I made another of those videos. Script below the fold.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Uh-oh. Gad Saad is polluting the discourse again, this time in a vain attempt to discredit the concept of toxic masculinity. It’s embarrassingly bad. I would say that you need to first understand the concept if you hope to debunk it, and Saad does not; if you do not, then all your floundering about will simply reinforce the idea and lead you to use examples that actually demonstrate the phenomenon.
Toxic masculinity is actually not that hard to understand. It’s not a rejection of masculinity itself; it’s a problem that arises when men are socialized to conform to a cultural stereotype that doesn’t actually match their nature.
bell hooks wrote this quote in her chapter called Comrades in Struggle: “…Yet the poor or working class man who has been socialized via sexist ideology to believe that there are privileges and powers he should possess solely because he is male often finds that few if any of these benefits are automatically bestowed him in life.” One of the “powers” that men are socialized to believe that they have to embody is masculinity. Masculinity seems to be the running force of patriarchy, but this term has a very specific definition under patriarchy that is not inclusive of all forms of masculinity. This phenomenon is called toxic masculinity. Toxic masculinity “refers to the socially-constructed attitudes that describe the masculine gender role as violent, unemotional, sexually aggressive, and so forth.”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It’s the stereotype of the steely-eyed muscular man who compels women to obey his will. The True Man is sexually aggressive. And what does Gad Saad do? He opens with examples of animals that engage in aggressive competition for mates!
Female fiddler crabs and hens prefer males with extravagantly large claws and tails respectively. Ewes (female rams) will mate with the ram that wins the brutal intrasexual head-butting contest. They reward targeted aggression by granting sexual access. Needless to say, there are innumerable other examples of sexual selection that I might describe, but I suspect that you get the general gist. Are rams exhibiting toxic masculinity? Are female fiddler crabs succumbing to antiquated notions of masculinity as promulgated by the crab patriarchy?
We are not crabs or rams. Saad has cherry-picked a few examples of species with the ideal behavior he’d like to see humans exhibit, which curiously enough, are all about sexual aggression, males beating up on each other to win access to mates. Not only is this the naturalistic fallacy, not only is this selective use of the data, but it also reveals that he doesn’t know what toxic masculinity is. You need to look at animals with more behavioral plasticity and a greater range of potential roles to see toxic masculinity, where among a range of possibilities, males are confined to a narrower and often uncomfortable role by cultural pressures. Rams and crabs do not have that flexibility.
Oh, but let’s watch Saad show off his evolutionary psychology bullshit.
Let’s now apply the exact same evolutionary process (sexual selection) to humans. Evolutionary psychologists have documented universal patterns of mating preferences that are invariant across time and place. In no culture ever studied have women repeatedly preferred to mate with pear-shaped, low-status, tepid men possessing high-pitched, nasal voices. In no documented culture do women’s sexual fantasies revolve around granting sexual access to unemployed, unambitious men who occupy the lowest stratum of the social hierarchy.
First, yes, let’s look at human evolution. The lesson ought to be that humans have not evolved by a strategy of beating up your competition, mating, and wandering away, like a ram or a crab. Relationships between males and females have been far more complex, involving prolonged association, integration with larger social groups, and shared responsibilities in food gathering and child rearing. The “exact same evolutionary process (sexual selection)”? Nonsense.
As for his ideal preferences by women, I will note that both Saad and I share similar physiques, lack a booming baritone, and are in professions that aren’t regarded as particularly manly, and in fact are being ‘taken over’ by women, numerically. Yet we’re both married! And, I assume, we’re both married to women who are happy with their choices! How did that happen?
He also sneers at unemployed, unambitious men who occupy the lowest stratum of the social hierarchy
, and yet, unemployed men somehow acquire willing partners. They can even be good partners. I have to think of my own parents, who were loving and dedicated to their family, who were also part of the lower classes that Saad would probably spit upon, and had qualities that Saad has elided — my father was a caring parent, hard-working, a good storyteller, loyal to his friends, sociable, and thoughtful. My parents married for love, against the wishes of her parents, yet most of my childhood was spent watching him bounce from job to job, struggling to get a reliable income, not because he was lazy and unambitious, but because good jobs were hard to find and fleeting when you got one in Seattle in the 1960s-1970s.
Saad relies on stereotyping of lowest stratum
men, deciding that they’re ugly and undesirable, and that no woman would desire them, despite the obvious evidence that they do. That’s toxic masculinity! It’s the judgment that there is an ideal man based on a narrow, biased set of criteria, and then heaping contempt on the men who don’t match it in every particular.
Then he uses this bias to stereotype women.
Instead, women are attracted to “toxic masculine” male phenotypes that correlate with testosterone, and they are desirous of men who are socially dominant, who are strategically risk-taking in their behaviors, and who exhibit patterns of behaviors that will allow them to ascend the social hierarchy and defend their positions from encroachers.
Jesus. How did I ever end up with an attractive, intelligent wife? I’ve never had to battle encroachers, ever. Maybe it’s because Saad’s entire argument rests on denying the richness and complexity of human interactions.
Of course this does not imply that women are not attracted to intelligent, sensitive, kind, warm, and compassionate men. The ideal man is rugged and sensitive; masculine and caring; aggressive in some pursuits and gentle in others. Think of the male archetype in romance novels, which is a literary form almost exclusively read by women. He is a tall prince and a neurosurgeon. He is a risk-taker who wrestles alligators and subdues them on his six-pack abs, and yet is sensitive enough to be tamed by the love of a good woman. This archetype is universally found in romance novels read by women in Egypt, Japan, and Bolivia, precisely because it caters to women’s universal evolved sexual fantasies.
Uh, “six-pack abs” are a culturally constructed archetype. They require very low body fat and a rigorous pattern of focused body building to create, and wouldn’t have been at all common in evolving human populations. Likewise, alligator wrestling would have been a lethal hobby that would have led to grossly reduced fitness. Romance novels are also an artificial phenomenon, and probably represent a kind of super-stimulus, just like the bad sex portrayed in the porn consumed by men. They are a poor guide to the kind of deeper decision-making made by human beings in choosing life-long partners.
When engaging in sexual role-playing in the bedroom, few women ask that their male partners wear their Google C++ programmer uniform. They ask for the fireman suit to make its presence. James Bond, the epitome of “toxic masculinity,” does not cry at Taylor Swift concerts. His archetype is desired by women and envied by men.
Wait…a “fireman suit”? Like this? Once again, Saad seems to confuse reality with fantasy. Most women are going to have a more realistic attitude towards prospective partners.
I do agree that James Bond is an epitome of “toxic masculinity”, and he makes my case for me. If you desire to be like Bond, you are going to be an aspiring asshole. This is not a good thing. I shouldn’t have to say that, but really, not a good thing. I’ve also noticed that James Bond movies are not particularly popular among women — they tend to notice that all of his partners end up murdered or abandoned. And how do you know he doesn’t cry at Taylor Swift concerts? It seems to me that women would favor men with shared passions, and this claim that a truly desirable man would not be brought to tears by music is yet another example of toxic masculinity.
