The Hoax
The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.
That’s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a “paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it.
This paper should never have been published. Titled, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” our paper “argues” that “The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.” As if to prove philosopher David Hume’s claim that there is a deep gap between what is and what ought to be, our should-never-have-been-published paper was published in the open-access (meaning that articles are freely accessible and not behind a paywall), peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences. (In case the PDF is removed, we’ve archived it.)The names were fake; their organization was fake; their argument was overtly nonsense; but it passed peer review! I used to get upset that peer-reviewed history journals would not publish my work. Now, it's a point of pride. Michael Bellesiles' first fraud was published in the Journal of American History, a peer-reviewed journal.
Academia is in free fall.
My problem is it seems there are a number of people talking about this, but the situation just seems to be getting worse. Academia has been in freefall for twenty years now since Mr. B's book destroyed the Bancroft award and the British pediatrician got the Lancet to buy the story that vaccinations caused Autisum. We are witnessing the the fall of western science and intelligence, no differently then the collapse that occurred in the later Roman empire.
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