Arquivo da tag: Racismo na ciência

Ghosts of Science Past Still Haunt Us. We Can Put Them to Rest. (Undark)

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Essay

By C. Brandon Ogbunu

Dec 13, 2022

Edward O. Wilson, known as the “father of biodiversity.” Visual: Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images

Conversations about famed scientists who held troubling views on race should center not on cancellation but on progress.

One autumn afternoon during the mid-2010s, when I was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, I decided that I needed a break from the toil of a sinking project on viral population genetics. I left my small, dusty office in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and walked across a street to a building that had a vending machine. Just ahead of me, in line, stood Edward O. Wilson — famed naturalist and “father of biodiversity.” He eventually purchased a pack of mints.

Seeing a celebrity in their element is a groovy experience. That day at the vending machine, Wilson wasn’t “Professor Biophilia.” He was just an older man wrangling loose change in his pocket, trying to fix a sugar craving just like mine. But he was a legend. Through the years, I’ve read many of Wilson’s papers and trade books. I still cherish my signed copy of “Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge,” an ambitious if flawed book that contains one of my favorite-ever quotes by a scientist: “The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper, and I suppose that if gifted with a full quiver, he also writes like a journalist.” 

E.O. Wilson, as he was widely known, was beloved by many and respected by almost everyone in the science community. When he died in December 2021, even critics of his work paid their respects to the life of a wizard. But just days after his death, a posthumous revelation sparked a debate about what he really stood for. The controversy raised questions not only about Wilson, but about how the science community as a whole can confront its legacy of racism.

One might say that the controversy was foreshadowed by the final chapter of Wilson’s “Sociobiology,” his 1975 manifesto on how the science of social behavior should embrace evolutionary reasoning in humans. The book was as bold a scientific pivot as you will see. It took courage to be a master in one set of domains — as Wilson was in evolution, entomology, and biodiversity — and engage in another, especially the thorny topic of human behavior and culture, which Wilson took on in his book’s final chapter. “Sociobiology” made several important, resonant observations, but it was also criticized on the grounds that it directly or indirectly put forward a sort of reasoning that is adjacent to scientific racism and sexism. Detractors felt Wilson’s heavy emphasis on evolutionary explanations for human social behaviors radiated the same sort of reductive evangelism that underlies eugenics — science founded upon the idea that certain classes of humans were unfit to reproduce.

Naturalist and Harvard Professor, E.O. Wilson was beloved by many and respected by almost everyone in the science community. But after his death, controversy flared over his support of scientific racist J. Philippe Rushton. Hugh Brown/The Chronicle Collection via Getty Images

Wilson’s dive into the human realm was, in my view, an exercise in the worst kind of carpetbagging, in which an expert uses their large reputation in one arena to justify parachuting into another where they are ignorant or out of their depth. In doing so, Wilson followed, and maybe helped write, a blueprint that continues to influence generations of dumpster fire biological determinists. The controversy encircled Wilson for years, but his excellent reputation eventually transcended it.

After his death was announced, however, the conflict swirled anew. An essay in Scientific American revisited the connections between “Sociobiology”and scientific racism and, much more damningly, scholars uncovered archival evidence that Wilson was an ardent defender of J. Philippe Rushton, a scientific racist who spent a career peddling pulp science fiction about the essential differences between races, draped in the lingo of evolutionary theory. In the archival materials, Wilson referred to anti-racists as “scoundrels.” But apparently, he thought the actual scientific racist that he had a cuddly relationship with was a fine person.

Amid all of this, a circus began. 

A broad, mostly academic alliance formed to defend Wilson’s reputation. It included the typical cast of cancel culture vultures and race science grifters, along with a surprising number of enablers who should have known better. And most of it seemed to me to be driven by some bold hidden agenda: to portray critics of Wilson’s legacy as if they were some imaginary legion of scientific critical race theorists, destined to overtake your curricula, make you and your children sad, and cancel everyone you know and love. The fossil-clutching and fake outrage emboldened extremists, leading to the standard soup-and-salad of white supremacist threats and racist social media posts. Unhelpful, irrelevant debates surrounding Wilson’s character followed, and within a few weeks, people went on with their lives. 