The inimitable equity feminist Christina Hoff Sommers wrote a book back in 2001 titled The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (see our chat on my show THE SAAD TRUTH_144 (link is external)). How prescient she was! There has been a relentless ideological attack on masculinity, stemming from radical feminism, the most recent example of which is the bogus term “toxic masculinity.” It literally seeks to pathologize masculinity in ways that are profoundly harmful to the existential sense of self of young men.
But this whole essay is about pathologizing masculinity! Men are supposed to have six-pack abs, be rich, and live like James Bond — if you were seriously concerned about the existential sense of self of young men
, you wouldn’t be promoting these ridiculous and harmful delusions about how men should be. You wouldn’t be setting up rams butting heads as an evolutionary ideal for human beings. There has not been on ideological attack on masculinity by anyone other than the anti-feminists, who set up this unrealistic cartoon of how men are supposed to be that denies the reality of human potential — that thinks that men should be more like James Bond than Mr Rogers. (By the way, if we were setting up an artificial ideal that said all men have to be like Mr Rogers, that would be a different kind of toxic masculinity, perhaps more benign, but also denying the range of human lives.)
Saad really needs to step back and look at what feminists actually say about toxic masculinity.
When men seek that control — when we feel it’s our due — and don’t achieve it, we can resent and hate. Toxic masculinity sets expectations that prime us for disappointment. We turn that disappointment on ourselves and others as anger and hatred.
— James Hamblin
That’s toxic masculinity. And Gad Saad’s article is the pear-shaped embodiment of defining unrealistic expectations for men.
Rather than that phony, Christina Hoff Sommers, perhaps Saad ought to be reading a real inimitable feminist.
All men support and perpetuate sexism and sexist oppression in one form or another … Like women, men have been socialized to passively accept sexist ideology. While they need not blame themselves for accepting sexism, they must assume responsibility for eliminating it.
— bell hooks
Among the many reasons that I detest evolutionary psychology, one has a name: Satoshi Kanazawa. He has a blog on Psychology Today called The Scientific Fundamentalist, and earlier he published this charming article: Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?. Don’t bother trying to follow the link, the article has mysteriously disappeared from the site…although you can still find a copy here, if you really must.
I’m a little surprised that it’s gone. After all, Psychology Today had no problem with his loving look at American politics in which he wanted Ann Coulter for president, because she would have nuked the Middle East on 12 September 2001. That’s just the kind of guy he is.
In order to make his determination that black women are ugly, he draws on The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) which I now learn to my surprise has a subjective component in which the people doing the survey make judgments about the subjects’ appearance.
Add Health measures the physical attractiveness of its respondents both objectively and subjectively. At the end of each interview, the interviewer rates the physical attractiveness of the respondent objectively on the following five-point scale: 1 = very unattractive, 2 = unattractive, 3 = about average, 4 = attractive, 5 = very attractive. The physical attractiveness of each Add Health respondent is measured three times by three different interviewers over seven years.
Good grief…shades of Francis Galton! For those of you who don’t know, creepy old man Galton ogled women and judged them for looks.
I may here speak of some attempts by myself, to obtain materials for a “Beauty Map” of the British Isles. Whenever I have occasion to classify the persons I meet into three classes, “good, medium, bad,” I use a needle mounted as a pricker, wherewith to prick holes, unseen, in a piece of paper, torn rudely into a cross with a long leg. I use its upper end for “good”, the cross arm for “medium,” the lower end for “bad.” The prick-holes keep distinct, and are easily read off at leisure. The object, place, and date are written on the paper. I used this plan for my beauty data, classifying the girls I passed in streets or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent. Of course this was a purely individual estimate, but it was consistent, judging from the conformity of different attempts in the same population. I found London to rank highest for beauty: Aberdeen lowest.
Because, as we all know, beauty is easily measured in a linear scale with no possibility of subjective bias (I say sarcastically). I’m quite pleased that no one in my family is a participant in Add Health, because I’d have to kick them out of my house when they came around. Same with Galton. Fortunately, his leering pseudo-statistical brain is now dust and slime.
Kanazawa is the kind of guy who looks at such shaky subjective evaluations, and without even considering the biases of these self-appointed judges, declares that
It is very interesting to note that, even though black women are objectively less physically attractive than other women, black women (and men) subjectively consider themselves to be far more physically attractive than others.
Wait a moment there…where in this study is the objective evaluation of attractiveness? Because Kanazawa can stack up a bunch of scores and make graphs does not mean that they have suddenly acquired the property of objectivity.
Can Kanazawa make his interpretations even worse? Yes, he can. He has a real talent for this. He generously concedes that, although black women are fat and blacks are less intelligent, their shortcomings in those areas, which are associated with the perception of beauty, are inadequate to explain why black women are so ugly, especially since black men are judged attractive, and lord knows, they have inferior IQs. But then, no loss: he also thinks Africans are too dumb to live.
It seems to have been purged from Psychology Today, but I suspect this article will soon find a happy home on the pages of Stormfront and other such aryan racist tripe.
And then there’s this idiocy:
There are many biological and genetic differences between the races. However, such race differences usually exist in equal measure for both men and women. For example, because they have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races. And the mutation loads significantly decrease physical attractiveness (because physical attractiveness is a measure of genetic and developmental health). But since both black women and black men have higher mutation loads, it cannot explain why only black women are less physically attractive, while black men are, if anything, more attractive.
That makes no sense. My ancestors, your ancestors, and Kanazawa’s ancestors were all African — we share mutations with all Africans from before the time our European and Asian ancestors left Africa, and those ancestors then accumulated new mutations at the same rate as the populations left behind in the ancestral homeland. We European/Asian folk inherited a subset of the totality of human genetic variation, but there’s nothing that implies Africans are or have been mutating faster than anyone else.
I know that not all evolutionary psychologists are this bad; more of them need to stand up and repudiate this bigoted clown and his ridiculous interpretations of sloppy data.
I have some thoughts on the topic of male and female dominance brought up by Blue_Expo.
In fact, it was the topic of a paper for my Evolution of Human Aggression class…
Females are under some different sexual selection pressures than males stemming from the fact that they are the limited sex. They can only produce a finite number of offspring and are heavily invested in their progeny. Perhaps this is the basis for the female dominance social hierarchies observed in bonobos (Parish et al., 1994) and hyenas (Jenks, 1995). In both these systems, offspring inherit their mother’s rank and a mother is willing to engage in physical combat or establish social coalitions designed to elevate their offspring in rank. Because rank determined ability to procure resources, survive and reproduce, and females had high parental investment, there was sufficient evolutionary pressure for females to evolve the capacity to establish dominance even over males on their offsprings’ behalf.
