I think your post is very reasonable. Singal may be exaggerating how bad SciAm is. Though my view is that the Wilson article is part of a pattern.

I responded to this because I read a biography of EO Wilson recently. It's strange to say his association with Rushton was a stain on his career because his career was massive. He published an absurd number of papers, did lots of field work, discovered many new species, wrote many popular science books, and was influential as an early conservationist. He was, by all accounts, an incredibly kind person. His link to some racist is a footnote, not a stain.

It's worth asking why it's even coming up. Here are a few possible reasons:

1. A number of left-wingers attacked Wilson following Sociobiology and it's been open-season on him ever since

2. It's trendy to call famous white scientists racist

3. Highly accomplished people cause envy in others which leads to tendentious attacks

For what it's worth: I'm not saying Singal is exaggerating how bad SciAm is. I think I agree with him, and have complained about it elsewhere.

I do have a problem with him dipping his toes into defenses of scientific racism (which is what he's doing when he implicitly imputes wokeism to an editorial calling E.O. Wilson out for dabbling in scientific racism). This is a problem with the reflexive contrarian rationalist sphere Singal has allowed himself to be relegated to (listen to his podcast, it's even more obvious there).

A lot of stuff SciAm has written is real dumb and even destructive. But not everything that anti-woke people object to in SciAm is wrong; if you adopt that stance, you can launder all sorts of crazy things into the discourse. He did that here.