13 ms·
An open letter on E.O. Wilson's legacy
- mudil 5y agoI came from the Soviet Union and these kinds of debates smell like 1937, like Lysenkoism, like Soviet doctors trials, etc etc. On one hand we have scientists that are probing the nature of reality and on the other we have politically opportune believers slash do-gooders, ready to paint the science on a political canvas, hurting the science, the scientists, and the progress itself.
- mannerheim 5y agoIt is reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. Liu Cixin lived through that period, which inspired one of the scenes he wrote in the Three Body Problem. In it, a physics professor is submitted to a struggle session by his students for teaching counter-revolutionary science (relativity and quantum mechanics) and beaten to death. While this story is fictionalised, it certainly was no exaggeration of the climate at the time.
- no_butterscotch 5y agoThat scene really stuck out to me when I read it. It enraged me. It reminds me of some of the "softer" floggings going on today when Professors won't adhere to the new collectivism of our University system.
- jahnu 5y agoI find these comparisons unhelpful. What happened in China during the Cultural Revolution is on such a different level of awfulness it just isn't even the tiniest bit comparable to anything controversial or problematic happening in West right now. Even today what is happening in China, and even the freer parts like Hong Kong, is still far removed from issues in the West. Even as a "thin end of the wedge" argument it's just weak. It hurts legitimate and necessary criticism of actual authoritarian countries and it hurts legitimate and necessary criticism of real issues (such as that raised in the article above) in free, Western countries.
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago[flagged]
- elefanten 5y agoI don’t support or agree with the far left, or any of the identity culture warrior / critical theory / wokeness or whatever other adjacent thing you wanna roll up in that. But this comment is just unhinged nonsense. This is akin to the claims that Jan 6 was a coup attempt. “The left” is not a homogenous organized force (rofl, come on, the trope is that the left eats itself) which has organized militants on standby. Antifa and Patriots are both larping idiots alike. It’s the contagion and mutation of bad ideas that’s a bigger problem. A semantic pandemic.
- mannerheim 5y agoThe Red Guards were mostly larping idiots, too. Many were literal children. The difference is they had substantial support both societally (either out of fear or ideology) and from the top by Mao, who saw them as a weapon he could harness. America isn't at that point, but we do ourselves no favours by pretending that it can't happen here. The ingredients are available, even if the execution isn't yet.
- bangkoksbest 5y agoUhhh China has centuries of history of peasant movements rising up in improvised make-shift revolts. I don't think you understand how real revolution was for people in China. It was absolutely not a LARP. Just looking from 1850 to Mao, there was: The Taiping Rebellion (30m dead), 2nd Sino-Japanese War (20m dead), Dungan rebellion (15m dead), Miao rebellion (5m dead), Red Turban rebellion (1m dead), Panthay rebellion (1m dead), Punti–Hakka wars (1m dead), Nationalist purges (1.5m dead), various Warlord Era conflicts (500k dead), 1911 revolution (200k dead), Boxer Rebellion (100k dead), and 1st Sino-Japanese war (50k dead). Not to mention residual deaths from the two World Wars not directly attributable to the conflicts above, but which would still number more than the losses the USA suffered in both wars. The American Civil War was about ~750k dead. There is absolutely no comparison between the traumatic social conditions of 1940s China with even 21st century China let alone the United States. They were definitely not "role playing".
- fastball 5y ago> It is reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. Which is not at all surprising given how many young people in the West like to style themselves as Marxists.
- hownottowrite 5y agoThe end of that chapter had me in tears.
- publicola1990 5y agoNot just that, see how Louis Aggasiz's reputation is being hounded down in recent years. Renaming schools and pulling down statues of him.
- throwoutway 5y agoIf you’re going to mention that then Id also have to mention these “do-gooders” renaming Abraham Lincoln schools… of all the presidents to cancel..