Fresh off that paper about how the liberals are destroying “merit” and science, Jerry Coyne fearlessly rides his hobby horse onto the pages of the Skeptical Inquirer, where he complains about a a grave threat
to biology. That threat? Ideology and dogma are strangling research and scientific communication. Scientists are too cowed
to speak their minds. Well, except for Jerry A. Coyne and his coauthor, Luana S. Maroja, who are willing to confront the dogma of the Progressive Left.
It’s somewhat peculiar to read the complaints about a dogmatic stranglehold from these people. Coyne is a well-known, established, and successful scientist — he is a graduate of Harvard, and is now an emeritus professor of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, one of the most prestigious institutions of evolution research in the country. Maroja is a full Professor of Biology, and Chair of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Program at Williams College. I don’t see how they can complain that their careers have been “strangled” by the Left.
Coyne and Maroja are the establishment.* Their careers are built on convincingly supporting the dogmas of biology (which is not necessarily a bad thing at all.) They have immense amounts of academic power and influence, and have far more potential to be the strangler, rather than the strangled. Yet somehow they have the idea that science is being politically purged by progressive social justice, which they claim doesn’t care about truth.
That’s a remarkable claim, fundamentally paranoid and conspiratorial, and I’m going to have to see strong evidence to support it. Coyne and Maroja write that they have six specific examples from just their field of evolutionary biology — examples of leftists distorting biology and altering education and devaluing “merit.”
Let’s see it. They’re going to give us six examples of “misstatements spread by ideologues” that they believe are impeding science.
1. Sex in humans is not a discrete and binary distribution of males and females but a spectrum.
Coyne & Maroja claim this is false because there are only two kinds of functional gametes, sperm and eggs, and therefore there can be only two sexes. The claims of gender ideologues can be trivially dismissed because they can’t trot out a third kind of gamete, or can’t name all the other sexes. Furthermore, people aren’t assigned sex at birth, so it is not a sexual construct, but rather, sex is an observation of biological reality.
The Coyne & Maroja argument is nonsense at every level. First, we humans are not our gametes — we are complex multicellular organisms. To argue that gametes are definitive is a gross oversimplification that ignores physiology, behavior, psychology, and culture, all of which are affected by sex. This is an example of extreme reductionism.
It’s also an argument designed to misrepresent and distort the positions of their critics. No one is arguing that there are other kinds of gametes; trans men and women are not claiming to have transformed their gametes to some other form, and the ones I’ve talked with are acutely aware that their gonads do not metamorphose. Trans men may still be capable of pregnancy, trans women will not ovulate, and they do not pretend otherwise. This is the kind of argument that shows that the ones proposing it are totally unaware of the nature of trans culture, they are arguing against a proposition that no one is making.
As for the claim that the definition of sex at birth is simply a biological observation…well, that wrecks their premise, because the sex of a baby is not a question of what kind of gametes they are producing. It’s a superficial examination of morphology. You can have a penis or vagina without any correlated gamete production!
Here’s what I, a biology professor and progressive Leftist, teach in my classes.
Biological sex is the product of a complex cascade of molecular and cellular activity in embryonic development that continues for decades — for the entirety of an individual’s life, in fact — and there are multiple opportunities for variation. These variations can accumulate to produce a continuum of outcomes, so that the broad categories of men and women encompass a vast diversity of human forms and ideas and behaviors.
I would say that claiming that humans are trivially reducible to two simplistic categories is the greater distortion of biological facts and diminishes the evolutionary consequences of the differences within a sexual category.
Do Coyne & Maroja do a better job of explaining and dismissing the second misconception of those progressive leftists? No, they do not.
2. All behavioral and psychological differences between human males and females are due to socialization.
While you might be able to find a few fringe individuals who espouse that view, it’s not at all representative of what academic biologists — or even the majority of informed laypersons — think. This is a common pattern in the Coyne & Maroja review, though, misrepresenting the perspective of the people they critique by inventing a straw man argument. They go on to cite Pinker’s book, The Blank Slate, as if it were a fact-based source of data rather than a subjective and dishonest mess of prejudicial assertions. The biologists I know would laugh at this notion that people are blank slates.
Rather than citing an unqualified non-biologist to tell us what biologists think, I’d recommend instead Lewontin’s The Triple Helix, which is far more representative. Lewontin explains that the evolution of individuals is explained by the interplay of genes, organisms, and the environment. Note that genes are part of the equation, a significant part, but that you can’t explain genetics except in the context of their environment.
It’s a little surprising that they ignore this common view, since Lewontin was Coyne’s mentor at Harvard.
So what would this deranged Leftist teach in his biology classes?
There are clear average differences between men and women, but the attempt to tease them apart into purely biological and purely cultural differences is a futile exercise, often ideologically motivated. Biology and culture are inseparable, and what makes you you is a complex pattern of interaction between the two.
3. Evolutionary psychology, the study of the evolutionary roots of human behavior, is a bogus field based on false assumptions.
Great. On this one, he cites me directly as the purveyor of this supposedly misguided claim. I wrote, “The fundamental premises of evo psych [evolutionary psychology] are false,” which is accurate, I did say that. I also said a lot more, explaining what those faulty premises are…but Coyne & Maroja omit that, for some unexplainable reason. Instead, they come up with an anodyne definition of evolutionary psychology: our brains and how they work–which yield our behaviors, preferences, and thoughts–sometimes reflect natural selection that acted on our ancestors.
One problem here is that I agree with that sentence, so once again, they have invented dissent where none exists and have hidden away the problem with evolutionary psychology. The idea that genes and evolution have shaped our behavior is accepted and not at all problematic, but Coyne & Maroja assert that opponents of evolutionary psychology deny the role of evolution on behavior.
Bluntly, that is an outright lie.
They think they can get away with it because they’ve obscured what premises of evolutionary psychology I consider false. It’s a quote mine.
Where I consider evolutionary psychologists to fail is in methodology and poor theory — they take the unjustified shortcut of assuming any modern behavior is the product of genetic traits that were locked in place in the Pleistocene, and are always the product of selection, and that therefore any hypothetical selective scenario they invent is valid and worth publishing as science. They seem to be entirely oblivious to alternative modes of evolution, treating natural selection as the only significant force, ignoring the facts of drift and migration. They are masters of the just-so story, building hypotheticals about ancient human ways of life and ‘testing’ them with surveys of middle-class students enrolled in Psych 101 courses.
I do not deny that human biology and behavior are the product of evolution, but rather that evolution is more complex than evolutionary psychologists imagine it to be, and that the tools of psychology are sadly inadequate to address the problem.
