Dr. Monica McLemore's obit on E.O. Wilson was an unintentionally hilarious display of ignorance mixed with woke sanctimony, which will resound through the ages, earning its place alongside other daft Critical Theory scholarship from the "Science Wars", such as Luce Irigaray's infamous assertion that E=mc2 is a "sexed" equation [because it "privileges the speed of light" over other equally worthy speeds], and Sandra Harding's claim that Newton's Principia is a "rape manual".
The idea that scientific knowledge is "socially constructed", in the manner claimed by academics such as Bruno Latour, Michel Foucault & David Bloor, is categorically and demonstrably false.
Pinker's books "Enlightenment Now" and "The Blank Slate" neatly summarise the insanity and intellectual corruption with which ideas about Social Construction have infected the humanities in the 20th Century. He indicts Nietzsche and Heidegger as the initial culprits, but then does not spare the entire cabal of French postmodernists/poststructuralists/deconstructionists: Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan etc and their adherents. Pinker correctly accuses them of being anti-Enlightenment, anti-reason & anti-science.
Foucault does not come in for attack in Sokal's "Fashionable Nonsense", because he managed to avoid saying anything which was obviously stupid about science [unlike, say, Lacan, Irigaray & Kristeva] but one of his core ideas is that Knowledge & Power are the same thing: he even came up with a pompous new term for this wonky idea: "Power/Knowledge". An idea which works quite well in the humanities [eg Churchill saying "History will be kind to me - because I intend to write it!"] but which of course instantly falls apart into hopeless confusion & unintended comedy if applied to scientific knowledge. [Remember the attempt by 6 radical feminists in the 1980s to come up with a "Feminist Algebra"?]
Foucault's "Power/Knowledge" idea, which is widely accepted in many fields in the humanities [especially those with "Studies" in their title] is essentially an open invitaiton to ignore rational debate, and go straight to ad hominen attacks. Foucault's followers insist that anyone who asserts that scientific knowledge is objective is actually making a disguised power-grab on behalf of the oppressor classes. It is pernicious ideas like this, which have been quietly percolating and gaining acceptance in academia for half a century, which underlie Monica McLemore's nonsensical hit-piece.
Well done, Razib. The Fall of Scientific American over several decades has been sad to watch. Glad to see you and others standing up for Wilson and scientific truth.
"To be candid, I felt their approach, probably perfectly standard in past decades, was wholly out of step with today’s dispensation, when attacks on science are legion, genuine fear of the social-media mob is rampant in academia and whole careers are “canceled” on a specious basis. Ignored long enough, the lie becomes canon."
Amen. Good people cannot stand idly by while this farce is perpetuated.
If nonmathematicians don't like the term "Normal Distribution", they could also just refer to it as "Gaussian". As Razib notes, it necessarily occurs throughout nature due to Central Limit Theorem. Large sums of random variables tend to normally distributed.
Been lurking around as free subscriber to this amazing substack for months now. Subscribed after reading this. For a layman like me, great to see someone do hard science. Great rebuttal. Worth printing and framing it for generations to come.
Michael Shermer is a well known science writer. He had a long running column is Scientific American, but he got pushed off the track by the Woke train. Like the other refugees from the Cultural Revolution, he is now on substack. Here he explains what happened:
"In April of 2001 I began my monthly Skeptic column at Scientific American, the longest continuously published magazine in the country dating back to 1845. With Stephen Jay Gould as my role model (and subsequent friend), it was my dream to match his 300 consecutive columns that he achieved at Natural History magazine, which would have taken me to April, 2026. Alas, my streak ended in January of 2019 after a run of 214 essays."
"Scientific American Goes Woke: A case study in how identity politics poisons science" by Michael Shermer • Nov 17, 2021
Jerry Coyne who is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the Weltberühmt University of Chicago, and who signed the above open letter, supported Shermer:
"I’ve written about a dozen posts calling out Scientific American for its fulminating wokeness (give me another word if you don’t like that one), in particular its use of op-eds to discuss and promote woke ideological views that have little or nothing to do with science. A lot of readers here have canceled their subscriptions, but that hasn’t stopped Editor-in-Chief Laura Helmuth from subverting what was once the premier popular science magazine in America, turning it into a “progressive” political mouthpiece whose “real science” articles get lamer and lamer."
Thank you for a clear, calm and civilised response to the poorly researched piece in Scientific American. In today's world of supposed virtue-signalling and uniformed opinions too-often expressed with anger and vitriol more than ever we need open discussion and a healthy exchange of ideas. Difference of ideas is vital for progress but assertions need to be supported by solid reasearch and a clear understanding of the material in question. Please keep up the good work and thank you to all those signatories who understand the importance of E.O. Wilson's not-so-complicated legacy.
Scientific American, like perhaps most print publications now, is selling an ego boost rather than an education. "You bought this magazine, which shows that you are one of the superior people." Easier to write those kind of articles anyway.
How about the fact that Wilson was a big supporter of Philippe Rushton, and argued that Rushton was being persecuted for promoting studies that showed Blacks are inferior to Whites? How does that fit your narrative?
Specifically, Rushton (if you don't know who he was, just google him) was trying to get a paper published arguing that r/k selection differences apply to human "races," ultimately trying to prove that Blacks care less for their offspring and have more babies. This was not a subtle argument. Wilson championed the paper, and after it was (correctly) rejected for publication, commiserated with Rushton by observing that he (Wilson) would like to be outspoken like Rushton (a Canadian), but would be "attacked" if he did.
And Wilson wrote a letter of support for Rushton when Rushton's university was attempting to discipline him for, among other things, publishing a paper that argued that IQ is inversely correlated with penis size (again attributing these differences to "racial" populations).
I knew Wilson and I don't think he was intentionally racist. But science--and biology, particularly--has a lot to answer for in the way it has turned a blind eye to enabling racism, sexism, and other forms of bias. This kind of sneering dismissal doesn't help the cause of reckoning with bias in our society, nor does it "set the record straight."
I agree that the essay in question could have had more detail and nuance, but the basic points it raises are worth engaging with, not dismissing. Nobody is immune from examination, and the constant stream of outrage every time someone critiques Wilson is disingenuous. Wilson campaigned for and engineered a lot of this outrage, from the moment the critiques of Sociobiology appeared, privately referring to his colleague Dick Lewontin as a "psychopath," dismissing all criticism of his ideas as "Marxist," and generally acting as if it was impossible to criticize his ideas on anything other than biased, ideological grounds.
