The new op-ed by Scientific American is a hit piece on Ed Wilson, calling him a racist.
It is written by someone who apparently has no training in evolutionary biology, and she says she was very familiar with Wilson's work and his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior. I usually don't question someone because of their credentials, but this piece is so stupid and ignorant of Wilson's work that I can attribute its content to a combination of ignorant and woke desire to take down someone who wasn't a racist. Or both.
The piece below could have been written by any social-justice ideologue, for it's main purpose is to change the nature of science. Read on.
I recommend you read it, it is short and free, but how could the editor allow this to be published?
I will try to refrain from ranting about this woman's stupidity. There are links that say discrimination andracism. There is no evidence that Wilson was a racist in the article. He was a biological determinist, but not a pure biological determinist, for he wrote books about the influence of culture and genetics, but I never heard him say that he was biased against other groups. Monica R. McLemore is black. Some people who claim that genes have a role in human behavior are not racist. If you claim that genes don't have any influence on modern behavior, you're wrong.
If Wilson was a racist, shouldn't McLemore have addeduced evidence? I don't see anything. I see stuff that she considers to be evidence, but it is not convincing.
Here is her only evidence that Wilson was a racist.
His influential text Sociobiology: The New Synthesis contributed to the false dichotomy of nature versus nurture and spawned an entire field of behavioral psychology grounded in the notion that differences among humans could be explained by genetics, inheritance and other biological mechanisms. I had enjoyed Wilson's novel, which was published later and written for the public, so I was disappointed that he thought this way.
The last chapter of Sociobiology is about how human evolution could have influenced many modern human behaviors. There is nothing in that chapter that suggests that Wilson is a racist or that he thinks that differences between races that have promoted racism are determined by genes. The index does not include the word race.
Wilson was a biological determinist about animal and human behavior. Humans are the only species whose behavior is unaffected by their evolution. Racist is not the same as thinking that differences between people or even groups could have a genetic component. They never adduced evidence for the accusation of racism against Wilson. McLemore does not. She wants to brand a famous scientist as a bigot.
There is more evidence.
Wilson was not the only one with problematic beliefs. His predecessors also published works and spoke of theories with racist ideas about the distribution of health and illness in populations.
Most of these people had ideas that would be considered racist today, but Darwin was also an abolitionist. And Mendel, for crying out loud? The good friar was a racist according to one piece of Mendel's writings. Was green peas better than yellow peas? McLemore is simply making stuff up, throwing Mendel's discoveries of inheritance into the pot with the other accused "racists." This is a very bad scholarship and it is almost comical in its ignorant assertions.
Wait! There is more!
Modern geneticists and genome scientists struggle with inherent racism in the way they gather and analyze data. J. Craig Venter writes in his memoir A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life that the complex provenance of ideas means their origin is often open to interpretation.
I will pass on as that sentence has nothing to do with racism.
There is more evidence that Wilson and his peers were racist.
The normal distribution of statistics assumes that humans are the standard that the rest of us can be measured against. We don't adequately take into account differences between experimental and reference group determinants of risk and resilience, which has been a hallmark of inadequate scientific methods. Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health, commented on vaccine acceptance in an interview with PBS NewsHour.
I don't know what this has to do with Wilson, Galton, Darwin, Pearson, and Mendel. The paragraph makes no sense to me. It seems that McLemore is trying to find racism in everything that exists, including the distribution itself.
One reader asked McLemore why she didn't quote any of Wilson's words to show his racism, and she gave the answer of a person who didn't do her homework, turning a necessity into a virtue.
I did not quote his work so you could read it yourself. I talked about why citational practices matter. My method was similar to my critique. His work should speak for itself, thanks for supporting my point.
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Monica McLemore PhD, MPH, RN, FAAN, is a professor.
It is all nonsense that various factors imply Wilson was racist.
The application of the scientific method is important because it tells us what works for ants and other nonhuman species.
Yes, but what?
It's a crude and cruel lens to look at nurture versus nature without any attention to externalities, such as opportunities and potential, that deeply influence human existence and experiences. This dispassionate query will lead to different ideas of the value and meaning of human lives, while our collective fates are inextricably linked.
Externalities are environments. Again, we get a paragraph that doesn't say anything.
McLemore gives three ways to help us evaluate problematic scientists.
The scientific record needs truth and reconciliation, including attention to citational practices when using or reporting on problematic work.
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. The scientific workforce needs to be more diverse in order to conduct better science and to ask new types of research questions. The same approach can be applied to scientific research.
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. We need new methods. New rules about public availability and use of data were just one of the many gifts of the Human Genome Project.
I can only add two things. McLemore is unscientific in accusing Ed Wilson of racism without mentioning any evidence. And Mendel? There is no scholarship involved in this piece, and defaming Wilson seems like an excuse for McLemore to vent her antiracist views on the readers of Scientific American.
The problematic people today are Ed Wilson, who ignores evidence, makes misleading statements about scientists, and accuses science of being racist in a way for which only she knows the cure. She is one of the people who are trying to change the face of science from being a set of tools to investigate nature into a set of ideological practices to achieve Social Justice.
reader Paul directed me to this thread, which contains many more takes on this article, but I haven't yet investigated it. None of them are good. Here are a few. Khan is a geneticist.
What is the complicated legacy of E. O. Wilson?
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December 30, 2021.
If a normal person without any credentials said that about normal distribution, there would be a huge eruption on science.
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Who/whom matters.
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We don't need charity for that.
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December 30, 2021.
I am sad about the demise of Scientific American.
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December 30, 2021.
It is embarrassing to me that this nonsense was published. We run AreoMagazine for $3k a month. We vet and copyedit pieces. I think Scientific American has a bigger budget.
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Iona Italia, PhD, December 30, 2021.
I remember when Scientific American had standards.
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December 30, 2021.
Scientific American profiled a Harvard professor who found that genetics is relevant for understanding human societies. This is not allowed by the post-modern left.
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December 30, 2021.
I usually don't say things like this on this site, but I am not far away from Wright here.
I'll make an exception to my rule about not swearing on social media.
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Scientific American can go crazy.
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Colin Wright wrote on December 30, 2021.
If you still subscribe to Scientific American, you need to give a reason why, for the editor wants less science and more wokeness.