What I teach in the classroom:
Every species is the product of a long history of evolutionary forces, and those forces involve more than just a cartoonish idea of endlessly optimizing selection. You’ve learned about nearly-neutral theory, about lineage analysis, about the mathematics of comparing traits (they would have gotten all that in even my introductory classes), and that accurately determining the evolutionary trajectory of a population requires detailed measurement and observation and rigorous mathematical analysis. Please do apply what you’ve learned to behavior and psychology, but do it better than the evolutionary psychologists have.
4. We should avoid studying genetic differences in behavior between individuals.
Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. In this section, Coyne & Maroja plunge into the world of the genetic basis of IQ scores and educational attainment and are saying that we should study genetic differences in the minds of people. The problem with that, and the reason we should discourage that kind of research, is that it inevitably leads to garbage science. Weak correlations will get used to prop up all kinds of biases. That’s why this topic is so popular among right-wing zealots and racists. They say,
This kind of study (genome-wide association studies, or GWAS) has, for example, turned up nearly 4,000 areas of the genome associated with educational attainment. Fascinatingly, many of these genes are active mainly in the brain. Using GWAS studies, it’s now possible to make fairly accurate predictions about a person’s appearance, behavior, academic achievement, and health simply by analyzing the DNA of an individual and calculating their individual “polygenic scores” based on large samples of their population.
No, you can’t do that.
GWAS are basically fishing expeditions — you search for correlations between genetic markers and social or behavioral phenomena. It might be useful when coupled to specific, prior hypotheses, but much of it is grinding through thousands of statistical correlations and grabbing any that rise above a chosen chance criterion. It can be hopelessly noisy. Look at the result of GWAS of “educational attainment” (already, a uselessly broad category): 4000 “areas” (not genes, just broad chunks of chromosomes) are somehow associated with learning, and we can at best say that many are active in the brain. Almost everything is active in the brain! Almost everything is active in the pancreas! Sorting out what is relevant is the problem, and we’re nowhere near achieving that.
There is such a volume of potential correlations that it may well be that most of what GWAS are picking up are accidental correlations by lineage — that is, the parameter is common among certain groups of people not because it plays a role in, for instance, intelligence, but because the people showing that trait are related. The danger is that, for example, you might think you’ve found a gene associated with the success of a certain group, but it’s only a coincidence and is actually irrelevant. Then that chance coincidence gets picked up as evidence of superiority of the tested group, and you’re off to the eugenics races.
It’s simply silly to suggest that we could feed a genome sequence into a computer, and it will then compute the organism. That’s genetic determinism, and it doesn’t work. Twins have strong physical similarities, but do twin pairs all share the same personality? I come from a blue collar family, generations of farmers and laborers, all good people but not really interested in things like college…I have to suspect that if universities had used a DNA sample as an admissions test, I’d be out picking fruit and plucking chickens in Yakima.
Coyne & Maroja are actually almost right in what I’d teach my classes.
We should avoid studying genetic differences in behavior between individuals, unless we have clear causal and functional information and specific hypotheses about the genes we are studying. Vague, sloppy generalizations will be abused!
5. Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.
Oh god, make it stop. Coyne & Maroja take a bold step in favor of race realism.
To be fair, they take a waffly stance, being ambiguous about how we ought to talk about ethnicities instead, about how many races/ethnicities there are, and how we can use race information to fine-tune medical treatments or even how we can solve crimes by reconstructing perpetrators from their genetic information (see previous section; no, you can’t). He uses these excuses to defend…Bo Winegard?
Indeed, even writing about this subject has led to sanctions on many scientists, who have “found themselves denounced, defamed, protested, petitioned, punched, kicked, stalked, spat on, censored, fired from their jobs and stripped of their honorary titles.” A well-known example is Bo Winegard, an untenured professor in Ohio who was apparently fired for merely suggesting the possibility that there were differences in cognition among ethnic groups. This is why most biologists stay far away from this topic.
“merely suggesting the possibility” is a curiously tepid way to describe a guy who openly describes himself as an “ethno-traditionalist”, “cultural nationalist”, and “racial realist” and who calls Arthur Jensen his “intellectual hero.” He’s a loud and proud racist who thinks white people are superior!
Here’s how I handle this in my classes:
Don’t be a fucking racist goober.
More seriously, in the last two weeks of my genetics course I gave the students a dozen peer-reviewed papers on how geneticists were addressing the issue of race, put them in groups, and had them give presentations on the papers they chose to discuss. Get into the literature, and you’ll discover most modern geneticists have little patience with so-called “scientific racism,” any more than they are interested in discussing “scientific creationism.” There are exceptions, obviously. Usually they’re posting on Quillette or other race-realist forums. Or publishing in Skeptical Inquirer or the Journal of Controversial Ideas.
6. Indigenous “ways of knowing” are equivalent to modern science and should be respected and taught as such.
On Coyne’s blog, he seems to be moderatly obsessed with New Zealand indigenous culture, thinking it compromises science, somehow. Maori culture is a complex mix of ideas.
Matauranga Māori, the indigenous way of knowing in New Zealand, is a mélange of empirical knowledge derived from trial and error (including the navigational ability of their Polynesian ancestors and Māori ways of procuring and growing food) but also includes nonscientific areas such as theology, traditional lore, ideology, morality, and legend.
That sounds like a liberal arts curriculum to me. Teach the history, the cultural practices, the religion and mythology…just as we do in Western societies. You can’t, for instance, teach the history of science without discussing Catholic theology and its contributions; you also can’t avoid discussing the oppressive aspects of a culture without also talking about art and beauty. I don’t see the problem, although I’m not familiar with the Maori.
I do teach at a non-tribal American Indian serving institution, though, and I think their concerns are overblown. The Lakota have a myth that their people emerged from a cave — they can even point to a cave in South Dakota called Maka Oniye as their origin. We teach this in our Indian Studies classes, since it is a lovely story and tells us about how the Lakota think of themselves (it also includes a spider god, Iktomi, which I find quite nice). But we don’t teach it in our biology classes. There are no angry Lakota citizens shaking their fists at us and demanding that we incorporate it into our curriculum. Perhaps Coyne is thinking that these indigenous peoples have the same fanatical certainty that Southern Baptists do. They don’t. They would just appreciate it if you showed a little respect for the people who were displaced by Western colonialism.
The only experience I’ve had with our Indian students that comes even close is that, several years ago, some visitors commented on the fact that we had a display of mounted owls at the entrance to our atrium, which was mildly offensive to Native Americans who regarded owls as symbols of death. So we moved them. It’s not hard to respect people’s beliefs, and it does no harm to the science.
No one teaches that cultural preferences are equivalent to what we teach in physics, chemistry, and biology.
Coyne & Maroja are also indignant about the idea of repatriation — that Native Americans are demanding the return of bones from museum collections. They don’t seem to appreciate that these remains were stolen, looted from grave sites, or even taken directly from murdered or executed Indians. I guess it’s true that we progressive lefties consider consent important, and that it even trumps Science.