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago> It is reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. That's right. People are being beaten to death, locked up in labor camps, mysteriously vanished and worse, all because they don't bow down to people who think there are different metrics worth using at least some of the time when judging science (or anything else). It's absolutely terrifying!
- etangent 5y agoYou make an excellent point. Let's wait until people are actually beaten to death and imprisoned (and not just one, like a good few thousands of them!), and only then start complaining.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoThat's right! Because there are just 1 or maybe 2 steps from Scientific American publishing a godawful article about Wilson & refusing to print a rebuttal (+), to peole being actually beaten to death. We need to take action, right now. (+) and let's not overlook that UPenn is actively considering changing tenure rules just because a poor law professor made some actually racist remarks. Labor camps could be here by 2023!
- etangent 5y agoYou know, I started out thinking that very bad language should indeed be censored. But considering what I see -- how eagerly language is used to eliminate one's political opponents from the public sphere, and how expansive definitions become over time (e.g. what happened to "literally violence") -- I now believe in complete freedom of speech, even down to fully genocidal rhetoric (and yes, that includes freedom from civilian consequences, not just government-imposed consequences). As a free speech absolutist, I now believe that the government should perform a proactive role in ensuring that the 1st amendment is obeyed -- not just a passive one.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y agoI don’t think anyone’s gonna die soon. What we are a couple steps away from, I think, is an environment where this rebuttal would be considered hate speech and the signatories would be fired for endorsing it. (We might be only half a step away, honestly; I give it a 50% chance that one of the signatories faces a Title IX complaint about it by next week, although I understand that such an unconfident prediction doesn’t really mean much.)
- zozbot234 5y ago> It is reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. It's quite literally a mindless zombie remnant of the actual Cultural Revolution ideology of Lin Biao and the criminal Gang Of Four. That whole ideological memeplex was taken up by young radical leftists throughout the West in the late 1960s and 1970s. A generation has passed, and now those leftist students have grown up and become respected "liberal" and "progressive" leaders. Do the math, it's not rocket science.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pron 5y agoThe debate around Wilson's ideas is not new, nor is it one of scientists on one side vs "do-gooders" on the other. E.O. Wilson was accused of lending support to scientific racism since the seventies, including by fellow distinguished scientists and Wilson't colleagues at Harvard, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/wilson-naturalist.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/s...
- slibhb 5y agoGould and Lewontin weren't debating. They were engaging in academic politics. Arguing that an idea is wrong because it "lends support to scientific racism" is unscientific. To argue against an idea, demonstrate why it's wrong or offer a better alternative. "That's racist" is neither a scientific argument nor a serious one.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago> Arguing that an idea is wrong because it "lends support to scientific racism" is unscientific. Since racism is itself not a scientific concept, arguments about this sort of thing are inherently never going to be scientific, but rather always political/philosophical. There's absolutely nothing wrong with Gould, Lewontin (or Wilson) engaging in such debates, which are as at least as important (and possibly more directly impactful) than the scientific ones. Political/philosophical debates do not involve questions of demonstrable "right" or "wrong", but rather are a stage for beliefs about the world and different notions of utility. You don't settle them by "demonstrating why it's wrong", or by "offering a better idea".
- slibhb 5y agoI agree with you. But if this isn't a scientific debate, why would it matter that Gould et al are "distinguished scientists at Harvard"? Shouldn't they separate their political-philosophical-religious views from their work as scientists? It isn't fruitful when one side is arguing science and the other is arguing politics.
- hilbert42 5y ago"I came from the Soviet Union and these kinds of debates smell like 1937, like Lysenkoism, like Soviet doctors trials, etc etc." I reckon you're correct. Unfortunately, it seems we are again entering an age when opponents of those with views or ideas attack the actual person rather than debate the ideas themselves. We could been forgiven for thinking that this was just a passing phase when such attacks ocured in social media, Facebook etc., but when an associate professor who holds a very prominent and responsible position in public life and who uses the pages of Scientific American to attack an eminent person who is now dead and who can no longer defend himself, then I'd say such attacks are here to stay. Most thinking people would find such attacks abhorrent. How we change the public discourse back to a more even keel is an unanswered question.
