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A once respected biology journal indicts evolutionary biology for ableism
- tgv 4y agoSad, but predicted. It's academic opportunism. "We may not have a spine, but we do have tenure, so let's roll with the tide." This is usually accompanied by vaguely positive statements and wishful thinking. It was already evident when The Closing of the American Mind was published, over 30 years ago. The ever advancing commercialization of universities has made the staff even more susceptible to public opinion (and public here means: their students and benefactors).
- fallingknife 4y agoPublic opinion laughs at this woke nonsense, though. I mean "egg parent" and "sperm parent." JFC. You're not gonna hear that IRL. It's only in elite academic circles that you'll find anybody who doesn't roll their eyes at this.
- walkhour 4y agoThis is a version of the silent majority argument, and I think you underestimate how much the public is onboard with these policies. And give it a few decades, opposing them will simply be outside of the Overton window. Competing over conformity is the Olympics sports of our time and boy is society keen on participating.
- mbg721 4y agoThe public just wants to give the underdog a fair shot; they don't care much about what's happening in academic publishing, but they get angry if they perceive that somebody is being oppressed because of who or what they are. A few decades from now, the public response will depend on how successfully these issues were cast as matters of justice.
- fallingknife 4y agoThen why do I never hear woke language IRL? People who I associate with are overwhelmingly left of center and under 35 BTW, so sample bias is actually making this a stronger indication of public opinion. Edit: and anybody who has ever dealt with an HOA knows that the silent majority is absolutely a real thing.
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y agoThe key is that it doesn’t take ‘a majority’ to affect change. Activists just need to be in positions of power, or put pressure on those that are. The average person in ‘the silent majority’ is against all the ‘wokeness’ but won’t actually fight it. They’ll prefer to reassure themselves that no one truly believes it while doing virtually nothing to confront those who are pushing it. As far as your HOA example goes, I’ve found most people really do not like being in one, but are relatively helpless when it comes to actually changing the association’s rules.
- throwaway894345 4y agoI lived in Chicago and I heard woke stuff all the time at work (we had some pretty insane DEI meetings and posters around the office), among friends, at church, and of course protests/demonstrations/riots on the streets. I think it’s not evenly distributed IRL and that has some people feeling like “woke” is just some Republican boogeyman. Also, people seem to be forgetting the #MeToo and #BLM eras surprisingly quickly—woke ideology spurred nationwide protests and riots and somehow that seems to be getting memory-holed.
- willnonya 4y agoI work in an environment that has a lot of focus on DEI, training, posters etc. Unless you're standing in front of the equivalent of a polit officer the language is used mockingly. This isnt some right wing coven but a mix of perspectives. This mocking stems from the shared recognition of the absurdity of the issue. As far as Me Too and BLM being "memory holed" that has more to do with the movements themselves. They each started with very real sparks but were both consumed rather quickly by movements that bore little resemblance to those sparks. They abused their support for unrelated and often self serving objectives and made themselves irrelevant as a result.
- throwaway894345 4y agoI sort of agree that we underestimate support for these policies, but critically I think we underestimate who (rather than how many people) supports these policies—notably the elites in Hollywood, media, academia, and business (at least via DEI platforms in every major company). Even still, I’m somewhat optimistic that this ideology won’t be adopted in its current form because it’s so inconsistent and often counterfactual, and I believe in a sort of “truth floats”. Moreover, our society is already “less woke” (or whatever term you prefer) than we were in the BLM and #MeToo eras. Honestly, my biggest concern is that proponents of woke ideology are pretty successfully framing it as the only alternative to Republican anti-wokeness or otherwise as the best way to “own the conservatives”. At least that’s the impression I get from debates I’ve had.