I would just ask how they would feel about the Jewish skull collection that was to be displayed at the Reich University of Strasbourg after WWII (fortunately, a plan that was aborted by the Reich’s defeat). The bones were returned to their families, where possible, and re-interred. The situation is directly analogous to what Native Americans experienced, except that imperialist forces haven’t yet been defeated. Why is one case an example of basic human decency, while a horrible anti-scientific crime in the other?
How would I teach this? I don’t. I suspect Coyne & Maroja don’t, either, and that neither have had to accommodate Maori traditions, so it’s a silly thing for us to be concerned about. If I did teach something in the appropriate field, I would probably steal the words of Jennifer Raff, who studies paleogenomics.
Actually, repatriation laws have really enabled a lot of the work I and some of my colleagues do. A lot of my work in North America is on ancestral remains that have been returned to tribes. As part of that process, some tribal representatives have come to me and said, “We are interested in studying the DNA before we rebury our ancestors.” A lot of these remains have been languishing in storerooms, and as part of NAGPRA they’ve been cataloged and looked at and new things have emerged as a result. Human remains from Shuká Káa [formerly On Your Knees] Cave in Alaska, for example, were excavated with the cooperation of local tribes and showed people living in the area today are related to an individual who died 10,300 years ago.
It’s not anti-science to take the beliefs of the people you work with into account. It’s the racism and colonialism and sexism and pseudoscience that are anti-science. Raff is pointing out that respecting the people of the cultures she studies literally benefits the science.
I’ll have to stop here — this is already over twice the length of the response Skeptical Inquirer was going to allow me, so I don’t think there’s any point in trying to submit it to them. I do have to say a bit about Coyne & Maroja’s conclusion, because that’s where they let all the fascist paranoia hang out.
Progressive ideology is growing stronger and intruding further into all areas of science. And because it’s “progressive,” and because most scientists are liberals, few of us dare oppose these restrictions on our freedom.
What restrictions on our freedom? I can say what I think, Coyne & Maroja can say what we think, and the only cost is that we each think the other is an asshole. I can live with that. So can the Emeritus Professor and the Chair of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. Of course, Coyne is only going to be able to publish this nonsense in not-very-distinguished journals. That’s fair, though, since his work clearly lacks merit.
And mainly what he’s going to do is complain about a nonexistent existential threat to all of science because it is infested with those dang liberals.
Unless there is a change in the Zeitgeist, and unless scientists finally find the courage to speak up against the toxic effects of ideology on their field, in a few decades science will be very different from what it is now. Indeed, it’s doubtful that we’d recognize it as science at all.
OK, now I’m inspired! I will continue to speak up against the toxic effects of conservative ideology on my field. You know, the ideology that would deny the existence of trans individuals; that advocates for genetic determinism; that thinks a sloppy science like evolutionary psychology that defies standard theory and practice is worthwhile; that promotes outmoded and dangerous ideas about IQ and the genetic basis of all behavior; that wants to return to an early 20th century version of race pseudoscience; and that thinks indigenous people who express their cultural beliefs ought to be silenced. Fine. I’ll declare that the Coyne & Maroja vision of science is broken and ultimately damaging. They represent old dogmas and tired ideas.
I do hope science is someday very different from the bad science that racists and sexists want to promote, and that the big change is that women and gay and trans people can work in science without old cranky scientists claiming that their existence does irreparable harm to the field.
Also, someday I hope staid old conservative skeptic organizations learn to recognize a moral panic when they see one and refuse to fuel it with more hysterical paranoia of the sort we see in the Coyne & Maroja article.
*By the way, so am I — I’m an old white heterosexual cis man. Isn’t it interesting how two people who belong to the same privileged demographic can have such radically different views?
Flash this image to see how fast a ‘free speech warrior’ will block you.
One accidental occurrence is meaningless and forgivable, but when you keep hanging out with the same group of racists for over 20 years, and when you are repeatedly informed that these are bad guys, the correlation becomes rather more substantial. All you have to do is look at Steven Pinker’s history of academic friendships to see that maybe there’s a problem here.
- 1999 — Pinker joins the human biodiversity (h-bd) group begun by Steve Sailer, now the editor of VDARE, along with race science researchers like Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, race science funders like Ron Unz (of the Unz report), J.P. Rushton of the infamous, explicitly eugenic Pioneer Fund, and J. Michael Bailey, who used pseudoscience to stoke transphobia and hate.
- 2004 — As editor of Best American Science Writing, Pinker publishes Steve Sailer’s essay citing inbreeding in Iraq as a rationale for an inevitable failed state, as well as fellow h-bd members Virginia Postrel and Daniel C. Dennett. Also included is writing by Max Tegmark, the MIT professor who recently attempted to fund a neo-nazi media group as part of the Future of Life institute, and two columns by Nicholas Wade of the New York Times, who later wrote a ‘deeply flawed, deceptive’ book on race science and was condemned by 140 population geneticists for misappropriating their work.
- 2005 — Pinker writes a letter “to protest the shocking and disgraceful treatment of professor Helmuth Nyborg”, a fellow h-bd member who speaks at the same conferences as David Duke and researches sex and race differences in IQ. In June of 2006 Nyborg was found to be “grossly negligent”, misrepresenting his own scientific efforts and results. Nyborg is subsequently relieved of duty from Aarhus University as part of a 3 year investigation. In 2009, Pinker sends a second letter in defense of Nyborg without changing a word, addressing it this time to the new president of the university. Many fellow h-bd members join him, including Rosalind Arden, Harpending, and Rushton, as does Linda Gottfredson.
- 2006 — Pinker writes a lengthy article on the the IQ of Ashekenazi Jews by fellow hb-d members Harpending and Cochran (debunked and later proven utterly unfounded by better science and scientists) in which he blithely asserts that “Like intelligence, personality traits are measurable, heritable within a group, and slightly different, on average, between groups.” In 2019, Pinker defends Bret Stephens’ use of the discredited paper, while Stephens goes on say that he regrets not obscuring the source of the data, noting that “I could have cited from any number of other sources not tainted by Harpending’s odious racial views.”
- 2007 — Pinker provides counsel to Alan Dershowitz, with whom he taught a class on Morality and Taboo as described by the Edge.org (full syllabus here), on the interpretation of the interstate commerce law used to prosecute Jeffrey Epstein. The late Epstein was, of course, a prominent funder of the Edge.org, the elite group of scientists and thinkers which included Wilson, Dawkins, Dennett, Cochran, and Pinker (as well as Gould and many others). Pinker is a bit sensitive about this connection.
- 2012 — Pinker helps fellow hb-d member and holocaust denier Ron Unz tailor a critique of self-described “scientific racist” Richard Lynn’s work on IQ, emphasizing his openness to it as a legitimate area of inquiry. (arguments about who is the real racist get ever more surreal in these circles).