What I’ve observed is a predictable cycle that happens time and time again in science: We discover (or re-discover) a racist thing that a luminary or popular person did or said; the criticism arrives, sometimes with a proposal that their name be removed from some relic or that we no longer honor them for whatever good that they did; a vigorous defense of the accused ensues, often manifesting as lamentations of cancel culture, appeals to academic freedom, attestations to the goodness of the accused, and insistences that the punishment should not be harsher than the crime; then comes a flowering of distracting, irrelevant pontifications about what really lurks in the hearts of people. (“What is a racist person really?”) 

Finally, everyone involved eventually gets tired and goes home. Discovery. Defense. Distraction. Departure. The issue vanishes from our mouths, minds, and social media timelines, and we move on, no one any smarter, no issues resolved.

It is the same sequence that has played out in the aftermath of James Watson’s repeated rants against Black intelligence, and in the wake of another inflammatory Charles Murray article on race and IQ. The more contentious of these situations, however, involve revered figures from the past. Figures like the late Robert A. Millikan, a Nobel-prize winning physicist whose support for racist eugenics policies recently came to light.

This steady drumbeat of revelations raises difficult questions: How can science live with its ghosts — the figures from days of old who are revealed to be the authors, supporters, or enablers of bigoted ideas? How do we hold a ghost accountable? And how can we emerge from these revelations as a smarter and stronger community of scientists and citizen-scientists, with a clear vision for moving forward?

What’s certain is that we can do better than the race science Groundhog Day that we have been reliving since time immemorial. But first, we must shift the discussion away from arguments about the nature of the people who authored and supported these bad ideas, and toward frank assessments of the nature, scope, and consequences of their actions.

The first thing we must do, when confronted by a ghost of science past, is reflect. 

To reference an old concept from cultural critic Jay Smooth, in discussions of racism, the “what you are” conversation is less relevant than “what you did.” By freeing ourselves of the burden of having to debate the essential goodness of a bad actor, we can begin to have a more refined conversation about what accountability looks like. 

In the case of Wilson, I don’t care whether we formally label him a racist (“what he is”). I do know, however, that his support of Rushton amplified race scientists and their rancid ideas (“what he did”). And I know that race science is perhaps the most destructive intellectual scam ever constructed. It has poisoned basic conversations about human evolution and genetics, even — perhaps especially — for people with non-racist leanings or tendencies. It has stymied progress, muddied conversation, and discouraged talented people from studying genetics and evolution. As far as misinformation problems go, it sits alongside scientific sexism on pseudoscience’s Mount Rushmore. (Give the anti-vax and climate change denial movements time to mature slightly, and they will take their rightful place there as well.) By extension, people who support race scientists promote destructive misinformation. And Wilson did just that. 

Wilson and other scientists who have authored, enabled, platformed, or promoted racist ideas have failed in their primary job description: to participate in the scientific process in a responsible manner. We may even consider the infractions as acts of scientific malfeasance, rather than as the acts of insensitivity. Being mean is bad. Propagating dangerous misinformation might be worse. 

Crucially, reflection needn’t always produce a guilty verdict. In 2020, the Society of Systematic Biologists seemed to call into question the past writings of evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, proposing to change the title of an award in his name. When I looked back on those writings, I didn’t feel the “what he did” amounted to much of an infraction. (The society later clarified that the proposed name change was not meant to be an indictment of Mayr, but rather part of a broader strategy to promote inclusion.) 

How can science live with its ghosts — the figures from days of old who are revealed to be the authors, supporters, or enablers of bigoted ideas?

But when an appraisal of a person’s actions does point to clear wrongdoing, how do we act on that knowledge? I believe that any revelation of a racist transgression committed by a scientist we admire — be it big or small — should meaningfully change the way we look at that person and their body of work. No, we need not embrace the charge of “cancellation,” which offers few opportunities to learn or solve the problem of how to truly hold bad actors accountable. But we must come to see the ghost’s legacy in a new light. 

We must reconstruct.

To reconstruct a person’s legacy is to grapple with complexity. We should not be afraid of the multiplicities that are the lives of the people that we admire. It is possible to carry several, maybe even competing understandings in our head at the same time. This is standard in science: Newtonian and quantum mechanics, natural selection and genetic drift, somatic and germline mutation. Science teaches us that keeping track of counterintuitive, incongruous, competing, or even incompatible ideas is the only way to understand nature. 