- VictorPath 5y ago
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago> Wilson wrote about that the white race is superior to the black race. Do you have a source for this?
- kgwgk 5y agoScientific American!
- hilbert42 5y agoReference please.
- kgwgk 5y agohttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-legacy-of-e-o-wilson/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-l... I thought I could do without the /s tag
- hilbert42 5y agoSorry, that's the McLemore article. From the way you were talking I thought it was an article by E.O. Wilson himself.
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoI think that the person you asked the question of was talking about the Sci Am article, but I was hoping for some evidence that EO Wilson was a racist, from his published works. All I can figure out is that if you don't subscribe to a blank-slate approach to human behaviour (i.e. nurture >> nature) then apparently you are racist. Probably someone should have mentioned that to all the authors of the psychology textbooks I read in college, then.
- acdha 5y ago> On one hand we have scientists that are probing the nature of reality and on the other we have politically opportune believers slash do-gooders, This false dichotomy is key to the false comparisons with Lysenkoism, etc. E. O. Wilson did not represent all scientists even during his working career and many of the people criticizing him are also scientists using their scientific expertise. The author of the Scientific American piece is “an associate professor in the Family Health Care Nursing Department and a clinician-scientist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco.” — hardly a political apparatchik. Some of the most outspoken criticisms of his work came from Richard C. Lewontin (a population geneticist) and Stephen Jay Gould (a paleontologist). Similarly, Razib Khan is someone who is at least comfortable using his expertise in forums which do not shy away from race politics — for example, he lost a contract writing for The New York Times when his regular contributions to Taki's Magazine, a very conservative venue which was at least neo-Nazi-adjacent (Richard Spencer was the managing editor). That doesn't mean that we should dismiss Khan's writing entirely but we should recognize that he's a human rather than the objective voice of science and his work also needs to be read with an understanding of how his political positions influence it.
- naasking 5y ago> The author of the Scientific American piece is “an associate professor in the Family Health Care Nursing Department and a clinician-scientist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco.” — hardly a political apparatchik. Hardly Wilson's peer either, and the article shows this quite clearly. > Some of the most outspoken criticisms of his work came from Richard C. Lewontin (a population geneticist) and Stephen Jay Gould (a paleontologist). Yes, criticisms of the substance and inferences like any good scientist would focus on, not thinly veiled accusations of racism.
- acdha 5y ago> Hardly Wilson's peer either, and the article shows this quite clearly. Whether you find her politically correct isn’t relevant to the topic at hand: she’s clearly qualified to participate in a scientific discussion.
- afpx 5y agoLuckily, in the US, we have constitutional rights and a long history of open debate. But, I'm curious. What would have helped the Soviet Union from forming? Was there a solution?
- HideousKojima 5y ago>But, I'm curious. What would have helped the Soviet Union from forming? Was there a solution? Large-scale invasion by the rest of Europe in support of the White Army, potentially. Hard to imagine Europe having the stomach for it after WW1 though.
- YeBanKo 5y agoThe political opportune believer is this case is Associate Professor of Family Health Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco. UCSF is one of the top ranked in medical field. It does not merely smell like the Soviet Union, when ideology can be successfully used to attack scientific opponents and, maybe, even within top scientific institution, it is the Soviet Union. The so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against. When she so casually misinterprets normal distribution in medical application in SciAm, what stop her from brining this notion into the classroom. And this is how we end up with Lysenkovschina, but in medicine instead of agriculture.
- throwawaysea 5y agoA couple other recent related discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29951406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29951406
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoI think reading it, the people who devote so much of their time to ethical and moral purity, and searching out failings in others, probably do not have the time to develop the technical competence required to comment on the underlying data and science used to draw the immoral conclusions. Maybe I just feel this because I hate moralizers, even if I agree mainly with the moral views they espouse. (though not agreeing with the moral attacks on Wilson, it seems a real perfect being the enemy of the good type attack - spearheaded by the self-righteous and opportunistic)
- cabalamat 5y ago> probably do not have the time to develop the technical competence Or the ability.
