Do you think Scientific American would air the contentious opinion that race exists in a pratical/statistical manner, like physicians needing to be aware of sickle cell anemia being more prevalent in African-Americans? I'm going to guess that such a contentious opinion would go unaired there.
It's important to air contentious opinions ... so long as you air enough of them so that everyone gets a turn at being offended.
Those were published before Helmuth stepped in as editor in 2020. One of the themes discussed in the article is that this is representative of a direction that she is steering SA in. Really, the evidence you shared supports that notion.
For years, fraudulent “academics” have pushed phony concepts like “white empiricism”, and no one aside from far-right types, hungry for ammunition to use against their ideological enemies, bothered to seriously criticize this gibberish…
Now that it’s going mainstream, it’s kind of funny to see people freak out about it and realize just how entrenched their interests are, and how for a huge number of scientists, ideological orthodoxy is far more important than the philosophy of science
Maybe. Maybe it's just that for publications to survive anymore they need as many rage clicks as they need earnest ones. I'm fairly certain there's published evidence that that generates more traffic.
I'd prefer erring on the side of letting people speak, so my problem is less with articles like this and more with the lack of articles saying this is bullshit. I think we have one of these PC freakouts every once in a while and the smart thing to do is just let it pass and let others' outrage help it jump the shark--an unfortunate collective action problem.
> Maybe it's just that for publications to survive anymore they need as many rage clicks as they need earnest ones.
The possibility that this cynical interpretation is correct is exactly why I made sure all my ublock settings were dialed up to 11 before reading the opinion piece.
I occasionally get a paycheck from Big Midwestern State U. The Orwellian linguistic tension is palpable. I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like on the coasts.
The OP is upset about the following opinion column published on Scientific American, titled "The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson -- We must reckon with his and other scientists’ racist ideas if we want an equitable future:"
That opinion column is essentially evidence-free. It's main point is that it is dangerous and therefore "wrong" to think, as E. O. Wilson did, that differences among human beings can be explained in part by genetic inheritance and other biological mechanisms, regardless of evidence.
Keep in mind: Most biologists think, as E. O. Wilson clearly did, that differences among human beings can also be explained in part by family dynamics, societal contexts, economic incentives, institutional structures, and other cultural mechanisms.
I wouldn't have expected to see this on Scientific American.
SciAm has been going down hill. I was about to restart my subscription years ago and decided to look through some free issue or some such. There was another “woke” opinion column or article.
As a reader of the magazine for the past 35 years or so, Scientific American, the print publication, has devolved into what Popular Science was about 20 years ago. Sensationalist headlines, writing geared towards a much lower reading comprehension level and the introduction of politics and opinion in various articles.
A sad state of affairs for a once great publication, unfortunately.
However, the mantle has been taken up by online publications such as Quanta, Aeon, Edge and Nautilus, as well as various science authors on Medium and Substack.
When I was about 13 or so, my father brought home a foot-tall stack of Scientific American issues. He was a logger, but knew I was interested in science. This would have been mid-80s.
I read each of those, cover-to-cover, so many times. Barely understanding anything the first time; slowly increasing my comprehension over the months and years. Writing programs in BASIC on my C64 to recreate fractals, or simulate evolutionary processes. It really affected my life profoundly.
I say all that to just emphasize how heartbreaking it is to see what a trash magazine SA is now. In print since the middle of the 19th century, and ruined just in the last 10-15 years. It's a true loss.
I think readers with kneejerk reactions to the tune of "theyve gone downhill / woke / bs" are maybe missing the point?
To pull from OPs url, evolution is true. This could suggest that true is not on one side of the "classical science is a blameless objective virgin" and "classical science is an evil villain" and is instead a third position that integrates the awareness of biological and social processes we are currently afforded and keeps pressing on...
If anything it's nostalgic. The old magazines were great since as far as I know there was little in the way of popular science writing that wasn't sensationalised headlines and bad writing. They did a good job of explaining hard science in a relatable way so that you could go any find out more if you wanted to. For whatever reason this article about coffee is still freely available: http://poplab.stanford.edu/pdfs/Illy-ComplexityCoffee-sciam0...
Not a hard read, accurate, references at the bottom for more reading. Even some interesting graphs!
Seriously, what's up with accusing someone of racism and then not pointing to any specific evidence and lumping Gregor Mendel, a friar whose seminal work was on peas, into the mix? What?
Excellent point! I think id like to reiterate my "yes and" stance- your critique of what is lacking doesnt dismiss , it acknowledges the claims but asks for more of a proof. I think thats good rigor.
