These are fraught times in academia. In the fall of 2022, an adjunct professor of art history at Hamline University in Minnesota showed a fourteenth-century image depicting the Prophet Muhammad in her class and lost her job. Understanding that her students might have varying reactions to these works, she warned her class—both on the syllabus and as the time approached—that the image of Muhammad would be shown and invited her students to come talk to her if they had concerns. Although no objections were raised before she displayed the image, afterward a student complained to the administration, and the professor was told her services would not be needed the following semester.

This episode comes out of the humanities, but the sciences should be different. The rejection of dogma has been a basic principle of the scientific project since at least the time of Galileo Galilei, so we might imagine that the sciences would be relatively free of ideological battles. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

In their cover story, “The Ideological Subversion of Biology,” Jerry A. Coyne, University of Chicago emeritus professor and author of Why Evolution Is True, and Luana S. Maroja, a professor of biology at Williams College, describe how progressive ideology is impeding progress in the biological sciences and threatening the careers of individual researchers. To make matters worse, many of the attacks on free and valid investigation are coming not from outside political or government forces but from other researchers within the field. Coyne and Maroja’s article is much longer than a typical feature story in Skeptical Inquirer, but we thought it important to have in our pages.

The dangers of “decolonizing science” in an effort to return to traditional forms of knowledge are highlighted in both the previous issue of Skeptical Inquirer on “Medical Pseudoscience around the World” and in Coyne and Maroja’s cover story in the current issue. This is not an abstract threat; as this issue goes to press, reports emerged from India that the National Council of Educational Research and Training had dropped the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the school curriculum. Soon to be the most populous country in the world, India joins its neighbor Pakistan in removing natural selection—arguably the single most important idea in biological science—from the classroom. Of course, many Muslim countries already have an outright ban on the teaching of evolution in schools and colleges.

Elsewhere in this issue, physicist Martin Bier answers the burning question, “Does hot water freeze faster than cold?” Although the answer might seem obvious, Bier points out that this question has been debated for a very long time, including to the present day. Also, psychologist Edward Wasserman describes the surprising genesis of a now-ubiquitous office supply: the Post-it Note. As in every issue of this magazine, you will find a wide variety of voices and ideas all sharing one thing: an abiding concern for science and reason.