This also goes for people. E.O. Wilson was a world-class scientist and made lasting contributions to several disciplines. But his amplification of pseudoscientists — and the misinformation they produced — are now part of his scientific legacy. That is, when we teach about him in our biology courses, when he is memorialized in biographies, we should tell the whole story. The bad should stand alongside the good. 

Ronald Fisher, an early 20th century polymath who helped found the field of population genetics and pioneer modern statistical sciences, is a canonical example of this duality. There is no debate to be had about the importance of his scientific contributions: Virtually everyone who has ever conducted any form of empirical research has been influenced by Fisher’s inventions. But he was also an architect of eugenics. His contributions to that dark chapter of science are also a part of his story. 

Most famous for his studies on ants, E.O. Wilson was a world-class scientist and made lasting contributions to several disciplines. But his amplification of pseudoscientists are now part of his scientific legacy. Hugh Brown/The Chronicle Collection via Getty Images

Still, it is not enough to simply acknowledge that people are complicated and shrug our shoulders. After reflecting on a scientist’s misdeeds and working to reconstruct their legacy, we must address the damage and chart a path forward.

We must repair.

Modern efforts to repair the damage of racism often center around the naming and renaming of awards. Such was the case when the Society for the Study of Evolution decided, two years ago, to rename a prestigious prize that had commemorated Fisher, and when Caltech, after much debate and deliberation, decided to rename campus buildings named after Millikan and other eugenicists. 

There are many sensible reasons to change the names of relics named after people. They include the idea that to name something after someone is to honor them. If the namesake was an avowed eugenicist, then we should not honor them, because the ideas had negative real-world consequences. And there are good arguments for doing away with named awards altogether: Names on relics often — though not always — imply a lone genius model of scientific achievement that is proving to be less true. All the greats had help, and history hasn’t been fair with regards to who gets credit. There is even an argument to be made for leaving the name of an award or other monument intact, despite the transgressions of its namesake: Removing a disgraced name allows society to sidestep discussions of the harms the person caused and to avoid wrestling with the question of what it means that society ever honored someone who harbored such racist perspectives in the first place. (Here, I’m borrowing from a viewpoint commonly expressed in a related debate over the removal of Confederate monuments in the United States.) 

In my view, an organization’s decision to rename, dename, or keep the name of an award or other monument should be made collectively — by the group’s leadership, members, and other stakeholders — and should reflect that organization’s values and priorities. Whatever the decision, what is most important is that we recognize that symbolic decisions about names are not the solution to the problem of how we reconsider our past. These actions should not be the end goal of our efforts to repair, but rather the beginning of a longer and more important process. The same painful revelations that spur us to reconsider the names of awards and monuments can also serve as moments to pause, take stock of our efforts to foster inclusion, and even focus on building new statues that reflect our better angels. 

To reconstruct a person’s legacy is to grapple with complexity. We should not be afraid of the multiplicities that are the lives of the people that we admire.

Among my most esteemed scientific colleagues are several persons of African descent, some born in the United States around the time of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They include a virologist who uses evolutionary theory to build viruses that kill the bacteria that cause illness, a computational biologist who has developed statistical tools that allow us to understand the link between genotype and phenotype with greater clarity, and a zoologist who studies the complex phylogeny of animals. They are not only great scientists, but they have dedicated much of their career to opening doors for others. These colleagues, and others of many backgrounds, remind me that there are new people to celebrate, and new scientific statues to build.

Part of this statue building should also take the form of supporting the potential legends of tomorrow — many of whom are dealing with life challenges or languishing in self-doubt — and making it easier for them to participate in the scientific enterprise. Many young people with E.O. Wilson-like talent are currently sitting in, or outside of, biology classrooms, either unaware of their gifts, or seeing few avenues to become the next great scientist. They span geographical ancestries, nationalities, and gender identities. 

This more enduring form of reparation should be the true goal of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives: not to place more “butts in seats” or to add color to departmental website photos, but to unearth talents from communities of people who have been told — by scientific racists and others — that they have little to offer. And it is the best way, perhaps the only way, to truly put to rest the ghosts of science past. 