- 2013 — Pinker, an advocate for the biological inevitability of war, coordinated with Wilson, Dawkins, and Dennett to urge that book reviewer John Horgan either denounce a book critiquing an ethnographer (Chagnon) and his writing on his subject (the Yanomami of the Amazon) or recuse himself entirely, warning that a positive review might ruin his career. Horgan, in conversation with Chagnon for more than a decade at that point, does not cave to the pressure, later saying “I’m only sorry that my review did not point out the irony that Chagnon — unlike some of his hard-core Darwinian champions and like many of his critics — rejects the view of war as an instinct.”
- 2018 — Pinker shares a Quillette article by fellow hb-d member Rosalind Arden on the disinvitation of fellow Nyborg supporter, Linda Gottfredson, from a conference. In his note, he tuts at the SPLC for labeling her an ‘extremist’ simply because she has spent nearly half a century insisting that racial disparities in IQ are innate, immutable, and ensure unequal outcomes between racial groups. Perhaps he feels this too is a reasonable hypothesis — or perhaps he feels the conference would benefit from the work of Arden and Gottfredson correlating intelligence and semen quality. (Arden discloses their professional relationship if not the subject of their work in her article, saying of intelligence research “How often do we take the time to walk empathetically in the cognitive shoes of others? Millions of people struggle to maintain their health, their jobs, and their finances for the blameless reason that they are a little less adept.”)
- 2022 — Upon the posthumous discovery of E.O. Wilson’s approving correspondence with eugenicist (and h-bd member) Rushton, Pinker does not reflect or contemplate the implications of this discovery for either his field or his close collaboration with Wilson. Instead, he promotes an article by Michael Shermer (another one of the New Atheists that took a hard right) and remembers the battles Wilson, like Pinker, fought in the NYRB on behalf of biological determinism.
I’m also grateful that the article reminded me of the argument between Pinker and Stephen Jay Gould on evolutionary psychology. Gould was brilliant. Man, I miss that guy.
I know it’s not as impressive as the mammoth, but it gives AMAB people an edge in rugby, therefore trans athletes should be banned. So saith Sean Ingle, chief sportswriter for the increasingly transphobic Guardian.
As he repeated many lies about trans women in sport, whether through ignorance or malice, Ingle said,
And going back to the start with the science is to have a separate, exclusive, preserved category for natal females with trans women and trans men then going into an open, universal category. And those that support this approach point to the recent science that suggests that even when testosterone is reduced, strength in transgender women only goes down 5%.
Most of that advantage for male puberty is retained. They also point out, and I hear this a lot, that women are not men with lower testosterone. They point out there are thousands of physical differences between males and females, and they aren’t always obvious.
Females tend to have better peripheral vision than males. Males, in contrast, are quite as fast[sic?] at accurately detecting the trajectory of a moving object. That is, how fast it’s moving, in which direction it’s moving, and where it’s going to be 1 second from now.
That’s helpful when you’re trying to chuck a spear at a rabbit. If you’re going back to evolutionary biology times, it’s also helpful when you’re trying to intercept a rugby ball. My general view here is that The Guardian should be at the heart of all this and that we should write about the subject fearlessly.
Ah, even sportswriters have absorbed the biases of evolutionary psychology. Now men, not women, have evolved to be better at throwing spears.
These glib comparisons always make me wonder what was being compared in these studies. All women tend to have better peripheral vision than men? What if you compared men, in general, to women tennis players? Is it still true? Isn’t it quite likely that peripheral vision, and the ability to calculate trajectories, are plastic and responsive to practice?
Also, how large is the variation within men, and within women? Aren’t we really dealing with selected subsets of populations, making blanket claims about the aggregate abilities of diverse populations rather problematic?
The whole premise is flawed. It assumes that men of the paleolithic were specifically and exclusively selected for spear chucking, that women of that time had no use for that talent, and that some epigenetic factor inhibits the genetic spear-chucking complex in women. No evidence for any of that. Then we have to assume that there was no further selection for or against that complex for 100,000 years — men retained a fairly specific ability through many generations of life farming. Then we assume further that whatever epigenetic modifiers allow for enhanced spearchucking in men, they don’t include things like testosterone that might be blocked by inhibitors — these hypothetical male advantages sail through everything that affects trans women unaffected.
But sure, if you’re an evolutionary psychologist sportswriter, you can just propose that whole chain of improbabilities as a given and call it “science” or “biology,” all in the name of transphobia. I call it magical thinking.
Do you enjoy unsupported premises and unwarranted conclusions? Then you’ll love this article about how serial killers are the product of evolutionary forces.
(Warning: evil cat tried to disrupt this recording and makes a few random appearances.)
Transcript down below.
This weekend, Peter Thiel and various right-wing think tanks backed something called the Academic Freedom Conference. You can guess what this was all about.
Academic freedom, open inquiry, and freedom of speech are under threat as they have not been for decades. Visibly, academics are “canceled,” fired, or subject to lengthy disciplinary proceedings in response to academic writing or public engagement. Less visibly, funding agencies, university bureaucracies, hiring procedures, promotion committees, professional organizations, and journals censor some kinds of research or demand adherence to political causes. Many parts of universities have become politicized or have turned into ideological monocultures, excluding people, ideas, or kinds of work that challenge their orthodoxy. Younger researchers are afraid to speak and write and don’t investigate promising ideas that they fear will endanger their careers.
The two-day Academic Freedom Conference, arranged by the organizing committee, aims to identify ways to restore academic freedom, open inquiry, and freedom of speech and expression on campus and in the larger culture and restore the open debate required for new knowledge to flourish. The conference will focus on the organizational structures leading to censorship and stifling debate and how to repair them.
All you have to do is look at the list of speakers and see that it’s a conference of far-right kooks and their enablers. Oh, look: there’s Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, Gad Saad, Niall Ferguson, Bjorn Lomborg, Jay Bhattacharya, John Ioannidis, and a horde of disgraced academics, bigots, Quillette authors, misogynists, vaccine deniers, and cranks. Several of the people there have publicly professed their support for good science (usually to defend garbage science), but then the keynote by Peter Thiel is an embarrassing anti-science rant. Also mostly rambling and incoherent.
So you you have the string theory people telling us how wonderful string theory people are and how everybody else just has bad math genes and can’t talk about it. We have the uh the cancer researchers promising us they will cure cancer in five years which they’ve been doing for the last 50. We have um and on and on in all these sort of hyper hyper specialized areas and um and then the question is, you know how much how much progress is actually happening?
The um, these sort of indirect intuitions I have on where it seems very very slowed, are things like, umm, if you if you if you look at things like um, the the economy, the the standards of living among younger people.