This is all well and good, but how does one deal with the reality of Brandolini's law? At what point are we allowed to say "this is a bad faith effort, and I reserve my right to dismiss it on those grounds -- to hell with this nonsense". If we never stand up and say that, it seems to me we are risking the cultural foundations of society for the sake of what? Rhetorical purity? As if nothing else was at stake?!
Risking the cultural foundation? To admit that people in the past acted with racial bias? Really?
To me that is literally cultural fragility. To fail to depart from the purity of the past myth you cling to suggests you lack the resilience to embrace the totality of what actually was.
Not saying you dont have a point- not saying we toss it all or slander everyone as evil- im saying we reckon with the complexity - the grey space between 0 and 1 if we want to actually realize the founding fathers very noble ideals.
I dont think this article made a very good attempt at it , and i think the previous comments pointing out what was lacking in relation to other "good" articles was the sort of "yes and" im referring to.
Though since you have no interest in rhetorical purity i should probably take your advice and dismiss the comment entirely as not being "in good faith" , right coach? ;p
>I think readers with kneejerk reactions to the tune of "theyve gone downhill / woke / bs" are maybe missing the point?
No it doesn't seem that way. Postmodern crowd has been calling evolutionary biologists/psychologists "problematic"/racist/whatever for decades. It's one of the main narratives of the original "culture wars" in the 80's/90's. The "problem" is postmodernists see humans as purely social constructions and any other narratives on human nature as power plays. This is not an integrative "yes and" perspective but the usual dismissal through "deconstruction" you see used by this crowd.
From another front page article about that yacht crash, I went to Wikipedia about MLM schemes, and then went down a Wiki-hole of reading about various religions. I was kind of curious if reading objectively about them would give me a paradigm of seeing where they actually differed on their philosophical points. Instead, I came away with a headache thinking it was a lot of disagreement over arbitrary implications of some arbitrary initial assumptions, ultimately driven by people looking to preserve their own status but cloaking it in the trappings of something greater. Thousands of years of wars, narrated by sophomoric intellectual strife over nonsense.
I feel like this is a modern version of that. Somehow these people have gotten themselves elevated within our societal zeitgeist - misapplying ideas, preaching nonsense, and invoking social sanctions to punish anyone who points out the hollowness of their bullshit. They do more harm than good on the topics they purport to care about, yet their ignorance imbues them with the strength to speak the loudest and most confidently. And they find symbiotic collaborators from the other tribe who mirror them perfectly, creating a false dichotomy of pointless argument.
I do hope it's a passing societal phase and we'll gain more immunity from such behavior, rather than the mysticism pendulum swinging back hard under the trappings of secularism.
There's a curiosly accurate psychological portrait of those people that I found in one book on a unrelated topic. Rephrased and reworded some parts to make it more acceptable on HN:
"Those who separated by vanity, tended to drift together by similarity of tastes and contempt for others, even though their idiosyncrasy of vanity led to quarrelling among themselves. Separateness became much intensified, thoughts developing in an undesirable way, becoming more and more of a shell, shutting out others. Animal passions were starved out by cold asceticism, instead of being changed into human emotions; sex-passion was destroyed instead of being transformed into love. As a result, they tended towards sexlessness. They formed communities, but those never lasted for long, as no one would listen to each other and everyone wanted to rule. Attempts to help them were met with outbursts of resentment, as they took those attempts as a plan to belittle them. Pride grew stronger, they became cold and calculating, without pity and remorse."
Everyone can be called a racist if you squint hard enough.
I think we should be careful throwing around that term, because it makes people defensive and closes off a chance to help somebody grow.
If you run into an actual racist, the cure is exposure to different ideas that may change their perception and underlying beliefs. It’s far easier to do that as a friend.
>Second, the application of the scientific method matters: what works
>for ants and other nonhuman species is not always relevant for health
>and/or human outcomes.
That's the flip-side of the religious person's belief that we can't study human beings as animals because we are special. So we can't look at human sexuality, for example, except in the context of special rules. When we give into this notion of exceptionalism, we will continue to be mystified when the human don't just obey the special rules.
To clarify, you are quoting from Monica McLemore's article which the linked article is criticizing.
In John McWhorter's recent book, "Woke Racism", McWhorter argues that people like McLemore are adherents of a new religion (he means this in a literal, sociological way) which he calls "The Elect". The Elect's word for "heresy" is "problematic".