Anticipating that the immediate response to this will be "what's your evidence," I can tell you that I have copies of the letters in question that I obtained at several openly accessible archives. I have an established track record as a historian of biology and am not making this shit up. Dismiss me if you want, but don't pretend that nobody's offered any substance.
I've not looked deeply into Rushton's work - I'm basically going off having watched the 'debate' with David Suzuki, and the occasional mention of his research by other people interested in race differences among humans, but I am familiar with his application of r/K selection theory to humans (to save anyone else looking it up: the hypothesis that there are subtle but real differences in the average amount of effort that different human populations invest into childcare, with Africans tending to put relatively more effort into producing a large number of children, and East Asians tending to put relatively more effort into nurturing a somewhat smaller number of children, and Europeans being intermediate).
I do not know if this is true - I'm not sure if there's even anyone who has taken up Rushton's mantle on this area of research - but I'm equally not aware of anyone having disproven it either. It sounds like a hypothesis that could turn out to be true or false (at least, if formulated as statistical average claim, with overlapping bell curves, rather than a night-and-day elephants-vs-mice comparison), that ought to be evaluated calmly without letting our emotions get in the way. Or, to put it another way, if we are a scientist acting in our role as a scientist, we are obliged to _not care_ whether Rushton was a racist lunatic, and to care only about the strength of the evidence for his hypotheses.
Obviously under the current zeitgeist it would be _convenient_ to believe that Rushton was wrong about the r/K idea - I'd be curious what you would put forward as the best piece of evidence refuting it.
Thanks for the comment. I can tell you that the paper Rushton submitted was rejected on the grounds that it completely misunderstood r/K selection, and the ideas, when eventually published in a book (by a fringe press) were roundly criticized. My own reading of the idea is that it's totally misguided, but I'm not a geneticist or evolutionary biologist--however, my colleagues and friends who are confirm this view. Basically, r/K selection applies to differences in reproductive strategies between SPECIES, not populations within species, and moreover I fail to see how even the proposed r/K differences could account for (or necessitate) differences in complex behavioral traits like intelligence. It's complete nonsense.
You raise some other challenging questions, which I'm afraid I won't be able to answer very well, both because some of them are perhaps unanswerable (can we separate the art from the artist?) and because I just spent 9 hours straight writing an essay about all of this, complete with all the documentation. I'm not sure where or how quickly it will appear, but as promised I will return here to update with a link when it does.
Let me offer this basic question, though: are "Africans" who raise large families any different than, say, Irish people? I mean, to some extent we're purely dealing with stereotypes, and that's one of the major criticisms of Rushton's work (this is a man who once cited PENTHOUSE FORUM as a source in an article that argued Black men have large penises and low intelligence). But even on empirical grounds this fails. Which "Africans"? Where? When? And if you mean "African-Americans," what about the enormous genetic diversity in African American populations through centuries of intermarriage and (at one time) forced reproduction under slavery? How do we even begin to define what that "genetic population" is? Skin color? Well, that's a pretty poor basis on which to create sweeping biological distinctions, and is basically what racists have been doing since the beginning. The same would go for the Irish too, by the way (minus the slavery and rape), and in that case, even if we posited that maybe their breeding habits did at one time reveal r-selection, why shouldn't that apply to all Europeans, if skin color is the basic criterion? And even granting any of the above, why would we assume that childraising strategies in any particular place in time are anything other than circumstantial or cultural?
Look, this is the problem with going down this road: no sooner do you start than almost immediately you're confronted with complex population genetic realities, or socially-constructed assumptions (like skin color, or generalized characterizations of behavior), or environmental factors, that pretty much make this kind of work impossible. Is it "wrong" to ask these questions? Maybe not. But I would argue that it is definitely "wrong" to propose simplistic answers to questions that aren't simple at all, to allow social prejudices or stereotypes to stand in for "scientific" categories, to entertain only evidence that supports your presuppositions, etc. And, unfortunately, some or all of these flaws exist in most attempts to find racialized hereditary differences in complex traits like intelligence.
I apologize for any brusqueness in my reply--I'm just rushing to leave work and have had a long day!
I think it's fair to say that it was a tactical error for Rushton to use the term "r/K selection" for his hypothesis, when, like you say, that is normally used to refer to a difference in reproductive strategies between species. But I do not see why it is fatal to his idea. It's not prima facie ludicrous that, as a result of subtly different selection pressures in different environments (before the Industrial Revolution changed everything by nearly wiping out child mortality), one racial group might average, say, ten children per woman, invest however much in each one, while another group averaged, say, eight children per woman, invested slightly more in each child, and within each group, everyone still ended up with, on average, slightly above two children surviving to adulthood and reproducing, and that the upstream cause of those differences was that the selection pressure caused the average psychological traits of members of the two groups to be slightly different - making one group slightly more sociosexual, and the other slightly more nurturing. Again, I do not know whether there is any strong evidence for this, just that the fact that r/K usually refers to different species would not be a good argument against it. And more generally, 'this sounds like something a racist lunatic would say' should not count as sufficient reason for dismissing a hypothesis out of hand, unless we (a) can accurately tell who is a racist lunatic and who isn't, and (b) have good evidence that racist lunatics are always wrong on factual questions pertaining to race.
At any rate, he's certainly not the only person to have taken the 'fast/slow life history strategies as applied to humans' idea seriously, though others have applied it to differences between individuals with a human rather than differences in average traits between human populations: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/03/book-review-evolutionary-psychopathology/
The 'where do you draw the boundaries' / 'what about admixture' arguments make sense if you are arguing against someone who thinks that human races are discrete, essentialized groupings that everyone belongs unambiguously to exactly one of, but I just don't see people in the HBD sphere making those kind of claims. Rather, the claim is simply that humans can be grouped into genetic clusters, where people in one roughly continent-sized area are more closely related to each other, on average, than they are to people in another roughly continent-sized area - and that although the variation may be clinal (if you walk from Nigeria to Norway via the Levant, there's no place you can draw a line in the sand and say 'this is where black people stop and white people begin', nonetheless by the time you've completed the journey you are surrounded by people who are genetically distinct enough to be able to make some generalizations about.