- jwalton 4y agoI have a number of friends who, a decade ago, jumped down the super woke rabbit hole. They’re quite far from academia - in fact the one thing that ties most of them together is that they didn’t bother going to university and then spent a long chunk of time essentially unemployed. So it isn’t just the elite and the Hollywood types… although my anecdotal evidence isn’t any better than your anecdotal evidence. :P
- throwaway894345 4y agoOh, I fully agree that it isn’t limited to academia. I’m only saying that your unemployed super-woke friends aren’t as influential as Hollywood, the media, government bureaucrats, academia, DEI departments, etc. :)
- Beltalowda 4y agoI've only known a single person who buys in to all this stuff, and my social circle leans overwhelmingly left. And with "this stuff" I don't make the basic precepts – many people agree on that – but rather the more outlandish "woke" interpretations of things: "structural racism exists and is a problem": sure, loads of people agree with that, as do I. But "math education is full of white supremacy culture" ... yeah, not so much. Not a very scientific poll by any standard of course and I'm sure it's a biased selection in all sorts of ways, but it doesn't seem that common of a viewpoint to me. I think the reason that you don't get a lot of pushback is that accusations of racism, transphobia, ableism, etc. are completely toxic, no matter how bullshitty they are. If you have to say "I'm not racist" then you've kind of already lost. It's a "cheat code" for winning the argument; the ultimate "stfu hammer". And you have to ask yourself: do I really have anything to gain by engaging on this and what do I risk losing?
- zozbot234 4y agoStructural racism exists and is a problem, but the clearest, most obvious and most prototypical example of a structurally racist society is not the United States; it's Latin America. Where racialized ideology got its start in the first place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casta and where the whole of society was twisted over five centuries to build up and sharpen a correlation between ancestry, social status and in fact outright social oppression and coercion. Of course this correlation is quite obvious today and explains much about the social dysfunction that persists there. Does structural racism then exist in the U.S.? Undoubtedly so in some places, especially those that were most influenced by Latinx norms and by the homegrown culture of oppression in the South. But to call it ubiquitous to the U.S. as the "woke" almost always do is to deeply misunderstand the nature of it.
- Beltalowda 4y agoI guess? I'm afraid I'm not too familiar with the history of South-America. I don't think it's unreasonable for people to primarily focus on their own country in their own time. Historical context is important, sure, both to understand the cause of today's problems as well as put things in perspective. But in the end, I'm not so sure if it really matters all that much when discussing contemporary issues in e.g. the US or Europe. I mean, you can look up how the ancient Greek treated their women and suddenly you will find that modern feminists from the 70s didn't have all that much to complain about either, never mind contemporary countries like Saudi-Arabia. It's interesting to learn about it for all sorts of reasons, but in the end ... not really all that directly relevant when discussing the status of women in your own country.
- svnt 4y agoPublic opinion is a schizophrenic cultural phenomenon that most people understand in a hyperlocal sense. This is generally how language works. People at the edges of understanding propose a lot of new ideas and reframings, and some gain broader footholds in popular use. I’ve been on both sides of this debate because sometimes the innovators push beyond what I think makes sense. But they are innovating.
- vba616 4y ago>Public opinion is a schizophrenic cultural phenomenon that most people understand in a hyperlocal sense. I asked someone with schizophrenia and they thought this pretentious comment was hilarious in the midst of a thread on ableism.
- svnt 4y agoI asked a dictionary and it thought your comment expressed insufficient awareness of different definitions of words. You can decide if that’s funny to you in a thread that is also about defining language and reacting to it. schizophrenic: 2: contradictory or antagonistic qualities or attitudes https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/schizophrenic https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/schizophrenic Perhaps your friend would prefer to be referred to as having schizophrenia spectrum disorder as that is now the more accurate term.
- vba616 4y ago>insufficient awareness of different definitions of words Lot of that going around. If you look up "retard" in Merriam-Webster, it says "informal + offensive : a foolish or stupid person" If you look up "schizo" in Merriam-Webster, it says "a schizophrenic individual". If you look up "psycho" in Merriam-Webster, it says "a deranged or psychopathic person —not used technically" Think about this and you will become enlightened. (I should make it clear that I agree with you if you think the idea of policing "schizo" and "psycho" like people police other terms is impossible, absurd. They can't be destigmatized or merged into "neurodiversity". All I really wanted or expected to do was shock some awareness.)
- bizfuz 4y agoI think it's because students tend to either trust the academic hierarchy, or understand that they need to adhere to what they're being taught in order to pass the course. When I was studying biology as an undergraduate, there were a number of religious students who vehemently disagreed with evolutionary theory, but would work under - in their minds - the assumption of this fiction being true in order to get decent grades. The same may well be true of students being taught that woke gibberish like "egg parent" and "sperm parent" are the correct terms to use. Or they just accept it as technical jargon as they would with all the other domain-specific language used in their course.
