Where are the right-wing scientists? Everyone's on the left like me

Trust in science has been eroded because the field is so dominated by left-wing academics, a leading evolutionary biologist has warned.

Ella Al-Shamahi, presenter of the BBC’s science series Human, which starts tomorrow night, said people who lean towards the right, or have strong religious beliefs, feel alienated by mainstream science.

“We do have to be a little bit honest and say that, to many, it seems like left-leaning atheists have a monopoly on science,” she said.

The dominance of a single school of political thought in science is an important context to President Trump’s withdrawal of funding from universities in America, she said. “If you can’t demonstrate that scientists and research labs don’t belong to just one tribe, then suddenly it doesn’t become a priority to fund them.”

Her comments echo those of the Wellcome Trust chief executive, John-Arne Rottingen, who warned this month that scientists had a “responsibility” to demonstrate why research matters across the political spectrum. In most countries the “research community overall is more on the progressive/left-wing side”, he told the Research Professional News website. “That has an impact on what research questions are being addressed.”

Al-Shamahi, 41, who describes her politics as “wokey-progressive — definitely left-wing”, said scientists who do not fit the political mould increasingly keep their heads down for fear of the response. “A lot of them feel that they have to hide their thoughts and their opinions.”

The scientist made her name as an explorer, author and TV presenter with an expertise in paleoanthropology, the study of early humans. She is known for seeking out fossilised remains, often in unstable regions such as parts of Iraq and Syria.

Her new five-part series on BBC2 tells the story of how Homo sapiens succeeded over Neanderthals and other hobbit-like species of early humans. “We were not the first species of human,” she says in the programme. “We were not the biggest or the strongest. We are just the latest in a long line of other humans. Yet a few hundred thousand years later we are the only ones left, and the most dominant form of life on this planet. How on earth did this happen?”

Al-Shamahi on location in Morocco

BBC

Al-Shamahi was born in Birmingham, one of five children of devout Muslim parents who had emigrated from Yemen. She said diversity is essential in science. “I mean that in its totality,” she said. “It is not just the people who look like me who need to have more of a place here. It also needs to be people who think like me — and the people who don’t think like me. Where are the deeply, deeply devout religious scientists? Where are the right-wing scientists? If all our biases are not in the room it leads to worse science outcomes.”

Al-Shamahi pointed to the Covid pandemic, a time of acute polarisation, when divisions over facemasks, lockdowns and vaccination became tied up with ideology and politics. Even the source of the virus — whether it came from a Chinese lab or an evolutionary leap — became “very, very political very, very quickly”, she said. “That was incredibly, incredibly unhelpful.”

In recent months divisive politics has raised its head again within academic institutions. A campaign gathered pace earlier this year to expel Elon Musk as a fellow of the Royal Society over his role in Trump’s government and its downplaying of climate change. and in March the University of Sussex was fined £585,000 for failing to uphold free speech in the case of Kathleen Stock, a philosopher who came under fire for her gender-critical views.

Al-Shamahi did not comment directly on the Musk or Stock cases but said: “On the left we blame the right. We’re happy to attack them in ways which I think are not necessarily helpful.”

She highlighted the case of the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, a self-styled “professor against political correctness”, who holds controversial views on gender, climate change and race. His offer of a visiting fellowship at Cambridge was rescinded in 2019 over the university’s fears he would not uphold an “inclusive environment”.

Al-Shamahi said: “I absolutely will happily eviscerate anyone’s ideas that I don’t think are appropriate, but when we start petitioning to have chairs and fellowships rescinded, that does make me uncomfortable. If you’re right-wing, or if you’re deeply religious, you look at that and you think, ‘so the few people that have my ideology within that group are being ostracised’.”

Jordan Peterson has turned from academia to polemic

JEFF GILBERT/SHUTTERSTOCK

Her own experiences had made her realise the importance of plurality of thought, Al-Shamahi said. As a child she dedicated herself to Islam, wearing a headscarf from the age of seven and travelling the UK from age 13 as a Muslim missionary. She took the word of the Quran as literal truth — that God created the universe and everything in it. “I was a creationist,” she said.

So convinced was she that she decided, aged 18, to go to University College London to study biology, with the aim of proving that the theory that underpins modern science was flawed. “I literally thought I could destroy the theory of evolution,” she said.

It did not take long to realise that Charles Darwin, and all those who followed after him — including her lecturers — were right. Her worldview was turned upside down. By the age of 27, after further studies at Imperial College London and the Natural History Museum, her faith had also been rocked. She distanced herself from her community, was divorced from her husband — a marriage that had been arranged by her imam — and took off her headscarf.

She vividly remembers walking into a petrol station in southwest London, her head uncovered in public for the first time. “I had always been taught that if I went out without the hijab my sheer beauty would cause fitna — which translates as something like ‘mayhem on earth’. But there was no mayhem,” she said. “The men in the petrol station didn’t even notice. Nobody collapsed. Nobody cared.”

The understanding and acceptance of her four siblings as she withdrew from her community kept her grounded. “I would not be here today if it was not for them,” she said. She now describes herself as a non-practising Muslim — “I still think religion can be wonderful”.

But the experience of changing her mind about the tenets of her faith made clear to her how important it is to value all beliefs and viewpoints.

“Inclusivity is really important to me,” she said. “Science belongs to each and every one of us. So I defend the right of those who I disagree with to exist — even if don’t like their ideas. They represent the ideas of so many people. We can criticise them. We can say we don’t like their ideas. But we should let them voice those ideas.”

She added: “As a left-wing brown woman, I am afforded more grace when I defend folks. But that in itself tells us something.”

Human, presented by Ella Al-Shamahi, starts at 9pm on Monday July 14 on BBC2 and iPlayer