Properly executed, the method above — reflection, reconstruction, reparation — has none of the flavor of cancellation. It removes distracting conversation about whether or not the ghost was a nice person. It focuses on the bad ideas themselves and seeks to construct a fair but full picture of who these scientists were. And it proposes ways that the scientific enterprise can repair the damage done — not through empty and performative gestures, but through creating more opportunities for more people to participate in the science enterprise.

Though I saw him in person several times, I didn’t know E.O. Wilson. I don’t know if he owned a pet or followed professional tennis; I don’t know if he listened to Charlie Parker or Frank Sinatra while counting the ants that he would become famous for; I don’t know if he voted for Obama or McCain in 2008. And I don’t care. 

I’ve surely been force-fed an image for decades: Wilson as a nature-loving, southern gentleman who was out of his element among the unfriendly elites of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I don’t know if this is true. And I don’t care.

Wilson was an evolutionary biologist who inspired many, opened our eyes to how nature worked, wrote many books with good ideas, and wrote others with corny and broken ones.

I also know, without a shadow of a doubt, that he amplified the authors of vile, regressive drivel. And I can accept this while still having respect for his contributions.

If I can remember the good and smile when I think of the mints that Wilson bought from a vending machine that one autumn day, then I owe it to his ghost to remember him for the wretched ideas that he and many others helped to propagate.

And so do you.

C. Brandon Ogbunu is an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, and is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.

Science must overcome its racist legacy: Nature’s guest editors speak (Nature)

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nature.com

We are leading Nature on a journey to help decolonize research and forge a path towards restorative justice and reconciliation.

Melissa Nobles, Chad Womack, Ambroise Wonkam & Elizabeth Wathuti

EDITORIAL, 08 June 2022

Four photos of people, clockwise from top left: Chad Womack, Elizabeth Wathuti, Ambroise Wonkam, Melissa Nobles.
Clockwise from top left: Chad Womack, Elizabeth Wathuti, Ambroise Wonkam and Melissa Nobles.Credit: Bottom left: Gretchen Ertl; bottom right: University of Cape Town

Science is a human endeavour that is fuelled by curiosity and a drive to better understand and shape our natural and material world. Science is also a shared experience, subject both to the best of what creativity and imagination have to offer and to humankind’s worst excesses. For centuries, European governments supported the enslavement of African populations and the subjugation of Indigenous people around the world. During that period, a scientific enterprise emerged that reinforced racist beliefs and cultures. Apartheid, colonization, forced labour, imperialism and slavery have left an indelible mark on science.

Although valiant and painful freedom struggles eventually led to decolonization, the impacts of those original racist beliefs continue to reverberate and have been reified in the institutional policies and attitudes that govern the ‘who’ and ‘how’ of individuals’ participation in the modern, global scientific enterprise. In our opinion, racist beliefs have contributed to a lack of diversity, equity and inclusion, and the marginalization of Indigenous and African diasporic communities in science on a national and global scale.

Science and racism share a history because scientists, science’s institutions and influential supporters of science either directly or indirectly supported core racist beliefs: the idea that race is a determinant of human traits and capacities (such as the ability to build civilizations); and the idea that racial differences make white people superior. Although the most egregious forms of racism are unlawful, racism persists in science and affects diverse communities worldwide. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement into science, Nature was among those institutions that pledged to listen, learn and change. In an Editorial, it said, “The enterprise of science has been — and remains — complicit in systemic racism, and it must strive harder to correct those injustices and amplify marginalized voices.”1

Nature invited us to serve as guest editors — notably, to advise on the production of a series of special issues on racism in science, the first of which is due to be published later this year. We accepted the invitation, although recognized the enormity of the challenge. How to define terms such as race, racism and scientific culture? How to construct a coherent framework of analysis: one that enables us to examine how racist beliefs in European colonial and post-colonial societies affect today’s scientists in countries that were once colonized; and how racism affects scientists of African, Asian, Central and South American and Indigenous heritage who are citizens and residents of former colonial powers?

