As scientists we are supposed to be open to all forms of inquiry, even if they may expose inconvenient truths. But on certain topics, we're not. Not because the questions are scientifically uninteresting, but because we're afraid the answers might conflict with our political commitments. This is bad for science. And ironically, it is also bad for the very politics we are trying to advance.
The problem runs deeper than any conscious rationalization. Many of us have tightly strapped our beliefs about the world to our political opinions, and vice versa. This is, at its root, a version of the naturalistic fallacy: the assumption that how the world is tells us how it should be. But it also operates in reverse: if you believe strongly enough in how the world should be, you will come to insist that this is how the world is. Your political beliefs will naturally dictate how you see the world, and your view of the world will dictate your politics. The two lock together. Your view of nature informs what you think is politically desirable, and your political commitments force you to see nature in a way that supports them.
This is the trap. Once your politics and your view of nature are bound this tightly, any scientific finding that threatens one threatens both. The result is that certain empirical questions become too dangerous to approach honestly, not because anyone has decided to be dishonest, but because the stakes of being wrong feel existential.
This does not mean that science and politics can be fully separated. They can't. What we choose to study, how we frame our questions, where the funding flows, all of these carry political dimensions. Scientists are human beings embedded in societies, and it would be naive to pretend otherwise. Politics will inevitably shape our scientific investigations and vice versa. The goal should be to prevent the two from locking into an unquestionable alignment. And this separation has to work in both directions. Science should not be forced to produce politically convenient answers. But equally, our politics should not depend on nature being a particular way. Our political aspirations should account for reality without being enslaved to it.
On the scientific side, the damage is usually subtle. It is rarely the case that a scientist sits down and decides that the results of their investigation must say X. The problem is more insidious than that. Certain interpretations become taboo. Research that straddles sensitive topics does get conducted. Results do come in. But when those results point toward conclusions that conflict with prevailing political commitments, the inconvenient interpretation gets rationalized away. Interpreting results is genuinely hard, and there are often caveats and alternative explanations that provide ample room for motivated reasoning. The community doesn't consciously decide to suppress an uncomfortable truth. It doesn't need to. The uncomfortable interpretation simply never survives the gauntlet of critical assessments, while the comfortable one sails through relatively unchallenged. And when any individual proposes to directly study the sensitive question itself, the pushback is often indirect but unmistakable. The methodology is picked apart with a scrutiny that is rarely applied to work whose conclusions are more comfortable. Results are criticized not for what they show, but for what they might imply. Sometimes the entire line of investigation is dismissed as pseudoscience. Some researchers do persist in asking these questions, but they are not taken seriously, the topic remains understudied, and the prevailing bias fills the vacuum.
I don't think most scientists fully recognize that this is happening. The mechanism is too subtle for that. It operates not as a conscious choice to suppress inconvenient findings, but as a failure to subject certain beliefs to the same scrutiny we would apply to anything else. We are, after all, trained to be skeptical of received wisdom. But when received wisdom aligns with our political commitments, that skepticism has a way of going quiet.
The most vivid case study is the debate over whether intelligence has a genetic component. Among progressives (and I count myself among them), it has become a common belief that cognitive differences between individuals are due solely, or almost entirely, to environmental factors. This is the Blank Slate model of the human intellect. The origins of this belief are understandable: the history of eugenics and racial pseudoscience is real and horrifying, and the desire to ensure that such ideas never again gain a foothold is a genuinely moral impulse. But over time, a defensive reaction has hardened into an unchallenged assumption. And this should alarm us as scientists. An empirical question has been treated as politically settled.
As I have argued previously, the Blank Slate model is not scientifically tenable. It is incompatible with basic principles of genetics and evolutionary biology. The brain, like every other organ, is a product of both genetic and environmental factors. To insist that genetic variation among humans affects height, appearance, susceptibility to disease, and countless other traits, but somehow has zero influence on brain function, requires a special pleading that no biologist should be comfortable with. And yet many of us accept it anyway, because we have come to believe that progressive politics requires us to accept it. As if the Blank Slate were not an empirical claim about the world, but a political commitment. As if to question it would be to betray the values we hold.
This is what makes our politics brittle. Political considerations are placed above being honest with ourselves, and above opening up the possibility that the world contains inconvenient truths. If the Blank Slate turns out to be wrong (and the evidence strongly suggests it is an oversimplification at best), then the entire political framework built on top of it crumbles. This is not a hypothetical risk. It is an ongoing one.
But it is also an unnecessary one. Because the assumption underlying all of this fear is itself wrong. The assumption is this: if intelligence has a genetic component, then the striving for fairness is misguided, past injustices and persistent structural racism can be too easily dismissed, and progressive politics collapses. It rests on a hidden premise, that the only basis for treating people equally is if they are, in fact, endowed equally. Yet there is a far stronger foundation for progressive politics that doesn't require the Blank Slate at all.
Consider the role of luck.
I always tell my graduate students that to be successful in science, you need two categories of things: those under your control (work hard, read widely, discuss your findings) and those that are not. Call it luck. To be successful, you need both. But if you ask those who have made it, they will overwhelmingly credit their success to hard work. And they're not lying. Without the hard work, they would not have achieved what they did. But they systematically discount the role of good fortune. This is partly due to what psychologists call survivorship bias: by asking only those who made it, and not those who did not, you cannot fully disentangle what separates the two groups. It is also due to the fundamental attribution error, our tendency to credit our own setbacks to forces beyond our control while blaming others' failures on their poor choices. We tend to underestimate both our good fortune, and others’ bad fortune.