- elefanten 5y agoIn addition to self-righteous and opportunism, for many it seems to be a very mundane case of psychological coping. I’m always amazed at the depth, intricacy and durability of the worldviews people adopt just so they can tell themselves a pleasant narrative about some unpleasant reality.
- hilbert42 5y ago"the people who devote so much of their time to ethical and moral purity, and searching out failings in others, probably do not have the time to develop the technical competence required to comment on the underlying data and science used to draw the immoral conclusions." I'm not sure what you're trying to say here but I can assure you that ethics and morals underpin societies, without them they would fall apart. It's hard to see how you can come to the conclusion that one cannot hold both moral views and still be a good scientist or technical person. Some of the greatest scientists have held extremely moral values and they've commented on them widely in public. Take Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard for instace. They were great scientists and they held very strong moral principles - specially over the Atom bomb. On the other hand, one of their colleagues, an equally brilliant scientist, Edward Teller, one of the developers of the hydrogen bomb, thought little of morals and by many accounts was a rather despicable person. (BTW, he also shafted his equally famous colleague Robert Oppenheimer who never fully recovered from Teller's slander.) Another despicable bastard was the brilliant chemists, Fritz Haber. He got the Nobel prize for the fixation of nitrogen (production of ammonia) for fertilizer which went on to provide food for millions. However, Haber had SFA morals, he went on to develop chemical weapons in WWI and the day after his wife, also a chemist, shot herself out of desperation for what he had done, he went off to the Western Front to install those diabolical weapons. Lesson: don't generalize.
- danbmil99 5y agoSo sad... My grand-dad (a mostly self-educated inventor with 200 patents to his name) turned me on to SciAm in the late 1960's. I immersed myself in the world of Martin Gardner, Douglas Hofstadter, and A. K. Dewdney. It may be difficult for the younger generation to really grasp how important a single magazine or newspaper could be back then, with today's overabundance of information channels. Most of them, if they exist at all, are now a pathetic shell of their former selves.
- hilbert42 5y ago"So sad... <...> I immersed myself in the world of Martin Gardner, Douglas Hofstadter, and A. K. Dewdney." So did I, and it is a sad day that it's come to this. SciAm and other technical mags were my lifeblood as a teenager. When the monthlies were due I'd race to the newsagent after school and occasionally when one was late I'd fret in disappointment. You're right, I reckon it is difficult for younger generations to grasp not only how important magazines were to us but also many other aspects of life back then. Trying to put the zeitgeist of an earlier era on a young head never works thus the younger generation has to work things out for itself. If we could accurately convey a past ethos then we probably wouldn't have any more wars but then we would never develop as a species either - it's the two-edged sword problem. Back to SciAm. Unfortunately I've had the impression for quite some time that the mag is near its end. I've seen this happen too many times previously with others that have had a long illustrious lineage. For some reason their editorial quality goes down followed by the circulation, they're then sold off and the new owners have no intrinsic interest in their subject matter, they then lose more and spiral further downward until they're soon defunct. Still, I hope I'm wrong about SciAm.
- pdonis 5y ago> I immersed myself in the world of Martin Gardner, Douglas Hofstadter, and A. K. Dewdney. So did I. SciAm today is a travesty, and it has been for years. I canceled my subscription in (IIRC) the late 1990s.
