The Executive Council of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, an organization whose annual conference I first attended in 1995, has issued a statement “in defense of science,” protesting the federal research funding cuts being carried out by the Trump administration.
Here is my reply:
Your statement decrying the defunding of federally-supported research and rallying in defense of “scientific freedom” misses a critical opportunity for self-reflection within our discipline. While the Human Behavior and Evolution Society claims to champion rigorous inquiry into the evolutionary bases of psychology and behavior, your alarmist rhetoric suggests a reluctance to confront an uncomfortable truth: the field has, for some time, allowed itself to be infiltrated and shaped by politically motivated agendas. The current funding cuts, rather than an assault on science, may instead be a long-overdue correction to a system that has strayed from its hypothetico-deductive and empirical roots.
Science demands unbiased truth-seeking and the avoidance of ideological agendas of any stripe. Yet, over the years, significant portions of the evolutionary human sciences research community have embraced frameworks such as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), Critical Race Theory (CRT), and Queer Theory. These paradigms, rooted more in activism than in hypothesis-testing, have diverted resources and attention from genuine scientific questions—questions about human nature—toward politically fashionable narratives. Studies on sex and gender differences, which you highlight as threatened, have too often been framed to appease progressive sensibilities, leading in some cases to outright pseudo-science and censorship. For example, in 2023, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists issued an evidence-free statement, purportedly “in support of trans lives,” that rejected the sex binary in humans and condemned “the historical role of our own discipline” in producing it. That same year, the American Anthropological Association canceled an already-accepted conference panel on sex as an analytic category, claiming it would harm the “Trans and LGBTQI community.” Given such antics, is it any wonder that policymakers and the public have grown skeptical of our enterprise?
The NIH and NSF have not been immune to this politicization. Grants have increasingly flowed to projects that align with prevailing cultural orthodoxies. In contrast, dissenting scholars have been not merely denied research funding, but have had their livelihoods threatened. In 2020-21, one U.S. tenure-track psychology professor was successfully fired, and a tenured psychology professor was fired before being reinstated following binding arbitration, solely for their dissents from progressive orthodoxy regarding race. The oversight you are lamenting is, in large measure, a reaction to this trend: a push to de-politicize a system that our own community has helped politicize. In this sense, we are reaping what we have sown. Decades of blurring the line between science and advocacy have eroded public trust in our work.
Rather than rallying against these funding shifts as an attack on our profession, HBES should seize this moment to advocate for a return to first principles. Reject the entanglement of science with ideological crusades. Demand that our research be judged on its rigor, not its alignment with political trends. Alternative funding sources exist —private foundations, industry partnerships, even state-level initiatives — and these can support a leaner, more focused discipline if we prioritize substance over posturing.
The success of science depends not on unchecked federal largesse, but on our willingness to uphold its integrity. Let’s not cling to a status quo that we ourselves have compromised.
Instead, let us lead by example, proving that the evolutionary human sciences can stand on their own strengths, free from the baggage of politics.
Joseph H. Manson 