In the US in particular, the fact of African Americans having substantial European admixture shouldn't be an obstacle - they're mostly descended from a population from a relatively small area of West Africa plus a population from a relatively small area of Western Europe, and if you take 'people with at least 50% sub-Saharan African ancestry' (especially if you take 'people with at least 50% ancestry from sub-Saharan Africans who were present in the USA in 1856', to exclude recent immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa who tend to be highly selected for human capital) and 'people with at least 90% European Ancestry', that should cover the majority of self-identified US blacks and US whites and give you populations large enough to get good data about average IQ from, shouldn't it?
I recall the 2000 HBES meeting at Amherst where Rushton was summarily dismissed as a racist lunatic by a crowd that has more than their fair share of ideological blindspot. It’s news to me that Wilson supported Rushton’s work. I’d be curious to see the letters you reference.
Well, in my view Rushton WAS a racist lunatic--his ideas are a matter of public record and you can make up your own mind. I'm not going to be posting archival documents on discussion boards, but I'm in the process of drafting an essay about Wilson and the larger issue of systemic racism in science that I hope to place in a magazine or journal soon (apparently not Sci Am, though! one thing I agree with in this substack essay is that Sci Am owes it to readers to allow for a back-and-forth, and I don't like their stated policy). If there's sufficient interest I'll come back here with a link to anything that eventually gets published. I'm not trying to be coy--I've been working on a book on this topic but it's still far from complete, and I now see the need to get something shorter out sooner without basically just dumping my research materials on the internet!
One thing you raise that I'll comment on, though, is the issue of a political agenda among Wilson's critics. That's indisputable. What troubles me, though, is the insistence by Wilson and his defenders that he (and they) have no politics or ideology. That's patently ridiculous, since everyone has a politics and it's impossible to separate that from everything else we do.
In Wilson's case (and Dawkins', and Pinker's, and Sam Harris', so on) that politics seems to be the same kind of fairly straightforward neoliberalism that has driven centrist politics from the 1980s onward, and which--while sometimes socially progressive--emphasizes "individual responsibility" at the expense of certain kinds of progressive social welfare programs. I'm not interested in debating the merits of that neoliberalism (which you can find influences of in everyone from Thatcher and Reagan to the Clintons and even Obama), but rather in pointing out that this IS an ideology (or a politics), and it influences views of science just as much as Lewontin's Marxism, etc.
And here, Wilson's discussions of ants are totally germane, as the author of the Sci Am essay proposes (though perhaps again without enough specificity), since Wilson frequently interpreted ant behavior though analogy to human social organization, and then turned around and used that interpreted analogy as a basis for understanding human social evolution and organization. It is in the circularity of that argument that Wilson's politics enter his science (among other places).
Thanks for your response--I don't plan to get into arguments with folks here, but I appreciate the opportunity to add a little more detail to the point I made in my original comment.
I thought your comment raised important issues and gave food for thought. I wish you would reconsider the approach of entering a comment section then declaring that you are not interested in comments that question elements of your comment. It seems a bit rude to me. Maybe you should consider an alternative form of exposition.
I think you misunderstood my comment. I was stating that my purpose wasn't to get into fights with people, since my comment was very much opposed to the general tone of other comments about this letter. I certainly wasn't implying that I only wish to talk to people who agree with me. I've simply spent too much time in unproductive arguments on internet discussion boards in the past and don't wan't to engage in personal attacks or name-calling. I have no objection to respectful disagreement.
Sorry you thought my comment was rude. Again, I think you misinterpreted it. I appreciate that you found the issues I raised worth considering.
<i>and don't wan't to engage in personal attacks or name-calling</i>
with this:
<i>in my view Rushton WAS a racist lunatic</i>
I can vouch for me that is was not my intention to misrepresent your position.
I push back against commenters who put in their 2 cents then are too busy or not interested in comment. You can do that if you want. I just don't like or respect it.
See, this is exactly what I was trying to avoid. Rushton is not a commenter on this thread (he died years ago), so clearly I wasn't insulting anyone here. If you don't think someone who traffics in racist stereotypes about penis size and IQ is a problem, that's your business, but in my opinion my statement was factual.
You've now tone-policed my comment a couple of times and seem eager for a fight by indicating your disrespect for me, etc. Again, that's your business. I've replied to everyone who has commented on my posts--including you--so clearly I'm not guilty of hit-and-run commenting (it seems strange that you would accuse me of that after I'd responded to you, lol). We all have to look at ourselves in the mirror every morning, and I try to conduct myself online exactly as I would in person--including using my real name and taking responsibility for what I say.
Wow. I wonder how many of the signatories to that letter even know what vdare is. They'd be pretty horrified if they did. (Of course, Scientific American has no standards, but neo-Nazi, White Nationalist websites are fine. What a world we live in.)
Just curious: is your concern mainly about the forum (Vdare, which is indeed a site where a lot of white nationalists seem to gather) or the contents of Razib's correspondence that was posted there? Personally, I consider "IQ research" to be half-baked and unconvincing (it seems there are so many factors that can determine one's intelligence, and test scores seem like a very inadequate input), but is the very quest (analyzing what data we have and trying to extract patterns) an illegitimate one in your view?
In case you were wondering, I'm not white and have no particular agenda here. I have found Razib to be a very informative source on genetics research for more than a decade, and knowledgeable enough to connect the dots across different disciplines. I believe he is doing a service by communicating scientific research to laypeople (or even scientists in different disciplines). His opinions on group differences in IQ and such I can ignore as idiosyncracies because even there I see an honest effort at gaining some insight into the human condition rather than anything malicious.
Thanks for the thoughtful question. To be honest, I didn't know much about Khan before this letter and I'm not particularly interested in critiquing or attacking his past writings. The link Mehmet posted is pretty distasteful in that it combines hereditarian racialized IQ studies with cultural stereotypes, and I gather that Khan has said other pretty inflammatory things.
But my interest here is in addressing the specifics of the letter he wrote, especially since he got a lot of prominent scientists to support it. As far as IQ studies go, I'm working on a history of biological determinism, and a lot of my sources suggest that these studies have been pretty overtly biased in the past (and may continue to be). Does that mean we should never investigate genetic bases for behavioral traits? Not necessarily, but as many of my geneticist friends point out, it may actually be impossible to conduct meaningful studies, since a) these are complex traits and not single-locus ones like sickle-cell anemia, and b) it may be impossible to normalize GWAS surveys of complex traits for social or environmental factors.