- yucky 4y agoThis used to be the case with saying "transwomen are women", for instance. Now you're called a bigot if you disagree, and there is a chance this post even gets removed or flagged because facts be damned if it could potentially hurt feelings. So don't assume the general public will stand up against insanity as much as you would like them to.
- svnt 4y agoThe paper is authored by grad students.
- zozbot234 4y agoDid they properly cite the previous work of Trofim Lysenko? He was the first to indict Western geneticists as "fly lovers and people haters" who promote imperialism and bourgeois false science. Failing to cite his work in this context is flagrant academic dishonesty.
- tgv 4y agoIt got published in a peer-reviewed journal. Its bloody impact factor is 3.926.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
- im3w1l 4y agoWell that just moves the question to another layer doesn't it? Why do the students and benefactors push this view? Because they are taught thus by professors, closing the circle? Personally I think the answer is anti-discrimination legislation. To be precise, the chilling effects of it. If someone goes against the "woke" it may not be illegal itself, but it means everything they do will be subject to more scrutiny and they risk being judged more severely for the same misstep. Thus anti-discrimination legislation, I conjecture, gradually select the woke to the top of the elite.
- noduerme 4y ago>> anti-discrimination legislation, I conjecture, gradually select the woke to the top of the elite. ironically, you're making a perfect argument for natural selection in evolutionary studies selecting... people who will eventually deny the existence of natural selection. I wonder if this is also an end stage of a lot of other systems of knowledge.
- throwaway894345 4y agoI’ve heard it described as: anti-discrimination legislation puts the burden of proof on employers to prove they aren’t motivated by discrimination, which is essentially impossible so they instead try to show that they are more committed to “anti-racism” than the median institution, which of course raises the median to the point where exceeding the median requires increasingly ridiculous, performance stuff. Initially I was skeptical of this model because it only explains administrators’ fervor, but as I thought through the knock-on effects, I think it probably does a decent job of explaining faculty and student zeal as well, at least over time.
- nequo 4y ago> Why do the students and benefactors push this view? Because they are taught thus by professors, closing the circle? Your reasoning applied to the 1960s would say that students only opposed the Vietnam War because their professors told them to. You should ascribe more agency to university students. Much more likely that their professors just taught them biology and how to operate lab equipment. Graduate students especially are incentivized to come up with new ways of seeing the world. That’s what writing a dissertation is all about. This is the same mindset carried over from biology to a social issue normally seen as unrelated. Edit: Those who are downvoting without replying, have you been to grad school, or are you just imagining what professors spend their time telling their students?
- cjbgkagh 4y agoI’ve been trying to get access to academic tools and data to research my own genetic condition and I’ve been required to pledge allegiance to anti-racism more than once. Basically if I stumble on something that could be considered racist then I guess it’s a breach of terms. I don’t intend to publish so it doesn’t bother me but it does seem antithetical to finding fundamental truths.
- walkhour 4y agoYou can find any fundamental truth that doesn't oppose that every single psychological trait has exactly the same average and deviation across ... really any group. Which is an outstanding claim, and therefore your priors should be it's extremely unlikely.
- cjbgkagh 4y agoI should add that I've taken to do my own research because I little faith in the actual scientists to do a good job, and the faith that I have left is diminishing. A lot of the science is needlessly incredibly slow and it appears that once someone has found something they can get funding for they drag it out forever as it's easier to get repeat funding than try for new funding. Then there is all the accidental (and not so accidental) p-hacking that is so prevalent that it appears that being good at math would be an impairment to an academic career.
- svnt 4y ago[flagged]
- meany 4y agoDon’t you think making an ageist statement to refute this is a bit hypocritical?
- svnt 4y ago“Likely lead-poisoned grumpy pants?” And no, I think the age of a person is very relevant to their willingness to change based on what we know scientifically about the way our brains wire and prune over our lives. But it’s a sacred cow here.