Except that cancer researchers say no such thing — the most common idea I see expressed by cancer researchers is that cancer is a thousand different diseases with hundreds of alternative pathways, and that there will be no magic bullet. All he’s got to go on is “indirect intuitions”. He’s an idiot. Then he makes similarly stupid statements about education.
Um and that’s probably the political intuition we should have about the sciences versus uh versus the humanities. The, the, the, the polemical version of it that I, I had once was that you know I I think um I think that uh it’s better for undergraduates to meh meh to major in the humanities rather than the sciences. Set computer sciences, aside, as the one thing that sort of works, but everything else. Because um in the humanities you at least know you’re not going to get a job, you’ll be unemployable, whereas in the sciences you have people who are so deluded as to believe that we’ll be taken care of by the natural goodness of the universe. And it’s just it is just a Malthusian competition.
You hear that? The only topic that matters is computer science, because that’s the only one that will land you a job — which isn’t true, and also isn’t the one reason to get education. Scientists don’t have this illusion that the universe has “natural goodness”.
I’m trying to imagine how any of the scientists in the audience could listen to that drivel without rising up and walking out. But don’t worry, there was no drama: the kinds of people who would attend such a conference are pre-selected for being gullible conservative loons. Even more, I can’t imagine anyone accepting an invitation to an even packed so heavily with horrible people like Thiel or Peterson or that roster of denialists and bigots, as summarized in this list or this one. Yet there sat marginally respectable people like Steve Pinker and Jon Haidt and Jerry Coyne, who have often fucked up and are now confirming their deplorable status by enthusiastically attending. Ick.
Coyne predicted ahead of time that he’d be labeled with guilt by association. He’s right.
I predict that the mainstream media and many on social media will deem the entire conference a conclave of bigots, racists, and transphobes because a few people on the schedule have been called those names. Indeed, Steve Pinker himself has been the object of criticism, and has been called a racist; and I (deemed “someone with a solid reputation who speaks his mind and is honest in his arguments”) have also been called a transphobe and a racist. Hardly anybody is immune!
Correct. If you hob-nob with transphobes, racists, and bigots, and you applaud their words, and trumpet how much you agree with the sentiments they express, then surprise! People will draw the reasonable conclusion that you are a fellow traveler. That’s how it works.
By the way, I was briefly mentioned (negatively, I’m proud to say) at the conference. Coyne condemned me for being “ideological” that he neglected to do for all the flamingly ideological speakers at the event.
He has done this multiple times in the past, and never pays any attention to corrections. Every time, he pretends that my beef is with the idea that our brains, as well as our body, show traces of our ancestry over the past 6 million years
. That’s a lie, just an outright lie. It doesn’t matter that I’ve repeatedly said that I’m a hardcore materialist who accepts the idea of humanity evolving entirely by natural mechanisms, he has decided, as a rhetorical strategy, that since he can’t address my actual criticisms, he’s going to misrepresent my position. Every time. It’s pretty damned disgraceful. As I’ve written before:
The brain is a material product of evolution, and behavior is a product of the brain. There are natural causes for everything all the way down. And further, I have great respect for psychology, evolutionary biology, ethology, physiology, anthropology, anatomy, comparative biology — and I consider all of those disciplines to have strong integrative ties to evolutionary biology. Does Coyne really believe that I am critiquing the evolved nature of the human brain? Because otherwise, this is a completely irrelevant statement.
Evolutionary psychology has its own special methodology and logic, and that’s what I criticize — not anthropology or evolutionary biology or whatever. Somehow these unique properties get conveniently jettisoned whenever a critic wanders by, only to be re-adopted without reservation within the exercise of the discipline. And that’s really annoying.
What I object to in evolutionary psychology is that their stock in trade is to make observations of behavior in a single species, often in a single population, and then to infer an evolutionary history from that data point. You don’t get to do that. It’s not that the observations are invalid (they’re often interesting in their own right), or that it’s not possible that human behaviors carry a strong genetic component — it’s that you simply can’t draw an evolutionary conclusion from the simple existence of a trait in a population. Yet evolutionary psychologists do, all the time.
His only approach is to poison the well. So now I’m a blank slater
and a Marxist, neither accusation being true.
It’s again, comes out of the ideology that we’re blank slates. I think that comes from Marxism, where people are seen as infinitely malleable by the social environment. Whereas evolutionary psychology tells us that we’re not blank slates that we’re born with a little bit of writing on those blank slates, that can be changed a bit, but can only be changed within certain limits.
Did you know that there are negligibly few biologists who believe we have no genetic predispositions? This whole blank slate
nonsense is Pinker’s conceit, his default straw man, and it’s transparently bogus. It’s always fun to encounter someone who attacks you by announcing that you hold a ridiculous opinion that you’ve never held and are happy to agree that it’s wrong.
I do wonder how his audience received that claim that it’s blank slaters who think people are infinitely malleable by the social environment when there are a bunch of transphobes there who think that everyone’s sexual identity is so easily corrupted by the social environment, believing in garbage like rapid onset gender dysphoria
. Is gender fluid in some people or not?
He also claims that evolutionary psychology has produced many valuable insights, such as differences in sexual behavior between men and women
. What are those insights? That women are better at spotting pink berries or something? He doesn’t say.
Again, my gripe with EP is methodological: you can’t make “valuable insights” about human evolution with surveys and experiments on modern American undergraduates.
There are interesting questions in the population genetics and evolution of different human groups, and it would be nice if there weren’t wretched ideologues who will happily misinterpret every difference between two groups of people, or even two people, to turn a description of differences into a ranking of superiority. It’s the Jordan Peterson problem of turning everything into evidence of a hierarchy.
Jedidiah Carlson provides some specific examples of how the right wing mangles research. It’s easy to see when the current fad is for murderous mass shooters to provide manifestos with their interpretation of the science; they are happy to name the credentialed scientists who provide fodder for their delusions.
The Buffalo shooter’s scientific bibliography has clear echoes to a similar citation scandal that arose in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During this era, the National Front (NF), a neofascist political party in the UK that had been steadily growing throughout the 1970s, distributed a series of pamphlets with articles referencing mainstream academic research. Their goal was to justify the organization’s platform of ethnic nationalism, white supremacism, and eugenics using contemporary science. The first wave of NF propaganda proclaimed, “scientists say that races are born different in all sorts of ways, especially in intelligence. This is because we inherit our abilities genetically.” Here, the NF cited the work of Hans Eysenck and Arthur Jensen, two of the most vocal proponents of the hereditarian theory that genetics could explain IQ differences between racial groups. Steven Rose, a champion of radical science and coauthor of Not in Our Genes with Richard Lewontin and Leon Kamin, lambasted Eysenck and Jensen in a 1978 letter to the editor of Nature, calling upon them to “publicly and unequivocally dissociate themselves from the National Front and its use of their names in its propaganda.” Eysenck and Jensen both complied with Rose’s request, albeit without a hint of apology for the societal harm their research precipitated. Eysenck asserted that he was “absolutely opposed to any form of racism” and claimed that “No-one familiar with Professor Jensen’s or my own writings could possibly misinterpret our arguments about the mean differences between various racial and other groups with respect to intelligence as implying the kind of policies advocated by the National Front.” Jensen echoed this self-absolving and patently false sentiment but also took the opportunity to lash out against his leftist critics for being, as he believed, as guilty as the far right in their desire “to promote and to gain public acceptance of a particular dogmatic belief about the nature of racial differences.”