As a historian, I'm not in the business of deciding what science is "legitimate," but I am very interested in promoting nuanced discussion about the relationship between social/political values and science, both in the past and today. My objection to this letter is that it's not very nuanced or accurate, not that its author has other views I may disagree with. Of course, I'm also a human being and have political and social views, and yes, I do find many aspects of current dialogue around race unsettling, especially when disingenuous attempts are made to deny that structural racism or implicit bias exist at all.
Sorry for the long reply! I am, at the very moment, writing an essay that responds to some of these issues and that will present the historical evidence I alluded to above. I respect your position that it's possible to value contributions to science literacy even if you disagree with other views an author holds. Personally, what I've learned about Khan recently (I know a number of people I respect who know him personally and have much deeper knowledge of his past writings than I do) makes me question his motives, but that doesn't automatically mean he's untrustworthy about basic science. For what it's worth, there are other writers who are equally qualified to talk about science who I could recommend (and whom you may already know of), like Carl Zimmer.
You are scientifically incompetent. That isn't an insult, it is a fact.
Being a "Historian" is not actually being a "biologist". It isn't even necessarily being a rationalist, as your comments make very clear.
You are attempting to nuance a set of gross (anti-science) smears by the cultural-left, which is presumably your support network.
Some basic, actual, biology: one of the most obvious differences between human gene pools are the Himalayan tribes (vs the rest of the human species) that have neanderthal DNA that was selected for as an adaptation: red blood cells that make absorbing oxygen at high altitude better.
(REMINDER, evolution is a process: variation, selection, retention.)
Another: the NW European gene pool became outbred due to the early Church's ban on cousin marriage. (see Harvard: Joseph Henrich's WEIRD model)
In contrast, the Arab gene pool became increasing inbred due to cousin marriage after the first couple of centuries of Muslim expansion. There is a significant body of medical documentation about mental and physical abnormalities due to intensely inbred human gene pools.
(Farmers noticed the same thing about inbreeding domestic animals for something like 5,000 years.)
All of your arguments are premised on "woke" (postmodernist) ideology, not science.
"Woke" (anti-science) ideology is a Neo-Feudalist project funded by elements of global finance and digital capitalism, see Kotkin's demographic and economic databases, collected over decades:
The problem is not that you aren't offering any "substance", it is that you are a propagandist for corrupt special interests that is distorting the evidence and cherry picking data to fit an ideology.
In other words you ae PROJECTING your own cognitive biases.
That isn't "science", or even good history.
-----
From another discussion:
TOXIC Leftist/ "woke" cancel culture / Cultural Marxist, PC left, CRT/SJW/BLM rhetoric*, explained:
00000. memory holing
0000. SMUG ARROGANCE
000. use absurd SMEARS
00. project
0. gaslight
......
1. Deflect from what was actually said/done (move goal posts)
2. Distort or lie about facts and evidence (such as straw manning)
3. Cherry pick evidence to fit the (victim/diversity) narrative / shift goal posts
4. Engage in emotive, feel good bs (special pleading) rather than use rational, objective thought
[->] 5. Use guilt by association ("you are a K-K-K/n-a-z-i") to smear people that dare to criticize PC/SJW leftist ideology.
[->] Use groupthink and scapegoating to marginalize critics of the PC left.
6. Demonize the personalities of opponents/critics.
7. Destroy the reputation, character and career of critics of the PC left
8. Use psychological violence, which could include doxxing, and threats of actual violence, against critics of the PC left.
-----
*Note: the above can be generalized to fit any ideology.
Hopi Hoekstra on Wednesday: I strongly, strongly believe we need to decouple ideas from the people who purvey them. Put my name on the letter.
Hopi Hoekstra on Thursday: So, I found out a few of my acquaintances might hold me in slightly lower esteem me if I publicly agree with this idea - solely because someone they don't like also agrees with it. So remove my name from the letter. I beg your forgiveness. Please, I beg you - please like me!
Does Hopi sound like someone the public can trust to be doing honest, straightforward scientific research regardless of social consequences stemming from her findings?
Her career is impressive, her credentials impeccable, her research highly influential. Yet she so strongly desires affirmation from people she barely knows that she will twist herself into a pretzel in front of everyone.
I used to be a STEM grad student but have not been in academia for a long time. Given how these people are behaving, it kind of feels like there's a Grand Inquisition going on across all of academia.
<i>Does Hopi sound like someone the public can trust to be doing honest, straightforward scientific research regardless of social consequences stemming from her findings? </i>
I'm not sure if she cares all that much about the public, and I'm not saying this to disparage her. For a long time, and with relatively few exceptions, scientists have been doing research for other scientists and not the public at large. The whole paper publication-conference treadmill one goes through maintains a big bubble, and people are happy to keep doing things that give them cred within. (I did the same when I was in grad school; it's a bit different in industry where I am now.) It's like how historians, with few exceptions, write history books targeted at other historians, and which turn out to be unreadable for you and me.
Dr. Monica McLemore's obit on E.O. Wilson was an unintentionally hilarious display of ignorance mixed with woke sanctimony, which will resound through the ages, earning its place alongside other daft Critical Theory scholarship from the "Science Wars", such as Luce Irigaray's infamous assertion that E=mc2 is a "sexed" equation [because it "privileges the speed of light" over other equally worthy speeds], and Sandra Harding's claim that Newton's Principia is a "rape manual".
The idea that scientific knowledge is "socially constructed", in the manner claimed by academics such as Bruno Latour, Michel Foucault & David Bloor, is categorically and demonstrably false.
Pinker's books "Enlightenment Now" and "The Blank Slate" neatly summarise the insanity and intellectual corruption with which ideas about Social Construction have infected the humanities in the 20th Century. He indicts Nietzsche and Heidegger as the initial culprits, but then does not spare the entire cabal of French postmodernists/poststructuralists/deconstructionists: Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan etc and their adherents. Pinker correctly accuses them of being anti-Enlightenment, anti-reason & anti-science.