We are committed to pursuing honest dialogue and giving a voice to those most affected by racism in science. But we also seek to provide readers with hope and optimism. Accordingly, our aim is to showcase some of the many examples of successful scientists who are Black, Indigenous and People of Colour, to highlight best practices and ‘lift-up’ programmes, and to feature initiatives that empower full participation and scientific leadership of African, Indigenous and diasporic communities around the world.

Articles will explore some key events and discoveries, drawn from both the scholarly literature and from lived experiences. Content will seek to understand the systemic nature of racism in science — including the institutions of academia, government, the private sector and the culture of science — that can lead either to an illusion of colour blindness (beneath which unconscious bias occurs) or to deliberate practices that are defiantly in opposition to inclusion. The articles will use the tools of journalism in all relevant media formats, as well as expert comment and analysis, primary research publishing and engagement, and will have a strong visual component.

Protesters attend the Black Austin Rally and march for Black Lives at Houston Tillotson University. Austin, Texas in 2020.
Protestors attend a march for Black Lives Matter in Austin, Texas, in June 2020.Credit: Mario Cantu/CSM/Sipa US/Alamy

This opening Editorial — the first Nature has published signed by external authors — is a contribution to what will be a long, sometimes difficult, but essential and ultimately rewarding process for the journal and its readers, and, we hope, for its publisher, too. The journey to recognizing and removing racism will take time, because meaningful change does not happen quickly. It will be difficult, because it will require powerful institutions to accept that they need to be accountable to those with less power. It will be rewarding because it will enrich science. It is essential because it is about truth, justice and reconciliation — tenets on which all societies must be founded. As scientists, we know that where there are problems in the historical record, scientific rigour and scientific integrity demand that they be acknowledged, and, if necessary, corrected.

Look at the record

So how do we know that science has advanced racist ideas? We know because it is detailed in the published scholarly record. Some 350 years ago, François Bernier, a French physician employed in the court of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, attempted to create a hierarchy of people by their skin colour, religion and geography2.

Such ideas came into their own when colonization was at its peak in the 1800s and early 1900s. In 1883, Francis Galton, an English statistician, coined the term eugenics for the study of human improvement through genetics and selective breeding. Galton also constructed a racial hierarchy, in which white people were considered superior. He wrote that “the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own (the Anglo Saxon)”3.

Although Charles Darwin opposed slavery and proposed that humans have a common ancestor, he also advocated a hierarchy of races, with white people higher than others. In The Descent of Man, Darwin describes what he calls the gradations between “the highest men of the highest races and the lowest savages”4. He uses the word ‘savages’ to describe Black and Indigenous people.

In our own times, James Watson, a Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, voiced the opinion that Black people are less intelligent than white people. In 1994, the psychologist Richard Herrnstein and the political scientist Charles Murray claimed that genetics was the main determinant of intelligence and social mobility in American society, and that those genetics caused African Americans and European Americans to have different IQ scores5.

Left: Cover of an essay from Arthur de Gobineau, Right: Cover of UNESCO Courier 1950.
Cover of an essay by the nineteenth-century French diplomat and social theorist Arthur de Gobineau justifying white supremacy (left). Scientists publish a statement through the UN affirming that race is a social construct and not a biological phenomenon (right).Credit: Left, Daehan (CC BY-SA 4.0); right, UNESCO Courier 1950

By 1950, the consensus among scientific leaders was that race is a social construct and not a biological phenomenon. Scientists affirmed this in a statement published that year by the United Nations science and education agency UNESCO (see go.nature.com/3mqrfcy). This has since been reaffirmed by subsequent findings showing there is no genetic basis for race, because humans share 99.9% similarity and have a single origin, in Africa6,7. There is more genetic variation within ‘races’ than between them.

Researching race and science matters, not only because these ideas influenced science, but because they became attractive to decision-makers, with horrific effects. People in power who advocated or participated in colonization and/or slavery used science, scientists and scientific institutions to rationalize and justify these practices.