- noduerme 4y ago"Science" says old people are less willing to change their language to suit politically correct fads? I wonder what it must say about people too young to recognize the first fashionable wave of politically correct zealotry they happen to get caught up in. There's probably a word for how they feel looking back at themselves later.
- svnt 4y agoThere are definitely people overplaying the woke position but language evolves. I’m likely as old as you. Your arrows missed their target here. If Jerry weren’t so identified with his language he might have read the paper and found a middle ground. Instead he’s located himself further in the opposite direction of where we are headed. Not that the paper’s authors know exactly where that is, either.
- mumblemumble 4y agoI can't speak for all generations and all political movements, but the "politically correct zealotry" of my generation is now widely understood to have been on the correct side of history, and, in the eyes of the cultural mainstream, the language we were looking to change has come to be seen, at best, as outdated and slightly embarrassing. That said, I saw it go the other way for some of the issues that one of my older siblings was excited about back in the day. It's just possible that, "This idea seems to be most popular among young people," doesn't actually function as a stunning rhetorical coup de grace for any side of any cultural debate.
- bongoman37 4y ago[dead]
- valdiorn 4y ago> the the use of certain terms of art in the field, like “fitness” is both ableist and discourages people from going into evolutionary biology. I want my master branches back, GitHub.
- xwdv 4y agoWe still use master branches as part of our coding guidelines.
- mumblemumble 4y agoThis has got to be the only time in history that legions of non-Java programmers have stood up with united voices to bitterly decry. . . using a name that's terser and easier to type.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wffurr 4y agoI want human beings to not have been such a tire fire of a species capable of great cruelty to one another. Alas, we don’t always get what we want.
- azangru 4y agoIt's deeper than GitHub now. I believe git itself has changed the default name of the initial branch [0]. [0] - https://github.com/git/git/commit/028cb644ec6450fa9438ba6b6d100c0f34e029a5 https://github.com/git/git/commit/028cb644ec6450fa9438ba6b6d...
- JoeyBananas 4y agoI was not aware of this. The fact that this got through is maddening. There is a person who campaigned for 5+ years to get the term "index" changed to "staging." Everyone agreed with this change. There is a ton of evidence that it's better. The patch was written. But one person refused it and it got shut down. Edit: here is the actual link https://felipec.wordpress.com/2021/08/10/git-staging-area-rename/ https://felipec.wordpress.com/2021/08/10/git-staging-area-re...
- fabian2k 4y agoThe framing in the title seems somewhat disingenuous to me. This is one article in that journal, it's not an editorial and as far as I can tell there is nothing to indicate that this article represents the opinions of the journal or its editors. The more interesting criticism of the paper are only paraphrased without quotes, I'm not sure I understand the arguments here without reading the original paper in full. There is one part I think that is interesting from an entirely different point of view, and that is that "fitness" is probably not the best term for this concept in evolution. I don't think I've ever heard evolution explained without the caveat that "fitness" in evolution doesn't mean what we understand commonly as fitness. It's more about the survival of the best adapted one, and not the strongest one. There are some terms in biology that are far from ideal, but they stick because we used them for a long time. Another example is the "central dogma of molecular biology", Crick later admitted that he misunderstood what dogma actually means when he coined that term. The term is simply wrong in this case, but it still remains.
- ominous 4y ago> Another example is the "central dogma of molecular biology", Crick later admitted that he misunderstood what dogma actually means when he coined that term. The term is simply wrong in this case, but it still remains. It remains because it is understood, making it not wrong. It is far from ideal, language wise, if we were to take language as more important than how language is used. > It's more about the survival of the best adapted one, and not the strongest one. The same applies to the usage of "fitness", that you chose to misunderstand. Do you also misread "islamophobia"? Are all usages of "literally" literal?
- tremon 4y ago"fitness" in evolution doesn't mean what we understand commonly as fitness. It's more about the survival of the best adapted one, and not the strongest one. It's almost as if the original author meant to say "fit for purpose".