McLemore ends with a call to action
"So how do we engage with the problematic work of scientists whose legacy is complicated? I would suggest three strategies..."
and goes on to recommend
1) "Truth and reconciliation", which sounds like all gatekeepers need to be members of The Elect
2) "diversifying the scientific workforce", phenotype is important, I guess
3) "new methods", which really sound like a set of new rules The Elect wish to impose
What religion? Because as I'm sure you well know, there is no such thing as "religion" per se. I'd challenge you to point to someone who is an adherent of "religion", as opposed to some particular faith (which we all have, btw).
I am not aware, for example, of any major religious tradition that does not accept human beings as animals. Indeed, I'd have to ask you: what is it to be an animal, in your view, that your straw man religious person would find objectionable? For Aristotle, an animal is just a living organism (and therefore something with a body) with the capacity for locomotion. What makes human beings especially different from all known animals is rationality (and according to an ontological, as opposed to phylogenetic classification, any rational animal, extraterrestrial or not, would qualify as "human"). Those animals lacking rationality (and free choice) have traditionally been called beasts. Perhaps your equivocation trades on the common use of "animal" to mean "beast", but then it is an entirely uninteresting criticism. So yes, there is something special about having a rational nature.
> So we can't look at human sexuality, for example, except in the context of special rules.
This is really vague. What rules? Is that code for morality? As rational animals with the freedom to choose our actions, we are absolutely subject to morality. Beasts that merely react to impulses and have no choice in the matter are not moral agents, but we are because we are rational. Thus a man who rapes a woman is behaving immorally to the degree that he understands what he is doing and to the degree that he has a choice (those with severe mental deficits or suffering from psychosis might be examples of those who cannot be faulted, morally speaking). And what makes certain sexual behaviors wrong? That they frustrates the nature of the human sexual act. These aren't rules, but rather principles governing the teleological order of the faculties involved, and sexuality is not special in this regard, though perhaps dangerous (interesting that you chose that particular example). It is also immoral to lie because speech is intrinsically ordered toward communicating truth (note the presumption we make about speech in this regard; lying would not work otherwise). It is immoral to stick a pencil in your eye because it frustrates the faculty of sight. It is immoral to do drugs because they frustrate the exercise of reason. Happiness is living in conformity with one's nature; misery is to act contrary to it. Human beings struggle with living well, and living badly can be easier than living well, especially once you've accumulated bad habits. It does not follow that departures from what we ought somehow disprove the existence of the ought.
Not surprised. I am a SA subscriber, and have been more and more disappointed in it. Very little quality science reporting. What they do spend ink on seems to be more and more like this.
> the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.
The time has come to ban the use of the normal distribution for human stats. End the bigotry!
No one is complaining about the most offensively ignorant line in the Scientific American article, so I will:
“ First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.”
No such thing is remotely true. This line is a deep embarrassment to the magazine, even in an opinion piece. Do they not even have editors???
I never met the guy. It's entirely possible he was a raging racist. I've read some of the papers in question, though, and while it's been some years and maybe I missed the white pointy hoods, I don't remember the racism in his writing, and I think the author at Scientific American has misread the work.
E O Wilson never said anything like "genes determine who's smart and who's dumb," which would be racist. He said something like "genes are a contributing factor," and fuckall, if that's racist then just pull the plug on science.
Genes absolutely determine who is smart and who is dumb. This is an incontrovertible fact. There is no single other factor that has more effect. And the truth cannot be racist; it is inherently non-ideological.
"Genes determine who's smart and who's dumb" would not be racist unless you suggested (or, worse, demonstrated) that the smart genes were concentrated in specific breeding communities, or lacking in (presumably other) such communities.
We have reason to believe that some such "smart genes" are inherited. That's not very egalitarian, but it is also not racist. The implication is that these smart genes are rare not only in your dispossessed underclass, but rare everywhere. In any place where their promise fails to be nurtured and cultivated, humanity is the poorer for it. By the numbers, if the genes are more-or-less equally distributed, the dispossessed include absolutely many more stewards of these genes than the privileged. Then, it is a crime against society for the privileged to have failed to nurture them wherever possible.
But of course it is not only carriers of "smart genes" who could provide a strong net benefit society as a whole by being well nurtured. Arguably, for every "smart gene" carrier who would give back more than the cost of the nurturing, there are many others who would also effloresce. The only way we know to identify and nurture them all is to nurture everybody and see who blooms. But that would cost money.