Foucault does not come in for attack in Sokal's "Fashionable Nonsense", because he managed to avoid saying anything which was obviously stupid about science [unlike, say, Lacan, Irigaray & Kristeva] but one of his core ideas is that Knowledge & Power are the same thing: he even came up with a pompous new term for this wonky idea: "Power/Knowledge". An idea which works quite well in the humanities [eg Churchill saying "History will be kind to me - because I intend to write it!"] but which of course instantly falls apart into hopeless confusion & unintended comedy if applied to scientific knowledge. [Remember the attempt by 6 radical feminists in the 1980s to come up with a "Feminist Algebra"?]
Foucault's "Power/Knowledge" idea, which is widely accepted in many fields in the humanities [especially those with "Studies" in their title] is essentially an open invitaiton to ignore rational debate, and go straight to ad hominen attacks. Foucault's followers insist that anyone who asserts that scientific knowledge is objective is actually making a disguised power-grab on behalf of the oppressor classes. It is pernicious ideas like this, which have been quietly percolating and gaining acceptance in academia for half a century, which underlie Monica McLemore's nonsensical hit-piece.
Well done, Razib. The Fall of Scientific American over several decades has been sad to watch. Glad to see you and others standing up for Wilson and scientific truth.
A valuable statement in any case. It should be distributed to the max. They were cowards not to publish it.
"To be candid, I felt their approach, probably perfectly standard in past decades, was wholly out of step with today’s dispensation, when attacks on science are legion, genuine fear of the social-media mob is rampant in academia and whole careers are “canceled” on a specious basis. Ignored long enough, the lie becomes canon."
Amen. Good people cannot stand idly by while this farce is perpetuated.
If nonmathematicians don't like the term "Normal Distribution", they could also just refer to it as "Gaussian". As Razib notes, it necessarily occurs throughout nature due to Central Limit Theorem. Large sums of random variables tend to normally distributed.
Or just "bell curve"! Oh wait sh-
No, it's the normal distribution. The word "normal" is not to be politicized.
No. Concessions like this do not help.
Signatories be like:…Harvard… London School of Economics… Razib Khan, Unsupervised Learning, Substack… Yale… UCLA…
king
Been lurking around as free subscriber to this amazing substack for months now. Subscribed after reading this. For a layman like me, great to see someone do hard science. Great rebuttal. Worth printing and framing it for generations to come.
Scientific American used to be the gateway publication for those interested in scientific research and rigorous scientific writing...
Michael Shermer is a well known science writer. He had a long running column is Scientific American, but he got pushed off the track by the Woke train. Like the other refugees from the Cultural Revolution, he is now on substack. Here he explains what happened:
"In April of 2001 I began my monthly Skeptic column at Scientific American, the longest continuously published magazine in the country dating back to 1845. With Stephen Jay Gould as my role model (and subsequent friend), it was my dream to match his 300 consecutive columns that he achieved at Natural History magazine, which would have taken me to April, 2026. Alas, my streak ended in January of 2019 after a run of 214 essays."
"Scientific American Goes Woke: A case study in how identity politics poisons science" by Michael Shermer • Nov 17, 2021
https://michaelshermer.substack.com/p/scientific-american-goes-woke
And:
"What is Woke, Anyway?: A coda to my column on Scientific American Goes Woke" by Michael Shermer • Nov 18, 2021
https://michaelshermer.substack.com/p/what-is-woke-anyway
And discusses the whole affair on Quillette Podcast #178: "Michael Shermer on Watching ‘Scientific American’ Go Woke"
https://quillette.com/2022/01/17/quillette-podcast-178-michael-shermer-on-watching-scientific-american-go-woke/
Jerry Coyne who is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the Weltberühmt University of Chicago, and who signed the above open letter, supported Shermer:
"I’ve written about a dozen posts calling out Scientific American for its fulminating wokeness (give me another word if you don’t like that one), in particular its use of op-eds to discuss and promote woke ideological views that have little or nothing to do with science. A lot of readers here have canceled their subscriptions, but that hasn’t stopped Editor-in-Chief Laura Helmuth from subverting what was once the premier popular science magazine in America, turning it into a “progressive” political mouthpiece whose “real science” articles get lamer and lamer."
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/11/18/michael-shermer-documents-the-decline-and-fall-of-scientific-american/
Shermer has an excellent new podcast episode on Quillette on the recent issue: https://quillette.com/2022/01/17/quillette-podcast-178-michael-shermer-on-watching-scientific-american-go-woke/
Thank you for a clear, calm and civilised response to the poorly researched piece in Scientific American. In today's world of supposed virtue-signalling and uniformed opinions too-often expressed with anger and vitriol more than ever we need open discussion and a healthy exchange of ideas. Difference of ideas is vital for progress but assertions need to be supported by solid reasearch and a clear understanding of the material in question. Please keep up the good work and thank you to all those signatories who understand the importance of E.O. Wilson's not-so-complicated legacy.
Brilliant Razib!
Thank you all for this.
Scientific American, like perhaps most print publications now, is selling an ego boost rather than an education. "You bought this magazine, which shows that you are one of the superior people." Easier to write those kind of articles anyway.
How about the fact that Wilson was a big supporter of Philippe Rushton, and argued that Rushton was being persecuted for promoting studies that showed Blacks are inferior to Whites? How does that fit your narrative?
Specifically, Rushton (if you don't know who he was, just google him) was trying to get a paper published arguing that r/k selection differences apply to human "races," ultimately trying to prove that Blacks care less for their offspring and have more babies. This was not a subtle argument. Wilson championed the paper, and after it was (correctly) rejected for publication, commiserated with Rushton by observing that he (Wilson) would like to be outspoken like Rushton (a Canadian), but would be "attacked" if he did.
And Wilson wrote a letter of support for Rushton when Rushton's university was attempting to discipline him for, among other things, publishing a paper that argued that IQ is inversely correlated with penis size (again attributing these differences to "racial" populations).
I knew Wilson and I don't think he was intentionally racist. But science--and biology, particularly--has a lot to answer for in the way it has turned a blind eye to enabling racism, sexism, and other forms of bias. This kind of sneering dismissal doesn't help the cause of reckoning with bias in our society, nor does it "set the record straight."
I agree that the essay in question could have had more detail and nuance, but the basic points it raises are worth engaging with, not dismissing. Nobody is immune from examination, and the constant stream of outrage every time someone critiques Wilson is disingenuous. Wilson campaigned for and engineered a lot of this outrage, from the moment the critiques of Sociobiology appeared, privately referring to his colleague Dick Lewontin as a "psychopath," dismissing all criticism of his ideas as "Marxist," and generally acting as if it was impossible to criticize his ideas on anything other than biased, ideological grounds.