- PicassoCTs 4y agoThats also wrong, its the good enough for a environment. And environments are many and ever changing. A fish sweating glycol into his body, is deadly sick on this planet (well maybe except the poles), but well adapted aka fit on alot of other planets. Finally, environments swing, for example by increasing and decreasing mouse populations, which may even within a species allow for epigenetic adaptions (good times reproduce, bad times sit on a pole and do energy efficient nothing), which then explains initial diversity and "neuro divergence" in animal popultions. Usual trigger is economic stresses. Now lets all pray to the great sinus curve of the environment in the sky.
- eximius 4y agoCivilization/society is, in a lot of ways, a human rejection of natural selection as the fundamental force driving our species's future. But evolution as a process, as much as we can ascribe these terms to a stochastic process, is inherently abelist and eugenicist? Like, that's what natural selection is. Both the author's analysis and the reviewed paper are dumb.
- zozbot234 4y agoIt's just the same process of selection operating at a higher level. Not on genes, but on social systems and institutions. Thus e.g. Socialism was developed under the assumption that human nature itself could somehow be changed in the service of a collective goal, the "New Socialist Man". But this ultimately failed, and so Socialism was mostly abandoned. (What some call socialism today is more of a minor adjustment on capitalism, trying to improve its overall outcomes without central planning of all production activity.)
- fedeb95 4y agoIs that even a paper? Which advancement does it make for science apart cosmetic terminology? Language doesn't define reality, if you study linguistics just a little bit. Sadly today the exact opposite is pushed forward by a lot of entities. Using this or that term won't advance science an inch. Doing serious research using whatever term, as long as it's understandable, would make for better papers.
- motohagiography 4y agoA lot of the controversy stems from the fact that most people need to understand what a critical theory is, as they take its outputs at face value, react, and then politically neutralize themselves leaving the theorist to troll again. The basic principle behind all of these 'isms, is they operate on the same mechanism, which originates in a few places, notably psychotherapy, where by beginning with an inconsistent premise (see Godel), you can prove anything within its downstream system of logic. Once you have accepted that, you will accept anything built on top of it. Logically, it is a universal solvent, where if you can introduce inconsistency into a line of reasoning, it dissolves the bonds of logic and reason by rendering them inconsistent and decoheres the ideas built on them. The reason you do this theraputically is to temporarily separate a patient from the logic of the story they tell about themselves as a means to relieve suffering long enough for them to process feelings about the events that led them to that conclusion. However, it got applied to literary criticism, and expanded from there. You can riff on a critical theory infinitely, seemingly proving conclusions in it effortlessly because of its base logical inconsisency. In this case, and pretty much all mainstream critical theories, the mechanism is a positive conclusion from a negative premise. The negative premise in these 'isms is that anti-badness is a positive value, principle, or ideal. A critical theory frames reality in terms of this negatively defined lens, and then shows how otherwise neutral and real things do not meet the condition of being anti-bad. Hence why you get someone riffing on insufficient anti-badness in a science journal and seeming to make sense, assuming you have accepted the underlying negatively defined fallacy that anti-badness is a sufficient or necessary condition for anything. However, the effect of this is similar to that of the therapist, where it creates a dependency on the critic to resolve the inconsistencies they have caused. It's mesmerism, and "problematic" has become the universal slogan charlatanism. The hardest part about unpacking it is getting people to admit how thoroughly they have been fooled. Once you are arguing in terms of whether you are not ablist or anti-bad enough, you have already taken the bait, and you are arguing at a disadvantage within the inconsistent framework of rules in the critical theory, which was designed to distract and keep you from resisting their seizure of the reins of the journals, institutions, funding bodies, and other "means of production," just like they do whenever a society develops industrial capability. They exploit your trust, agreeableness, and good nature, tell you that you have a false consciouness, and that you have been terrible this whole time, and that only their approval can heal. There's one way out, which is perhaps also ablist because it requires the use of one's middle finger, but it's the only way.
- transfire 4y ago> However, we also represent white settlers’ perspectives on these issues. Yeah. So shut up. Your ideas don’t count!
