In the wake of the May 14 Buffalo shooting, where a white man drove 200 miles to target people at a supermarket in a majority Black town, killing 13 and wounding 10, the bunk theory of eugenics has once again come up as a talking point. The scene of violence was very modern. The white supremacist made his plans public. He broadcasted his attack. The alt-right used many of the meme's in his since-removed manifesto. His ideas were old, racist, and antisemitic. Many media outlets latched onto the shooter's belief that immigrants and non-native, non-white peoples will breed enough to exceed the current population. Tucker Carlson, the premiere baby-face of Fox News, has become a Greek fountain of replacement theory, anti-immigration hate. The shooter used accredited and discredited science to support his beliefs, and replacement theory misses that roster. As the shooter explained how he planned to carry out his attack, he laid out dozens of links to scientific articles, graphs, and papers from all over the scientific spectrum, no matter the quality or content, as long as they could be used to justify his murder. The debate about how to deal with scientific racism at the borders of genetics and biology is being dragged into clear focus by this episode of violence fueled at least in part by modern scientific literature. White scientists have propped up racist figures in the scientific community for too long, and it's time for them to understand that racists are capable of weaponizing their words, wrote Janet Stemwedel, a philosophy professor at San Jose State University. Next-Level Sound can be experienced. Theater-like sound surrounds you with spatial audio with dynamic head tracking.
Stemwedel and others in the scientific community said there needs to be a change. Scientists say they need to identify why their theories are being used to justify racist violence and disrupt the process that leads to further racist radicalization.
Many of the studies pushed by the shooter were discredited or questionable. He picked up on Rushton's theories which tried to correlate race with intelligence.
Some of the sources the shooter pulled from are less well-known. He was referring to a political science professor who tried to draw a connection between race and genetic intelligence. The Pioneer Fund has a long history of backing racist theories and the shooter was heavily into pseudo-intellectuals. The Pioneer Fund was headed by Rushton and Richard Lynn.
John Gaski is a professor at the University of Notre Dame. Gaski claimed in his opinion piece that the rates of Black-on-White crime are higher than the reverse. The professor said in a statement that he wasappalled and deeply distressed that the information he provided was associated with the young man's actions.
Anything that could be applied to the shooter's view of the world was included in his fragmented screed. The fact that the shooter collected so much from so many different sources points to the fact that he got support online.
Jedidiah Carlson, a population geneticist working in Minnesota, has been analyzing how the radical right uses and abuses science for years. He said that online hate groups form what he called small journal clubs, that act as crowdsourced bibliographies for any and all published science they can co-opt or twist to make compatible with their racist ideology.
The online bands find a community on Telegram. The Iron Mirror was an online Library on society, economy, psychology and genetics that was used to spread bad interpretations. Carlson said that the Buffalo shooter was unique because he included links to his citations in his citations.
There are studies looking for genetic markers associated with educational attainment in the shooter's document, and some people are pointing out this is research that is directly feeding into the shooter's ideology.
The basis of great replacement theory is flawed, but the racists need these studies to understand their messed up worldview, according to Dr. Fatima Jackson. The narrow sense of whiteness will always need to eliminate any identifiable heritable features outside the norm, such as a broad tropical nose. She said that with the technology for genetic engineering, old concepts of eugenics are coming back.
The emphasis on a very narrow range of acceptable looks is a product of their own Goldilocks tales. We haven't been able to replace the racist, eugenic notions that many people still have.
Regular people and even some scientists are able to understand the world even if they don't agree with the concept of race. Intelligence testing between races is a popular sticking point for race-based arguments, despite scientists routinely disproving IQ-like tests as a quality means of measuring intelligence.
White supremacists have attempted to couch their arguments in racial superiority for a long time, according to Dr. Joseph Graves. Graves has written a number of books about race and genetics in modern society, and his latest book, Racism, Not Race, came out at the end of last year. It's easy for racists to misinterpret scientists work. Graves cited the recent examples of white supremacists chugging milk to prove their superiority because of their genes. Groups in east Africa have the same genes.
Genetics and intelligence have dominated the way the majority of Americans think about these issues.