- atdrummond 5y agoI fear articles like this rarely serve their purpose and sadly not due to any inherent weaknesses in the presentation or arguments. Rather, they rarely land in front of the people who disagree with the contention held within. Instead, they tend to be nearly exclusively read by those who agree. When said pieces do land in front of those holding alternate views, invariably it is by the propagandists and those whose views are forged in iron. The individuals who might be convinced inevitably avoid such articles thanks to the filtering power of today's social media platforms and the dogged pursuit and (not always successful, I'll admit) elimination of such essays from news feeds and sometimes even search engines and their hosting platforms themselves. I have been very lucky that the majority of my friends and acquaintances hold diametrically opposed political views from me, as this has allowed me to watch this very phenomenon unfold on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc. The most incredible platform to watch this on is TikTok - if one doesn't purposely engage with opposing viewpoints, one's "For You Page" will be nearly entirely filled with shorts confirming your existing ideological biases. The only remaining few percentage points of content will be extremely popular Toks, which are almost always non-political trending memes, such as dances.
- josh2600 5y agoFor what it's worth, my Tiktok feed has 0 political content. It's all dancing, contortionists, singers, and magicians. I think the algorithms serve their masters.
- atdrummond 5y agoI have very little political content on my main FYP these days, instead purposely confining it to the puppet accounts I set up just for that purpose. That said, it is very easy to fall into one of the political TikTok streams with just a few inadvertent likes or shares.
- hilbert42 5y ago"Rather, they rarely land in front of the people who disagree with the contention held within." You are likely right as those involved will probably dismiss any criticism. However, I believe the authors of this open letter probably want their position put on the record for posteriorly. However, such is the outrage against Scientific American and Associate Professor McLemore that this open letter may have a life of its own. The outrage was palpable 14 days ago with the HN story The Demise of Scientific American and many of those who posted shared the same discust. The public release of this open letter signed by many prominent people will probably reinforce this view and give the matter a continued existence in the public domain. I've posted a link to the earlier HN story below.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago> Wilson was not without faults, as I highlighted in the podcast I recorded with David Sloan Wilson and Charles C. Mann. Many scientists I know and respect have expressed skepticism and dismissal of some of Wilson’s enthusiasms. Great scientists of the past are not gods any more than great scientists still among us, but humans, with all the complexity that entails. Well this is shocking, speaking ill of the dead like this. It seems there's some secret list of things you're allowed to attack prominent dead scientists about. Anyone got a copy of that list? Can I also add that if one of your prominent motifs in your environmentalism is "certain people in specific areas of the globe should have less babies" then it's maybe not the great defence against charges of racism that you might think it is. Hopefully that's something you are allowed to disagree with him on.
- ghusto 5y agoI know I shouldn't, but okay I'll bite. > It seems there's some secret list of things you're allowed to attack prominent dead scientists about. Highlighting certain views that I scientist held to be problematic because they focussed their work to prove those views (e.g. Nazis and eugenics) is indeed "allowed". Using someone's death and your own ignorance of basic science, to promote your own political views, is not.
- VictorPath 5y ago
- Turing_Machine 5y ago> In 1975 Wilson began publishing the white race is superior to the black race. Can you provide a verbatim quote from his published work where he said that?
- rwnspace 5y agoYet in 1981 he either had a total change of heart, or, you are - wittingly or unwittingly - spreading misinformation: https://www.nature.com/articles/289627b0.pdf https://www.nature.com/articles/289627b0.pdf
- 5y ago
- pwdisswordfish9 5y agoThe SciAm article blows my mind. Seven occurrences of the word 'problematic' in 11 paragraphs. Reminded of their reading of a (fiction) Wilson book decades ago, and inspired by something else, the author wrote essentially a three-message Twitter thread, tacked on a few decorative sentences, and was published. Next to no research, no review of the literature, no consultation with relevant scholars. A bit like this comment, but given the blessing of a national science magazine. Further examination reveals the SciAm article's author had a previous publication in SciAm on a public health topic. Can someone use "nepotism" in a sentence?
- low_tech_love 5y agoThe thing that really bothers me is how little she actually discussed of Wilson's work. It feels like she read a few paragraphs on the more polemical aspects of his work and decided "yep, sounds racist, my chance to shine".