Anticipating that the immediate response to this will be "what's your evidence," I can tell you that I have copies of the letters in question that I obtained at several openly accessible archives. I have an established track record as a historian of biology and am not making this shit up. Dismiss me if you want, but don't pretend that nobody's offered any substance.
I've not looked deeply into Rushton's work - I'm basically going off having watched the 'debate' with David Suzuki, and the occasional mention of his research by other people interested in race differences among humans, but I am familiar with his application of r/K selection theory to humans (to save anyone else looking it up: the hypothesis that there are subtle but real differences in the average amount of effort that different human populations invest into childcare, with Africans tending to put relatively more effort into producing a large number of children, and East Asians tending to put relatively more effort into nurturing a somewhat smaller number of children, and Europeans being intermediate).
I do not know if this is true - I'm not sure if there's even anyone who has taken up Rushton's mantle on this area of research - but I'm equally not aware of anyone having disproven it either. It sounds like a hypothesis that could turn out to be true or false (at least, if formulated as statistical average claim, with overlapping bell curves, rather than a night-and-day elephants-vs-mice comparison), that ought to be evaluated calmly without letting our emotions get in the way. Or, to put it another way, if we are a scientist acting in our role as a scientist, we are obliged to _not care_ whether Rushton was a racist lunatic, and to care only about the strength of the evidence for his hypotheses.
Obviously under the current zeitgeist it would be _convenient_ to believe that Rushton was wrong about the r/K idea - I'd be curious what you would put forward as the best piece of evidence refuting it.
Thanks for the comment. I can tell you that the paper Rushton submitted was rejected on the grounds that it completely misunderstood r/K selection, and the ideas, when eventually published in a book (by a fringe press) were roundly criticized. My own reading of the idea is that it's totally misguided, but I'm not a geneticist or evolutionary biologist--however, my colleagues and friends who are confirm this view. Basically, r/K selection applies to differences in reproductive strategies between SPECIES, not populations within species, and moreover I fail to see how even the proposed r/K differences could account for (or necessitate) differences in complex behavioral traits like intelligence. It's complete nonsense.
You raise some other challenging questions, which I'm afraid I won't be able to answer very well, both because some of them are perhaps unanswerable (can we separate the art from the artist?) and because I just spent 9 hours straight writing an essay about all of this, complete with all the documentation. I'm not sure where or how quickly it will appear, but as promised I will return here to update with a link when it does.
Let me offer this basic question, though: are "Africans" who raise large families any different than, say, Irish people? I mean, to some extent we're purely dealing with stereotypes, and that's one of the major criticisms of Rushton's work (this is a man who once cited PENTHOUSE FORUM as a source in an article that argued Black men have large penises and low intelligence). But even on empirical grounds this fails. Which "Africans"? Where? When? And if you mean "African-Americans," what about the enormous genetic diversity in African American populations through centuries of intermarriage and (at one time) forced reproduction under slavery? How do we even begin to define what that "genetic population" is? Skin color? Well, that's a pretty poor basis on which to create sweeping biological distinctions, and is basically what racists have been doing since the beginning. The same would go for the Irish too, by the way (minus the slavery and rape), and in that case, even if we posited that maybe their breeding habits did at one time reveal r-selection, why shouldn't that apply to all Europeans, if skin color is the basic criterion? And even granting any of the above, why would we assume that childraising strategies in any particular place in time are anything other than circumstantial or cultural?
Look, this is the problem with going down this road: no sooner do you start than almost immediately you're confronted with complex population genetic realities, or socially-constructed assumptions (like skin color, or generalized characterizations of behavior), or environmental factors, that pretty much make this kind of work impossible. Is it "wrong" to ask these questions? Maybe not. But I would argue that it is definitely "wrong" to propose simplistic answers to questions that aren't simple at all, to allow social prejudices or stereotypes to stand in for "scientific" categories, to entertain only evidence that supports your presuppositions, etc. And, unfortunately, some or all of these flaws exist in most attempts to find racialized hereditary differences in complex traits like intelligence.
I apologize for any brusqueness in my reply--I'm just rushing to leave work and have had a long day!
I think it's fair to say that it was a tactical error for Rushton to use the term "r/K selection" for his hypothesis, when, like you say, that is normally used to refer to a difference in reproductive strategies between species. But I do not see why it is fatal to his idea. It's not prima facie ludicrous that, as a result of subtly different selection pressures in different environments (before the Industrial Revolution changed everything by nearly wiping out child mortality), one racial group might average, say, ten children per woman, invest however much in each one, while another group averaged, say, eight children per woman, invested slightly more in each child, and within each group, everyone still ended up with, on average, slightly above two children surviving to adulthood and reproducing, and that the upstream cause of those differences was that the selection pressure caused the average psychological traits of members of the two groups to be slightly different - making one group slightly more sociosexual, and the other slightly more nurturing. Again, I do not know whether there is any strong evidence for this, just that the fact that r/K usually refers to different species would not be a good argument against it. And more generally, 'this sounds like something a racist lunatic would say' should not count as sufficient reason for dismissing a hypothesis out of hand, unless we (a) can accurately tell who is a racist lunatic and who isn't, and (b) have good evidence that racist lunatics are always wrong on factual questions pertaining to race.
At any rate, he's certainly not the only person to have taken the 'fast/slow life history strategies as applied to humans' idea seriously, though others have applied it to differences between individuals with a human rather than differences in average traits between human populations: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/03/book-review-evolutionary-psychopathology/
The 'where do you draw the boundaries' / 'what about admixture' arguments make sense if you are arguing against someone who thinks that human races are discrete, essentialized groupings that everyone belongs unambiguously to exactly one of, but I just don't see people in the HBD sphere making those kind of claims. Rather, the claim is simply that humans can be grouped into genetic clusters, where people in one roughly continent-sized area are more closely related to each other, on average, than they are to people in another roughly continent-sized area - and that although the variation may be clinal (if you walk from Nigeria to Norway via the Levant, there's no place you can draw a line in the sand and say 'this is where black people stop and white people begin', nonetheless by the time you've completed the journey you are surrounded by people who are genetically distinct enough to be able to make some generalizations about.