- naasking 4y agoFrom the paper being critiqued: > A defensive approach will not work. As a common example, we need to refrain from claiming that whatever ableist or eugenic connotations terms such as “fitness” and “selection” may have in the public sphere, we understand their apolitical technical definitions. This does not hold water because our views, and especially the views of scientists new to the field, are inevitably shaped by the public sphere and public discourse around evolutionary biology—hence the persisting popularity of survival of the fittest in general biology narratives and manuscripts. This seems like a deeply stupid strategy. This sets up a whack-a-mole game of constantly changing apolitical technical language as the new terms then become co-opted by misuse or bad actors. This literally just happened with "woke", which used to be a positive term and is now used pejoratively. For people so concerned with the impact of history they seem particularly inclined to ignore it when it suits them.
- fhsm 4y agoIsn’t that exact cycle the current norm… E.g., https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1937-00266-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1937-00266-001 The sign is changed to escape folk connotations but in time reality asserts itself the signed subsumes the new sign and the cycle repeats.
- bakuninsbart 4y ago> These ableist teaching practices also serve to alienate and marginalize disabled and chronically ill students (Hales 2020) and may be partially responsible for disabled students and scholars exiting the field, along with noninclusive teaching/ researching practices (Laurentino et al. 2021). The proportion of disabled evolutionary biologists is far below the population average (Rushworth et al. 2021; 10.8% vs. 26% overall), as is the proportion of doctorate recipients who are disabled (8.1% of life sciences PhD recipients in 2020 vs. the same 26% of the population; NCSES 2021), although this is very hard to study quantitatively given small sample sizes in present studies (Wanelik et al. 2020). This seems to be pretty much in line with the US national average of abled vs. diasbled people with at least a Bachelor's degree. [0] I'm sure there are still barriers that exclude disabled people from higher learning that we can and should work on deconstructing, but there's also a fundamental issue of some disabilities making people less able to perform academic work. And this to me seems to be the crux: I have the bad suspicion that people talking about ableism have the goal of fundamentally disavowing disucssion about ableness. But this is from my point of view pretty fundamental to how I view the world, and it seems basically delusional to me to deny the differences in ableness we have as humans. This article has given me a lot to think about, and I should read more on the topic, any suggestions very welcome! [0] https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/people-with-a-disability-less-likely-to-have-completed-a-bachelors-degree.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/people-with-a-disability-l...
- prepend 4y agoIt seems important to age adjust these rates as disability increases with age. So phd students are young and comparing their rate of disability to the entire population doesn’t seem very useful. It also seems difficult to compare the rate of disabled biologists with the overall populations as many disabled people don’t work at all and would not consider biology or any profession. So of course the rate would be lower than the population.
- funstuff007 4y ago> newspeak, propagandistic language that is characterized by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings. https://www.britannica.com/art/newspeak https://www.britannica.com/art/newspeak
- luuuzeta 4y ago>It’s one thing when magazines like Scientific American go all catawampus on science, but another entirely when a good scientific journal itself succumbs to wokeness. >The article below, from July’s American Naturalist [...] shows two things. First, it’s one of the more ludicrous examples of science policing I’ve seen. Second, it shows how the American Society of Naturalists [...] has gone down the same woke road as the other ecology and evolution societies. As someone once said, "everything woke goes to shit". There are few ideologies as pervarsive and corrodive as Wokeness. At the end of the day, it's ultimately about power and ruling over people's thought process. >The piece’s hectoring tone, which tells us what we MUST do, pervades the entire paper, especially the final section, “A path forward.” Oh, and here’s part of the acknowledgments—the obligatory self castigation That's par for the course: 1. Point out a non-existent problem (or amplify it to gigantic proportions if it does). 2. Pontificate how it affects some marginalized group(s) and how the problem's day-to-day existence mortally affect the livelihood of said group(s). It's important you're talking on behalf of the group(s) and that you don't provide any evidence. 3. Try to introduce some methodology and/or framework to solve the problem. It's important this new framework be the only "path forward", and morally justified to bully others to accept it even if it has no merits. >(I have yet to understand what unlived experience is! And what do white settlers have to do with ableism?) Neither do I! >The paper, as you’ll see, is really an indictment of biology and undergraduate genetics for not using sufficiently woke language. It seems that ship unfortunately sailed a long time ago. Nowadays it's about denying reality, and being forced to participate in some individuals' theatrics and self-image or else you'll be labeled a -phobic or -ist. --- On a different note, give Coyne's books (Faith vs Fact and Why Evolution Is True) a read. Highly recommended.