51 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadIt's important to air contentious opinions ... so long as you air enough of them so that everyone gets a turn at being offended.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clinical-trials-h...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alzheimers-attack...
I'd prefer erring on the side of letting people speak, so my problem is less with articles like this and more with the lack of articles saying this is bullshit. I think we have one of these PC freakouts every once in a while and the smart thing to do is just let it pass and let others' outrage help it jump the shark--an unfortunate collective action problem.
The possibility that this cynical interpretation is correct is exactly why I made sure all my ublock settings were dialed up to 11 before reading the opinion piece.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-l...
That opinion column is essentially evidence-free. It's main point is that it is dangerous and therefore "wrong" to think, as E. O. Wilson did, that differences among human beings can be explained in part by genetic inheritance and other biological mechanisms, regardless of evidence.
Keep in mind: Most biologists think, as E. O. Wilson clearly did, that differences among human beings can also be explained in part by family dynamics, societal contexts, economic incentives, institutional structures, and other cultural mechanisms.
I wouldn't have expected to see this on Scientific American.
A sad state of affairs for a once great publication, unfortunately.
However, the mantle has been taken up by online publications such as Quanta, Aeon, Edge and Nautilus, as well as various science authors on Medium and Substack.
I read each of those, cover-to-cover, so many times. Barely understanding anything the first time; slowly increasing my comprehension over the months and years. Writing programs in BASIC on my C64 to recreate fractals, or simulate evolutionary processes. It really affected my life profoundly.
I say all that to just emphasize how heartbreaking it is to see what a trash magazine SA is now. In print since the middle of the 19th century, and ruined just in the last 10-15 years. It's a true loss.
To pull from OPs url, evolution is true. This could suggest that true is not on one side of the "classical science is a blameless objective virgin" and "classical science is an evil villain" and is instead a third position that integrates the awareness of biological and social processes we are currently afforded and keeps pressing on...
" No but " vs " yes and "
Not a hard read, accurate, references at the bottom for more reading. Even some interesting graphs!
The original article in the OP is here https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-l...
Seriously, what's up with accusing someone of racism and then not pointing to any specific evidence and lumping Gregor Mendel, a friar whose seminal work was on peas, into the mix? What?
To me that is literally cultural fragility. To fail to depart from the purity of the past myth you cling to suggests you lack the resilience to embrace the totality of what actually was.
Not saying you dont have a point- not saying we toss it all or slander everyone as evil- im saying we reckon with the complexity - the grey space between 0 and 1 if we want to actually realize the founding fathers very noble ideals.
I dont think this article made a very good attempt at it , and i think the previous comments pointing out what was lacking in relation to other "good" articles was the sort of "yes and" im referring to.
Though since you have no interest in rhetorical purity i should probably take your advice and dismiss the comment entirely as not being "in good faith" , right coach? ;p
No it doesn't seem that way. Postmodern crowd has been calling evolutionary biologists/psychologists "problematic"/racist/whatever for decades. It's one of the main narratives of the original "culture wars" in the 80's/90's. The "problem" is postmodernists see humans as purely social constructions and any other narratives on human nature as power plays. This is not an integrative "yes and" perspective but the usual dismissal through "deconstruction" you see used by this crowd.
I feel like this is a modern version of that. Somehow these people have gotten themselves elevated within our societal zeitgeist - misapplying ideas, preaching nonsense, and invoking social sanctions to punish anyone who points out the hollowness of their bullshit. They do more harm than good on the topics they purport to care about, yet their ignorance imbues them with the strength to speak the loudest and most confidently. And they find symbiotic collaborators from the other tribe who mirror them perfectly, creating a false dichotomy of pointless argument.
I do hope it's a passing societal phase and we'll gain more immunity from such behavior, rather than the mysticism pendulum swinging back hard under the trappings of secularism.
"Those who separated by vanity, tended to drift together by similarity of tastes and contempt for others, even though their idiosyncrasy of vanity led to quarrelling among themselves. Separateness became much intensified, thoughts developing in an undesirable way, becoming more and more of a shell, shutting out others. Animal passions were starved out by cold asceticism, instead of being changed into human emotions; sex-passion was destroyed instead of being transformed into love. As a result, they tended towards sexlessness. They formed communities, but those never lasted for long, as no one would listen to each other and everyone wanted to rule. Attempts to help them were met with outbursts of resentment, as they took those attempts as a plan to belittle them. Pride grew stronger, they became cold and calculating, without pity and remorse."
If you run into an actual racist, the cure is exposure to different ideas that may change their perception and underlying beliefs. It’s far easier to do that as a friend.