In the US in particular, the fact of African Americans having substantial European admixture shouldn't be an obstacle - they're mostly descended from a population from a relatively small area of West Africa plus a population from a relatively small area of Western Europe, and if you take 'people with at least 50% sub-Saharan African ancestry' (especially if you take 'people with at least 50% ancestry from sub-Saharan Africans who were present in the USA in 1856', to exclude recent immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa who tend to be highly selected for human capital) and 'people with at least 90% European Ancestry', that should cover the majority of self-identified US blacks and US whites and give you populations large enough to get good data about average IQ from, shouldn't it?
I recall the 2000 HBES meeting at Amherst where Rushton was summarily dismissed as a racist lunatic by a crowd that has more than their fair share of ideological blindspot. It’s news to me that Wilson supported Rushton’s work. I’d be curious to see the letters you reference.
Well, in my view Rushton WAS a racist lunatic--his ideas are a matter of public record and you can make up your own mind. I'm not going to be posting archival documents on discussion boards, but I'm in the process of drafting an essay about Wilson and the larger issue of systemic racism in science that I hope to place in a magazine or journal soon (apparently not Sci Am, though! one thing I agree with in this substack essay is that Sci Am owes it to readers to allow for a back-and-forth, and I don't like their stated policy). If there's sufficient interest I'll come back here with a link to anything that eventually gets published. I'm not trying to be coy--I've been working on a book on this topic but it's still far from complete, and I now see the need to get something shorter out sooner without basically just dumping my research materials on the internet!
One thing you raise that I'll comment on, though, is the issue of a political agenda among Wilson's critics. That's indisputable. What troubles me, though, is the insistence by Wilson and his defenders that he (and they) have no politics or ideology. That's patently ridiculous, since everyone has a politics and it's impossible to separate that from everything else we do.
In Wilson's case (and Dawkins', and Pinker's, and Sam Harris', so on) that politics seems to be the same kind of fairly straightforward neoliberalism that has driven centrist politics from the 1980s onward, and which--while sometimes socially progressive--emphasizes "individual responsibility" at the expense of certain kinds of progressive social welfare programs. I'm not interested in debating the merits of that neoliberalism (which you can find influences of in everyone from Thatcher and Reagan to the Clintons and even Obama), but rather in pointing out that this IS an ideology (or a politics), and it influences views of science just as much as Lewontin's Marxism, etc.
And here, Wilson's discussions of ants are totally germane, as the author of the Sci Am essay proposes (though perhaps again without enough specificity), since Wilson frequently interpreted ant behavior though analogy to human social organization, and then turned around and used that interpreted analogy as a basis for understanding human social evolution and organization. It is in the circularity of that argument that Wilson's politics enter his science (among other places).
Thanks for your response--I don't plan to get into arguments with folks here, but I appreciate the opportunity to add a little more detail to the point I made in my original comment.
I thought your comment raised important issues and gave food for thought. I wish you would reconsider the approach of entering a comment section then declaring that you are not interested in comments that question elements of your comment. It seems a bit rude to me. Maybe you should consider an alternative form of exposition.
I think you misunderstood my comment. I was stating that my purpose wasn't to get into fights with people, since my comment was very much opposed to the general tone of other comments about this letter. I certainly wasn't implying that I only wish to talk to people who agree with me. I've simply spent too much time in unproductive arguments on internet discussion boards in the past and don't wan't to engage in personal attacks or name-calling. I have no objection to respectful disagreement.
Sorry you thought my comment was rude. Again, I think you misinterpreted it. I appreciate that you found the issues I raised worth considering.
Thank you for the reply.
I think that you need to reconcile this:
<i>and don't wan't to engage in personal attacks or name-calling</i>
with this:
<i>in my view Rushton WAS a racist lunatic</i>
I can vouch for me that is was not my intention to misrepresent your position.
I push back against commenters who put in their 2 cents then are too busy or not interested in comment. You can do that if you want. I just don't like or respect it.
See, this is exactly what I was trying to avoid. Rushton is not a commenter on this thread (he died years ago), so clearly I wasn't insulting anyone here. If you don't think someone who traffics in racist stereotypes about penis size and IQ is a problem, that's your business, but in my opinion my statement was factual.
You've now tone-policed my comment a couple of times and seem eager for a fight by indicating your disrespect for me, etc. Again, that's your business. I've replied to everyone who has commented on my posts--including you--so clearly I'm not guilty of hit-and-run commenting (it seems strange that you would accuse me of that after I'd responded to you, lol). We all have to look at ourselves in the mirror every morning, and I try to conduct myself online exactly as I would in person--including using my real name and taking responsibility for what I say.
Have a nice evening.
Dr. Sepkoski, I'm looking forward to your assay on the subject. I should set a Google alert probably so I don't miss it.
I'd also like to urge you to not engage with a provocateur as Mr. Khan. His whole business model revolves around bein Ben Shapiro of science communication. I present an early example of how far his "cringe" can go when he needs attention: https://vdare.com/letters/vdare-khan-letter-and-sailer-reply-america-s-imported-caste-system
Wow. I wonder how many of the signatories to that letter even know what vdare is. They'd be pretty horrified if they did. (Of course, Scientific American has no standards, but neo-Nazi, White Nationalist websites are fine. What a world we live in.)
Just curious: is your concern mainly about the forum (Vdare, which is indeed a site where a lot of white nationalists seem to gather) or the contents of Razib's correspondence that was posted there? Personally, I consider "IQ research" to be half-baked and unconvincing (it seems there are so many factors that can determine one's intelligence, and test scores seem like a very inadequate input), but is the very quest (analyzing what data we have and trying to extract patterns) an illegitimate one in your view?
In case you were wondering, I'm not white and have no particular agenda here. I have found Razib to be a very informative source on genetics research for more than a decade, and knowledgeable enough to connect the dots across different disciplines. I believe he is doing a service by communicating scientific research to laypeople (or even scientists in different disciplines). His opinions on group differences in IQ and such I can ignore as idiosyncracies because even there I see an honest effort at gaining some insight into the human condition rather than anything malicious.