- throwoutway 5y agoThat’s generally how things go. No debate, just condemnation and repeating the same talking points and labels— “He is a racist!” Or “she uses hate speech!” Without any discussion of the controversy. Smear campaigns spread as wild as misinformation. Oh yes, that is BECAUSE they’re both misinformation!
- bmitc 5y agoI feel that's the most likely case, using his death as a cheap way to advance a pre-existing agenda. It was really weird how the article slams E.O. Wilson but then at the same time, it's basically not even about Wilson.
- wombatmobile 5y ago“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.” ― Anaïs Nin
- tgv 5y agoThere are countless variations on that. I've always been partial to this one: Y es que en el mundo traidor nada hay verdad ni mentira; todo es según el color del cristal con que se mira which roughly translates to: "and it's that in this treacherous world, there is truth nor lie; everything has the color of the glass(es) through which we look", from Ramón de Campoamor, a 19th century Spanish poet.
- hilbert42 5y agoI find this open letter on E.O. Wilson's legacy most welcome. I have already had my say about setting the record straight in the light Monica R. McLemore viscous attack on E.O. Wilson in an earlier HN story so there is no point repeating it here. For the sake of completeness I'd suggest readers of this page take a look at those posts and consider them an adjunct to these ones: All HN posts to the story The Demise of Scientific American: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778348 My own critical post about Associate Professor McLemore is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778348#29785417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778348#29785417
- Angostura 5y agoI used to be a magazine editor (trade press) and I can understand the editor's reticence to publish, because the letter is couched as an attack on the magazine, rather than a letter that framed as setting the record straight about the legacy of EO Wilson. If you are going to write a letter like this don't put this: "Scientific American published a bewilderingly flimsy opinion piece" in sentence 2. Instead write "we strongly disagree with some of the conclusions of your piece". The whole letter reads like a polemic attack on the editorial department of Scientific American. It would have been quite possible to have taken the arguments in this piece and written a firm rebuttal that gave an alternative view and set our the weaknesses in the published op-ed - and I suspect it would have been published in its entirety.
- biorach 5y ago> The whole letter reads like a polemic attack on the editorial department of Scientific American. It really doesn't. The letter addresses the points raised by the author of the original piece. Your comment is bizarre because it is so at odds with the actual contents of the letter.
- havelhovel 5y agoI don’t think their claim is bizarre at all. Almost every other sentence insults Scientific American or McLemore. A lesson for others wanting to get a rebuttal published: You can embarrass someone with facts, but you can’t say they "demonstrate a baffling ignorance of one of the most basic concepts."
- fenomas 5y ago> The whole letter reads like a polemic attack on the editorial department of Scientific American. As I understand it, the furore here is over SciAm having published the article - not just that the article exists or that people disagree with it. If the authors of the open letter felt the article was substantive but wrong, I imagine they'd have written the kind of letter you're suggesting.
- pdonis 5y ago> The whole letter reads like a polemic attack on the editorial department of Scientific American. That's because it is. Any magazine that purports to be informing the public about science should never have published the original article. It is in fact an opinion piece, and an ill-informed one at that. I agree that a magazine is unlikely to publish an article that attacks its own editorial policies, but that doesn't make the magazine right.