He's most concerned about how the modern eugenicist ideas have taken hold among the far right and the mainstream Republican party. A majority of people who voted for Trump believe in the core idea behind replacement theory, according to a recent Yahoo/Yougov poll. A recent AP/NORC poll had similar results.
Modern day genetics were built from the crumbling bedrock of eugenics. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is on Long Island, New York. The area around the lab is peaceful. The lab is located on the edge of the bay. The building and area feel timeless even though the trees change with the seasons.
The lab was once a center of the American eugenics movement. It focuses on genomics, biology, and neuroscience, but it still has artifacts and records of its past. This has made it possible for researchers like Elof Axel Carlson to get a better idea of the local influence that eugenics had on the scientific community. He still talks about the history of eugenics even after he retired.
Eugenics offered an idealistic, 18th century enlightenment-era belief in the best of society, according to his 2001 book The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea. Eugenics came from the same smog-clogged stacks of the industrial revolution. The widening gap between the rich and the poor in the city has led to a rethinking of certain elements of society.
In the US during the 19th century, some people argued that these people should be put to work in good environments. Some people said environments didn't change heredity. The judgments of human souls often took on a racist overtone, especially in the U.S. southern states. The problem was in the self, whether they were poor or stupid. The only way to end society's ills was to curtail reproduction of those who were unfitting.
Eugenicists used removal of ovaries, castration and vasectomies as a means of limiting the ability to reproduce. Some states went as far as codifying sterilizing laws as a way to prevent procreation and crime. Racist and antisemitic groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Know-Nothings were the offspring of these eugenic ideologies according to Carlson's book.
During the Holocaust, the ideas presented by American and European eugenicists ended up in Nazi Germany. 6 million jews and 5 million others were killed in that slaughter. The rise of mendelian genetics took hold after World War II. The last international eugenics convention was held in 1932. Eugenicist circles in the U.S. have largely been promoted by the Pioneer Fund along with the regular slate of white supremacists.
Carlson is concerned by the way that figures on Fox News promote hate.
He moved closer to his screen as he talked to Gizmodo over the phone. Tucker Carlson is wrong. That is not biology. That is prejudice.
According to an assistant professor of biology at Howard University, those trying to equate race with IQ or violent behaviors are more fringe than they used to be. Some scientists will argue against tarnishing the legacy of once-respected researchers even when racism is exposed. She co-authored an article about the support disgraced psychologist J. Philippe Rushton received. The biologist's death in 2021 sparked an intense debate among her peers about how to deal with the scientist's historical support for scientific racism.
She said that we have to have brutally honest conversations about how scientific racism has affected our fields, how it persists, and how it influences the way that we talk about science today.
Jedidiah Carlson said part of the problem is how scientific studies are published. The Lynn-backed Mankind Quarterly is one of the journals that is blatantly racist. White nationalists abuse Academic preprints, where science isn't presented to the public before peer review, with 10% of preprints containing notable connections to alt-right audiences.
It's not uncommon for scientists to change what they study and how they present their findings in order to appease racists.
The legacy of a system that has been sympathetic to racial hierarchy is still being grappled with.
The problem with accredited studies linking genetic data with statistics is that they often lead to eye-catching headlines that aren't backed up by data. He argued that scientists need to work harder to make their research less applicable to racists, even if it makes the research sound sexy.
Graves disagreed with the idea that changing the way scientists present their research will deter racists from misinterpreting their studies. His first book, The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium, described how there is no biological basis behind our categorization of races. Graves said a judge in Texas used his book to argue against affirmative action.
He said people should be careful.
Jackson was the first black woman to receive the Charles R. Darwin Lifetime Achievement Award. She said that most people don't know what genetic modification is. The other problem is cultural. The U.S. struggles to understand science and scientific research. In order to establish theories, a rigorous and time consuming process of self-review and peer review is required.
We in America look for quick answers, answers that cruise through all levels of analysis that are true, now and forever, when that isn't how it works.
Graves has a problem with how the world views the scientific community. Black and Brown scientists have been trying to change their views of science for years.
We are a minority, but we have been working diligently to address these issues. Our voices have always been heard. The media doesn't always pay attention to us, but I think the media could do a better job listening to Black and Brown voices who have been doing this work for centuries.
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