Robert H. Frank has documented this extensively in Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. The uncomfortable truth is that a great deal of what separates the successful from the unsuccessful is chance. Being born in the right place, at the right time, to the right family. Encountering the right mentor. Having your work noticed by the right person. None of this diminishes the value of hard work, but it does mean that the powerful and successful do not fully deserve their status, and crucially, that their children do not automatically deserve the inherited advantages either.
This realization changes the political calculus entirely.
It is worth noting that both left and right claim to champion meritocracy. They simply disagree about what threatens it. On the right, especially in the tradition of Hayek, Friedman, and works of fiction like Atlas Shrugged, the greatest threat to merit is the state: bureaucracy, central planning, and the artificial elevation of those who haven't earned their position. On the left, the greatest threat is a system that favours those who already hold power. This takes many forms: an unchecked accumulation of wealth that entrenches advantage across generations, corruption and nepotism that reward connections over competence, and structural racism that excludes entire communities. According to the left, the state must step in to correct these distortions.
Central to this disagreement is the question of whether the powerful deserve their status. On the right (at least traditionally), the answer has been largely yes: success reflects effort, discipline, and good choices, and those who have risen have generally earned their place. Some go further, arguing that certain cultures produce better outcomes, or that inherent differences between individuals and groups play a meaningful role. On the left, the answer has been no, and the case has partly been built on the Blank Slate: everyone is inherently capable of great things, and inequality reflects nothing but unequal opportunity.
But the argument from luck gives the left something much more powerful. You do not need to believe that all people are born with identical potential to believe that all people deserve equal treatment. You only need to recognize that success depends enormously on factors beyond anyone's control, and that the accumulation of advantage is itself a form of undeserved luck. The political program that follows from this is robust: invest in institutional structures (education, healthcare, family support) that allow talent to blossom wherever it happens to exist. Redistribute resources not simply from the wealthy to the poor, but from concentrated private wealth into institutions that foster genuine opportunity for everyone. Combat corruption and nepotism, which are the real enemies of meritocracy regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum. Prevent racism by insisting that individuals should be judged by their abilities, not by their demographic.
This holds whether intelligence is 10% heritable or 90% heritable. The program is the same either way. That’s what makes it durable.
This is becoming more and more important as most Western societies have become less meritocratic, and the role of luck has increased. Why? Part of the blame is the neo-liberal economic policies that were implemented starting with Reagan and Thatcher in the early 1980s. The consequences are now visible: rising inequality, stagnating social mobility, increasing concentration of wealth and power. Citizens’ choices and hard work matter less and less. The family that you happen to be born into matters more. The worldwide political frustration we see today is a response to this reality. "Make America Great Again" resonates not because working-class Americans want to return to the cultural norms of the 1950s (though this is the misreading made by both left and right). It resonates because the 1950s were a time when an able-bodied individual could find a job in a local factory and build a middle-class life regardless of the family they happen to be born in. That was a direct product of progressive economic policies: FDR's New Deal and similar programs throughout Western democracies. A middle-class life is now harder to attain, especially if you are unlucky enough to be born in the wrong neighbourhood, go to the wrong school and are not gifted with a large monetary endowment. The frustration over declining opportunity is real, even if it is often channelled in unproductive directions (such as blaming immigration).
But let me return to the central point, because everything I've just discussed about politics is ultimately in service of an argument about science.
Freeing science from political obligation is good for science. When we impose ideological constraints on what questions can be asked, no matter how well-intentioned, we cripple our capacity to understand the world. A scientific community that cannot honestly investigate the biological dimensions of human variation, because it has convinced itself that progressive politics requires certain answers, has surrendered its core purpose. We are supposed to be in the business of seeking understanding, and that requires us to be unrestrained by biases, however good the intentions behind them.
And freeing science from political obligation is also good for our politics. This is the part that I think my colleagues on the left too often miss. If we want to build a more meritocratic society (and I believe we do), we need to understand how human development actually works. How do ability, environment, and chance interact? What interventions actually make a difference? What structures genuinely foster opportunity? Science that is free to investigate these questions honestly can help us answer them. Science that is constrained to produce only politically convenient findings cannot. To fool ourselves with unjustified beliefs, however comforting, is to deny ourselves the very knowledge we need to achieve the goals we care about.
Our political goals should be shaped by what we want society to be, and they should be flexible enough to take into account what nature actually is. We do not need a politics that requires nature's permission. We need a politics built not on the premise that all people are created equal in ability, but on the principle that all people should be treated equally, given the same opportunity to develop whatever potential they have. Even if innate differences exist, we cannot predict them, and (this is the critical point) they do not matter for how we should organize society. We should build a world where, if innate abilities exist, they can fully blossom. We should invest in the institutional structures that help any individual be productive. We should fight corruption and nepotism. And we should be responsive to the needs of the public, so that each individual gets what they need to fully develop their potential.
This is a political vision that doesn't shatter when the next study comes out. And it lets science do what science is supposed to do: help us understand how the world actually is, so that we can build the world we actually want.