A once respected biology journal indicts evolutionary biology for ableism

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/12/29/a-once-respected-biology-journal-indicts-evolutionary-biology-for-ableism/

by barry-cotter • 4 years ago

83 73 4 years ago

tgv2• 4 years ago

Sad, 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).

fallingknife2• 4 years ago

Public 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.

walkhour2• 4 years ago

This 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.

svnt6• 4 years ago

Public 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.

bizfuz3• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

This 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.

svnt6• 4 years ago

The paper is authored by grad students.

zozbot2345• 4 years ago

Did 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.

tgv2• 4 years ago

It got published in a peer-reviewed journal. Its bloody impact factor is 3.926.

im3w1l• 4 years ago

Well 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• 4 years 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.

throwaway8943455• 4 years ago

I’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• 4 years 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?

bizfuz3• 4 years ago

I believe you're right, it does seem to have had a significant effect.

Perhaps it's also interesting to imagine the societal changes if law and policy prohibited discrimination based on being disadvantaged by class, wealth and income. We may well edge towards a genuinely more equitable society, rather one that just pays lip service to it based on one's identity.

Though it's unlikely to ever happen, given the economic and political system we exist in. It would disadvantage the wealthy and well-connected too much for them to permit it.

gshubert17• 4 years ago

Author William Deresiewicz some months ago commented on why academics (administrators, professors, and students) push this view in "American Education's new dark age" https://unherd.com/2022/03/american-educations-new-dark-age/ , previously discussed in HN with 2 or 3 comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30748684

cjbgkagh2• 4 years ago

I’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.

walkhour2• 4 years ago

You 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.

cjbgkagh2• 4 years ago

I 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.

valdiorn• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

We still use master branches as part of our coding guidelines.

mumblemumble• 4 years ago

This 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.

wffurr• 4 years ago

I 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• 4 years ago

It'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/028cb644ec6450fa9438ba6b6d...

JoeyBananas• 4 years ago

I 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-re...

fabian2k• 4 years ago

The 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

Thats 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.

Beltalowda5• 4 years ago

The common translation of "survival of the fittest" in Dutch is "survival of the strongest", which is even worse!

I do think "fitness" is often misunderstood, as is evolution in general. Even though the basic principles aren't that hard it's kind of tricky to really "get" natural selection. It's like trying to "get" just how huge astronomical distances are, or how a river could have formed the grand canyon: it's so far outside of our regular every-day experiences it takes some effort.

I'm not sure if s/fittest/best adapted/ (or something along these lines) would help, but it might? Of course, good general education about evolution would help even more, but yeah, that's been controversial for 150 years now...

naasking2• 4 years ago

and as far as I can tell there is nothing to indicate that this article represents the opinions of the journal or its editors.

From the article or it's comments, the journal's editors actually solicited this submission, it wasn't submitted and then approved after passing a standard review.

eximius• 4 years ago

Civilization/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.

zozbot2345• 4 years ago

It'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• 4 years ago

Is 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• 4 years ago

A 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.

62951413• 4 years ago

Everyone has a critical theory until they get punched in the face.

luuuzeta2• 4 years ago

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,

The best way to escape quick sands is to actively avoid getting into quick sands.

This is such a poignant analysis of these -isms. Do you have any recommended readings by any chance?

transfire• 4 years ago

However, we also represent white settlers’ perspectives on these issues.

Yeah. So shut up. Your ideas don’t count!

naasking2• 4 years ago

From 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• 4 years ago

Isn’t that exact cycle the current norm…

E.g., 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• 4 years 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-l...

prepend• 4 years ago

It 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• 4 years ago

newspeak, propagandistic language that is characterized by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings.

https://www.britannica.com/art/newspeak

luuuzeta2• 4 years 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.

A once respected biology journal indicts evolutionary biology for ableism

Related Stories