That’s fascinating. Jensen actually tried to argue that oh no, he’s not a racist!, while producing some of the most outrageously bad pseudoscience defending racist discrimination. This is an ongoing problem in recognition, because it is common for racists to deny they are racist, while promoting awful garbage that they will never deny. As the Southern Poverty Law Center points out, “Jensen worked hard to develop a reputation as an objective scientist who “just never thought along [racial] lines,” and to portray critics of his racist conclusions as politically motivated and unscientific.” Right. That’s why he has a long entry at the SPLC.
Jensen is way, way out there, and it’s patently obvious that he was a screaming bigot manipulating the data to support an evil conclusion. But there have also been other scientists, less aggressive about their racism, who have been quietly smuggling bad science into the literature. How about kindly old Grandpa EO Wilson, who, after his death, was found to have been supporting all kinds of openly racist ideas? On the one hand, we’re supposed to objectively evaluate scientific ideas, but on the other, we’re supposed to somehow ignore the biased presuppositions that have led to those ideas, which makes no sense. People regarded sociobiology with suspicion when it first came out, because we were supposed to consider only the limited set of facts presented within it, but somehow we should overlook the fact that it quickly acquired a following among the worst kinds of people, the ones who wanted a racist conclusion and could read between the lines and see that sociobiology was a tool to reach that conclusion? Only racists are allowed to see the obvious interpretations, critics are “politically motivated and unscientific”, which provides a useful ratchet to make sure only the racist perspective gets widely disseminated.
So what do we do about subjects like sociobiology or evolutionary psychology, which promote, with the authors’ open consent and approval, bad ideas like genetic reductionism or determinism? I don’t know. I don’t like the idea of censorship, so perhaps a better idea would be if the various channels of scientific communication, the journals and blogs and so forth, were more proactive in rejecting work that is so clearly constructed around fallacious premises? Good luck enforcing that. The gatekeepers seem to have mostly bought into the bad ideas, since they’re typically privileged beneficiaries of the biases.
And then even work in which the authors were not advocating racism (near as I can tell) will be chewed up and twisted by malicious actors to arrive at a malicious conclusion. There’s no avoiding that.
Much of the scientific community’s outrage in the aftermath of Buffalo centered around the shooter’s citation of a paper colloquially known as the “EA3” study (Lee et al., published in 2018 in Nature Genetics). This study, carried out in over 1.1 million individuals of European descent, identified hundreds of genetic variants associated with “educational attainment” (often abbreviated to EA)—i.e., the number of years of school completed, often taken to be an “easy-to-measure” proxy for intelligence. The shooter’s reference to the EA3 study came in the form of a screenshot of a plain-looking document (figure 1) proclaiming, “The latest findings on genetics and intelligence show that biological factors contribute to the gap in intelligence between European and African populations.” Beneath this image, the shooter weighed in with his own interpretation, punctuating his earlier claims that “whites and Blacks are separated by tens of thousands of years of evolution, and our genetic material is obviously very different.”
Many variations of this table can be found throughout the internet, but the earliest version can be traced back to a thread on 4chan (an anonymous and largely unmoderated online forum) timestamped to September 15, 2018, barely six weeks after Lee et al. was published online (on July 31, 2018). The original post that initiated this thread (figure 2) is a perfect example of what sociologist Aaron Panofsky calls “citizen scientific racism”: an individual, having come across the EA3 study, collected the top EA-associated variants from a supplementary table of the paper, annotated these variants with the allele frequencies in European and African populations using publicly available data from the 1000 Genomes Project, and curated a set of EA-associated variants with the greatest differences in population frequency to argue that Europeans are genetically predisposed to higher intelligence.
The responses to this thread rapidly crystallized into a simple propaganda strategy: turn these “findings” into a standalone unit of easily-digestible visual information—or a meme, for lack of a better term—and let it organically spread across other online spaces. Shortly thereafter, another user took these suggestions to task and independently reproduced the original post’s analysis, presenting the results in a table similar to that shown above. Within hours, this image began to circulate in other 4chan threads and mutate into alternate versions, often accompanied by zealous calls for diffusing these memes throughout the internet. “SPREAD THESE IMAGES LIKE WILDFIRE,” encouraged one user. “This is the new IOTBW” said another, referring to the racist slogan, “It’s OK to be white.” The meme was even passed on to a cabal of popular alt-right bloggers and Youtubers who “have several PhDs and can give you a hand…plus they’re fantastic propagandists.” This collective enthusiasm for propagandizing the EA3 study appears to have been wildly successful. Altogether, variations of this meme have been posted over 5,100 times on 4chan and regularly appear on more mainstream social media platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and Quora. Contrary to the scientific community’s prevailing narrative that the shooter was an isolated extremist who happened to stumble upon the study,20 these data demonstrate that the EA3 study has been a significant force in empowering far-right extremists for years, virtually since the day it was first published.
(Note that Carlson article includes many figures that illustrate the point he’s making, but he’s flagged all of them with a “do not replicate” watermark. They often come from places like 4chan, so I agree, let’s not promote these vile sources.)
One step forward that Carlson promotes is the revitalization of activist-scientists. We need to speak up on all fronts, rather than passively sitting by while nonsense gets published in multiple outlets.
Weaponized science continues to threaten far more than the public image of scientific authority. Today, it has morphed and evolved to find new victims and modes of victimization, and exploits whatever platforms and resources are at its disposal to promote its message. Synthesizing the lessons learned from past radical science movements provides us with a path forward: our collective response to weaponized science must be fiercely multimodal and operationally diverse, taking place in the pages of scientific journals, the digital streets of social media, and the physical spaces of our institutions and cities.
He also gives us three challenges.
First, we must further educate ourselves on the ecosystem of weaponized science. Second, we must actively resituate our appetite for scientific progress towards the service and liberation of our communities. Finally, we must channel this knowledge and desire for change towards the development and implementation of creative strategies to disarm weaponized science, inoculate against its normalization, build resilience and solidarity, and spread those ideas like wildfire.
All right, I think I’ve been doing the first. I’m depressingly familiar with the bad science that gets published in all kinds of outlets. I’ve been involved in the second already, too, as one of those people who strongly believes that science should be serving a larger social purpose. The third…I’m not sure about what creative strategies I could implement, beyond just telling all of you what sucks about some of our modern science.