- rwnspace 5y ago" Genes and racism S1R- Steven Rose notes in his recent letter (Nature 22 January, p.335) that a National Front journal New Nation has claimed to find support for racism in my writings on sociobiology, as well as in those of Dawkins and Maynard Smith. Rose calls on the latter two authors to dissociate themselves from such misuse, although curiously he does not extend the same invitation to me. To keep the record straight, I am happy to point out that no justification for racism is to be found in the truly scientific study of the biological basis of social behaviour. As I stated in On Human Nature, "I will go further and suggest that hope and pride and not despair are the ultimate legacy of genetic diversity, because we are a single species, not two or more, one great breeding system through which genes flow and mix in each generation. Because of that flux, mankind viewed over many generations shares a single human nature within which relatively minor hereditary influences recycle through ever changing patterns, between the sexes and across families and entire populations" . lf there is a possible hereditary tendency to acquire xenophobia and nationalist feelings, it is a non sequitur to interpret such a hypothesis as an argument in favour of racist ideology. It is more reasonable to assume that a knowledge of such a hereditary basis can lead to the circumvention of destructive behaviour such as racism, just as a knowledge of the hereditary basis of haemoglobin chemistry and insulin production can lead to the amelioration of their pathological variants. l now call on Professor Rose to consider these and similar arguments raised in my writings. It is my hope that he will not confine himself, as he has in the past, to arguments that link sociobiology to racism and thus to continue to abet the very misuse which he piously claims to deplore. EDWARD0. WILSON Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA" https://www.nature.com/articles/289627b0.pdf https://www.nature.com/articles/289627b0.pdf
- hilbert42 5y ago"lf there is a possible hereditary tendency to acquire xenophobia and nationalist feelings, it is a non sequitur to interpret such a hypothesis as an argument in favour of racist ideology." Whether they are held in lay or scientific forums, this statement is central to many of the arguments over racism. The key issue in this sentence is its initial point, which is that we still do not know whether the human race has any hereditary tendency to acquire xenophobia. We need to determine for certain whether this is in fact true or otherwise. Guessing one way or other not only doesn't help but it also fuels the fires of those on either side of the debate. If we know the answer for certain then it's much easier to set a course to remedy the situation. If we are to make real progress then I believe it's cucial that we determine the facts and we need to do immediately. In the earlier posts some 14 days ago on SciAm and E.0.Wilson I made the following point: "As discussion and debate over gene expression has been in the high-stakes category both in the scientific community and across much of humanity for decades it would ultimately make sense to get to the scientific truth of the matter. If it eventuates and we learn for certain that human genes are in fact able to express themselves in ways that the vast majority of us humans now find morally repugnant and that such expression manifests in actual behaviour then as a species we'd be forced to deal with the problem head-on rather than sweep it under the carpet (as we now seem to be doing)."
- low_tech_love 5y agoScientific American avoids, she explained, “running direct rebuttals of earlier articles. This is a standard practice in most magazines to avoid being too self-referential, and so each article stands on its own.” Probably the laziest reject I've ever read. If she wanted him to rework some points, I guess it could be done, but rejecting it really sends a message.
- kgwgk 5y agoFollowing a link in the comments section to a blog post from Michael Shermer I discovered this jewel titled "Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion" Subtitle: "They’re meant to be heroes within the Star Wars universe, but the Jedi are inappropriate symbols for justice work" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-term-jedi-is-problematic-for-describing-programs-that-promote-justice-equity-diversity-and-inclusion/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-term-jedi... (A separate submission has been flagged but I hope this comment is allowed. It's a very funny/depressing piece that deserves to be better known.)
- sol_invictus 5y agoThanks for highlighting, personally blacklisting Scientific American as a phony pseudoscience magazine. Truly a shame
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- low_tech_love 5y agoI can't make my mind about which part of this is the most absurd. The fact that "real" (I suppose) academics are trying to attach themselves to Star Wars characters through an acronym, the crazy allegorical (and anachronic) argumentation of the authors of this article in order to diminish the Jedi themselves, or the fact that such a thing would be published in Scientific American of all places. To be honest I actually agree with them in their premise: people shouldn't be using the JEDI acronym, not because the Jedi are holding phallic swords or "gaslighting" with mind tricks, but simply because it is a childish and self-aggrandizing bull#%&@.
- qart 5y agoI haven't read the linked article, and I don't like Star Wars. But as for people using JEDI or other Star Wars, Harry Potter, LoTR, GoT acronyms, I'm OK with all that. This is just how culture adopts new mythology, new symbolisms and new customs. Quite a lot of ideas, words and phrases from Orwell's 1984 are an integral part of current English communication. Of course, when it comes to adoption of Star Wars and Harry Potter expressions, Disney and WB are likely to throw all their might at preventing it. You mentioned "gaslighting". That's from a movie too.