It seems like you're making an interesting point and I'd like to understand it.
One is merely a cheap way to attack somebody who disagrees with you, and the other is somebody who is making assumptions based on limited data.
The “black KKk leader” skit on Dave Chapelle shows that in a funny way
>Second, the application of the scientific method matters: what works
>for ants and other nonhuman species is not always relevant for health
>and/or human outcomes.
That's the flip-side of the religious person's belief that we can't study human beings as animals because we are special. So we can't look at human sexuality, for example, except in the context of special rules. When we give into this notion of exceptionalism, we will continue to be mystified when the human don't just obey the special rules.
In John McWhorter's recent book, "Woke Racism", McWhorter argues that people like McLemore are adherents of a new religion (he means this in a literal, sociological way) which he calls "The Elect". The Elect's word for "heresy" is "problematic".
McLemore ends with a call to action
"So how do we engage with the problematic work of scientists whose legacy is complicated? I would suggest three strategies..."
and goes on to recommend
1) "Truth and reconciliation", which sounds like all gatekeepers need to be members of The Elect
2) "diversifying the scientific workforce", phenotype is important, I guess
3) "new methods", which really sound like a set of new rules The Elect wish to impose
Sounds like an inquisition.
I am not aware, for example, of any major religious tradition that does not accept human beings as animals. Indeed, I'd have to ask you: what is it to be an animal, in your view, that your straw man religious person would find objectionable? For Aristotle, an animal is just a living organism (and therefore something with a body) with the capacity for locomotion. What makes human beings especially different from all known animals is rationality (and according to an ontological, as opposed to phylogenetic classification, any rational animal, extraterrestrial or not, would qualify as "human"). Those animals lacking rationality (and free choice) have traditionally been called beasts. Perhaps your equivocation trades on the common use of "animal" to mean "beast", but then it is an entirely uninteresting criticism. So yes, there is something special about having a rational nature.
> So we can't look at human sexuality, for example, except in the context of special rules.
This is really vague. What rules? Is that code for morality? As rational animals with the freedom to choose our actions, we are absolutely subject to morality. Beasts that merely react to impulses and have no choice in the matter are not moral agents, but we are because we are rational. Thus a man who rapes a woman is behaving immorally to the degree that he understands what he is doing and to the degree that he has a choice (those with severe mental deficits or suffering from psychosis might be examples of those who cannot be faulted, morally speaking). And what makes certain sexual behaviors wrong? That they frustrates the nature of the human sexual act. These aren't rules, but rather principles governing the teleological order of the faculties involved, and sexuality is not special in this regard, though perhaps dangerous (interesting that you chose that particular example). It is also immoral to lie because speech is intrinsically ordered toward communicating truth (note the presumption we make about speech in this regard; lying would not work otherwise). It is immoral to stick a pencil in your eye because it frustrates the faculty of sight. It is immoral to do drugs because they frustrate the exercise of reason. Happiness is living in conformity with one's nature; misery is to act contrary to it. Human beings struggle with living well, and living badly can be easier than living well, especially once you've accumulated bad habits. It does not follow that departures from what we ought somehow disprove the existence of the ought.
Calling E.O. Wilson names is yet another new low.
“And the descriptions and importance of ant societies existing as colonies is a component of Wilson’s work that should have been critiqued.”
> the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.
The time has come to ban the use of the normal distribution for human stats. End the bigotry!
“ First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.”
No such thing is remotely true. This line is a deep embarrassment to the magazine, even in an opinion piece. Do they not even have editors???
E O Wilson never said anything like "genes determine who's smart and who's dumb," which would be racist. He said something like "genes are a contributing factor," and fuckall, if that's racist then just pull the plug on science.
We have reason to believe that some such "smart genes" are inherited. That's not very egalitarian, but it is also not racist. The implication is that these smart genes are rare not only in your dispossessed underclass, but rare everywhere. In any place where their promise fails to be nurtured and cultivated, humanity is the poorer for it. By the numbers, if the genes are more-or-less equally distributed, the dispossessed include absolutely many more stewards of these genes than the privileged. Then, it is a crime against society for the privileged to have failed to nurture them wherever possible.
But of course it is not only carriers of "smart genes" who could provide a strong net benefit society as a whole by being well nurtured. Arguably, for every "smart gene" carrier who would give back more than the cost of the nurturing, there are many others who would also effloresce. The only way we know to identify and nurture them all is to nurture everybody and see who blooms. But that would cost money.