Thanks for the thoughtful question. To be honest, I didn't know much about Khan before this letter and I'm not particularly interested in critiquing or attacking his past writings. The link Mehmet posted is pretty distasteful in that it combines hereditarian racialized IQ studies with cultural stereotypes, and I gather that Khan has said other pretty inflammatory things.
But my interest here is in addressing the specifics of the letter he wrote, especially since he got a lot of prominent scientists to support it. As far as IQ studies go, I'm working on a history of biological determinism, and a lot of my sources suggest that these studies have been pretty overtly biased in the past (and may continue to be). Does that mean we should never investigate genetic bases for behavioral traits? Not necessarily, but as many of my geneticist friends point out, it may actually be impossible to conduct meaningful studies, since a) these are complex traits and not single-locus ones like sickle-cell anemia, and b) it may be impossible to normalize GWAS surveys of complex traits for social or environmental factors.
As a historian, I'm not in the business of deciding what science is "legitimate," but I am very interested in promoting nuanced discussion about the relationship between social/political values and science, both in the past and today. My objection to this letter is that it's not very nuanced or accurate, not that its author has other views I may disagree with. Of course, I'm also a human being and have political and social views, and yes, I do find many aspects of current dialogue around race unsettling, especially when disingenuous attempts are made to deny that structural racism or implicit bias exist at all.
Sorry for the long reply! I am, at the very moment, writing an essay that responds to some of these issues and that will present the historical evidence I alluded to above. I respect your position that it's possible to value contributions to science literacy even if you disagree with other views an author holds. Personally, what I've learned about Khan recently (I know a number of people I respect who know him personally and have much deeper knowledge of his past writings than I do) makes me question his motives, but that doesn't automatically mean he's untrustworthy about basic science. For what it's worth, there are other writers who are equally qualified to talk about science who I could recommend (and whom you may already know of), like Carl Zimmer.
<i>I consider "IQ research" to be half-baked and unconvincing</i>
Suppose that you are wrong. (And I think that you are.)
Think for a minute about how we could achieve a more egalitarian society given that high IQ is not equally distributed among individuals or races.
You are scientifically incompetent. That isn't an insult, it is a fact.
Being a "Historian" is not actually being a "biologist". It isn't even necessarily being a rationalist, as your comments make very clear.
You are attempting to nuance a set of gross (anti-science) smears by the cultural-left, which is presumably your support network.
Some basic, actual, biology: one of the most obvious differences between human gene pools are the Himalayan tribes (vs the rest of the human species) that have neanderthal DNA that was selected for as an adaptation: red blood cells that make absorbing oxygen at high altitude better.
(REMINDER, evolution is a process: variation, selection, retention.)
Another: the NW European gene pool became outbred due to the early Church's ban on cousin marriage. (see Harvard: Joseph Henrich's WEIRD model)
In contrast, the Arab gene pool became increasing inbred due to cousin marriage after the first couple of centuries of Muslim expansion. There is a significant body of medical documentation about mental and physical abnormalities due to intensely inbred human gene pools.
(Farmers noticed the same thing about inbreeding domestic animals for something like 5,000 years.)
All of your arguments are premised on "woke" (postmodernist) ideology, not science.
https://razib.substack.com/p/setting-the-record-straight-open/comment/12455703
"Woke" (anti-science) ideology is a Neo-Feudalist project funded by elements of global finance and digital capitalism, see Kotkin's demographic and economic databases, collected over decades:
https://joelkotkin.com/the-coming-of-neo-feudalism/
The problem is not that you aren't offering any "substance", it is that you are a propagandist for corrupt special interests that is distorting the evidence and cherry picking data to fit an ideology.
In other words you ae PROJECTING your own cognitive biases.
That isn't "science", or even good history.
-----
From another discussion:
TOXIC Leftist/ "woke" cancel culture / Cultural Marxist, PC left, CRT/SJW/BLM rhetoric*, explained:
00000. memory holing
0000. SMUG ARROGANCE
000. use absurd SMEARS
00. project
0. gaslight
......
1. Deflect from what was actually said/done (move goal posts)
2. Distort or lie about facts and evidence (such as straw manning)
3. Cherry pick evidence to fit the (victim/diversity) narrative / shift goal posts
4. Engage in emotive, feel good bs (special pleading) rather than use rational, objective thought
[->] 5. Use guilt by association ("you are a K-K-K/n-a-z-i") to smear people that dare to criticize PC/SJW leftist ideology.
[->] Use groupthink and scapegoating to marginalize critics of the PC left.
6. Demonize the personalities of opponents/critics.
7. Destroy the reputation, character and career of critics of the PC left
8. Use psychological violence, which could include doxxing, and threats of actual violence, against critics of the PC left.
-----
*Note: the above can be generalized to fit any ideology.
examples:
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/i-criticized-blm-then-i-was-fired
community.fairforall.org/c/fair-news/erec-smith-black-people-who-oppose-critical-race-theory-are-being-erased
Hopi Hoekstra on Wednesday: I strongly, strongly believe we need to decouple ideas from the people who purvey them. Put my name on the letter.
Hopi Hoekstra on Thursday: So, I found out a few of my acquaintances might hold me in slightly lower esteem me if I publicly agree with this idea - solely because someone they don't like also agrees with it. So remove my name from the letter. I beg your forgiveness. Please, I beg you - please like me!
Does Hopi sound like someone the public can trust to be doing honest, straightforward scientific research regardless of social consequences stemming from her findings?
Her career is impressive, her credentials impeccable, her research highly influential. Yet she so strongly desires affirmation from people she barely knows that she will twist herself into a pretzel in front of everyone.
Remarkable.
I used to be a STEM grad student but have not been in academia for a long time. Given how these people are behaving, it kind of feels like there's a Grand Inquisition going on across all of academia.
<i>Does Hopi sound like someone the public can trust to be doing honest, straightforward scientific research regardless of social consequences stemming from her findings? </i>
I'm not sure if she cares all that much about the public, and I'm not saying this to disparage her. For a long time, and with relatively few exceptions, scientists have been doing research for other scientists and not the public at large. The whole paper publication-conference treadmill one goes through maintains a big bubble, and people are happy to keep doing things that give them cred within. (I did the same when I was in grad school; it's a bit different in industry where I am now.) It's like how historians, with few exceptions, write history books targeted at other historians, and which turn out to be unreadable for you and me.
Worse than this...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-climate-anxiety/
And that was pretty bad.