- jgalt212 5y agoLaura Helmuth needs to go. The problem is does the person they replace her with bring us back to Scientific American or does it continue on as Feelings American?
- ng12 5y ago> It wasn’t difficult to find signatories to the rebuttal, and we could have collected hundreds. I stopped seeking names after a few dozen, because the message is abundantly clear when you see who signed. Dr. David C. Queller is one of the most prominent critics of Wilson’s late foray against Hamiltonianism. Dr. David Sloan Wilson and Dr. Jerry Coyne both signed without hesitation. Well, clearly these men are horrible racists as well. Obviously I kid but it is truly frustrating how immune to logic or deeper analysis the current social justice movement is.
- kgwgk 5y ago
- JKCalhoun 5y ago> I don’t want to live in a world where my interlocutors and I are so fragile that our ideas must “stand on [their] own” because we are presenting “[our] own experiences.” I want discussion. I want debate. I want to deserve the robust, roiling world of ideas that could forge and nourish a truth-seeking mind like E.O. Wilson’s. Then don't be fragile. Discuss, debate. When people "self-edit" their opinions for fear of being attacked, then they have themselves to blame as well.
- motohagiography 5y ago> Ignored long enough, the lie becomes canon. If you are an articulate original thinker, I think one is morally obligated to respond to rhetorical bullying. The more coarse the ideological reasoning, the greater the obligation. Poppers paraphrase about not tolerating intolerance is nothing but a zero sum first movers advantage game, and it isn't a principle so much as a cheap strategy designed to exploit collegiality and agreeableness. The strategy of this current crop is incrementalism, where making absurd claims about small or distant things lets people think it doesn't matter because they're small or distant, when in fact, we've tolerated absurdity. It's a distraction theft, where your attention is focused on the small or distant thing, and you ignore that they have stepped into your domain and suddenly you have elevated a bully to an equal by arguing with them. I'm very glad this article was posted, and I hope the minority of people with the intellectual torque to beat this nonsense are encouraged to lean in to more public discourse.
- pfortuny 5y agoThe SciAm paper says “ the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.” This is so stupid that SciAm has lost any credibility even as mere divulgation.
- buo 5y agoThere have been many links to the SciAm article and to rebuttals and opinions about it. Popular media articles and obituaries that get it right should also be linked to and promoted; e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/13/they-saw-bigger-things-richard-leakey-edward-o-wilson-and-thomas-lovejoy-remembered-aoe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/13/they-saw...
- UIUC_06 5y agoScientific American has soiled itself irreparably, and this is just more of the same, by someone who isn't fit to carry his magnifying glass. "the so-called normal distribution": calling something "so-called" is the sort of thing that creationists do when confronted by the facts of natural selection. It has zero content and if it says anything, it says "Ewww! I don't like all that yucky math!"
- 8bitsrule 5y agoA comment to this response posits that: "Dr. Monica McLemore's obit on E.O. Wilson was an unintentionally hilarious display of ignorance mixed with woke sanctimony.... The idea that scientific knowledge is "socially constructed" ... is categorically and demonstrably false." In the past century we've seen many cases of strongly-held hypotheses causing contrary evidence to be ignored - and scientists with contrary hypotheses to be ridiculed, even ruined. Three examples: Wegner's plate tectonics, Bretz's catastropic floods, Cinq-Mars Bluefish cave dating. Eventually the first two were later adopted by the mainstream, their authors lauded. So certainly, the prior 'scientific knowledge' -- passed along to trusting educators and their students as if it were 'gospel truth' (despite evidence to the contrary, and eventual overthrow) -- was demonstrably socially-constructed - and still is. One difference from the the dogmatic medieval era is fewer stake-burnings.