers and supporters, even prominent ones.

The journal Nature has been flirting with the same tendency

Last year, Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne sounded the alarm at Why Evolution Is True over an article at Nature’s call for the decolonization of science:

The authors 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

Yes, “decolonization” does mean accepting legends in place of evidence, in order to show respect for the legends’ tellers and believers.

Last year, we said,

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 (August 21, 2025)

The materialist approach that all these science luminaries take can certainly be challenged on the evidence. But today, long before we get anywhere near considering evidence, Woke politics demands that debates be shut down in order to protect, for example, the traditional beliefs of people they identify as victims.

On the bright side, the fact that materialists feel threatened by all this that means that they really do believe that some things can be objectively true, not just politically convenient. The worst aspect of Wokeness is the profound cynicism about the possibility of truth that lies at its heart and represents its greatest danger to all of us.