Take Thomas Jefferson, the third US president, who drafted the Declaration of Independence of 1776. Jefferson is widely considered to be among the founders of liberalism and the idea of meritocracy. The declaration includes some of the most well-rehearsed words in the English language: that “all men are created equal”. And yet Jefferson, who was both a scientist and a slave owner, also thought that people of African descent were inferior to white people.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the French diplomat and social theorist Arthur de Gobineau wrote an essay justifying white supremacy8. De Gobineau thought that “all civilizations derive from the white race [and] none can exist without its help”. He argued that civilizations eventually collapse when different peoples mix. To advance his theory, he classified people according to their skin colour and social backgrounds. White aristocrats were given the highest category, Black people the lowest. De Gobineau’s ideas subsequently influenced the development of Nazi ideology, as did Galton’s — eugenics gained support among many world leaders, and contributed to slavery, apartheid and colonization, and the related genocide.

Addie Lee Anderson, age 87, in 2006 at her home in Fayetteville, North Carolina
Addie Lee Anderson was involuntarily sterilized in 1950 by the Eugenics Board of North Carolina. She is pictured here in 2006 at the age of 87.Credit: Sara D. Davis/TNS/ZUMA Press

In the early decades of the twentieth century, many US states passed eugenic sterilization laws. For example, North Carolina enacted such a law in 1929; by 1973, approximately 7,600 individuals had undergone involuntary sterilization in the state. The laws initially targeted white men who had been incarcerated for mental-health disorders, mental disabilities or crimes, but were later used to target Black women who received welfare benefits. It is estimated that between 1950 and 1966, Black women in North Carolina were sterilized at 3 times the rate of white women, and at 12 times the rate of white men9.

Deconstruct, debate and decolonize

Even today, colonization is sometimes defended on the grounds that it brought science to once-colonized countries. Such arguments have two highly problematic foundations: that Europe’s knowledge was (or is) superior to that of all others, and that non-European cultures contributed little or nothing to the scientific and scholarly record.

These views are evident in the case of Thomas Babington Macaulay, a historian and colonial administrator in India during the British Empire, who famously wrote in 1835 that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”10. These were not idle words. Macaulay used these and similar arguments to justify stopping funding for teaching India’s national languages, such as Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian — which, he said, taught “false history”, “false astronomy” and “false medicine” — in favour of teaching English language and science. Some might question what is wrong with more English and science teaching, but the context matters. Macaulay’s intention (in his own words) was not so much to advance scholarship, but to educate a class of person who would help Britain to continue its Imperial rule.

Portrait of Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), English writer and politician.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, an influential British politician in colonial times, thought that to teach in Arabic and Sanscrit would be to teach “false history”, “false astronomy” and “false medicine”.Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty

The erasure of Indigenous scholarship in this way has had incalculably damaging effects on formerly colonized countries. It has meant that future generations in Africa, Asia and the Americas would be unfamiliar with an unbroken history of their nations’ contributions to knowledge, even after decolonization. At present, much of the work to uncover non-Western scholarship is taking place in the universities and research centres of high-income countries. That is far from satisfactory, because it exacerbates the power imbalance in research, particularly in collaborative research projects between high-income and low- and middle-income countries. Although there is much talk of ‘local ownership’, the reality is that researchers in high-income countries hold much more sway in setting and implementing research agendas, leading to documented cases of abuses of power.

The effects of historical racism and power imbalances have also found their way into the research funding and publishing systems of high-income countries11. The National Institutes of Health, the United States’ main funder of biomedical science, recognizes that there is structural racism in biomedical research. The funder is implementing solutions that are starting to narrow gaps. But not all funding institutions in high-income countries are studying or acknowledging structural or systemic racism in their funding systems or scholarly communities.

Restore, rebuild and reconcile

A wave of anti-racism statements followed Floyd’s murder in 2020. Research funders and universities, publishers and individual journals such as Nature all published statements in support of eliminating racism from science. Two years on, the journey from words to action has been slow and, in some respects, barely measurable.

Nature’s upcoming special issues, its invitation to work with us as guest editors and its ongoing coverage of racism in science are necessary steps to inform, encourage debate and, ultimately, seek solutions-based approaches that propose ways to restore truth, repair trust and seek justice.

We must have hope that the future will be better than the past, because every alternative is worse. But solutions must also acknowledge the reasons why solutions are necessary. Racism has led to injustices against millions of people, through slavery and colonization, through apartheid and through continuing prejudice today. The point of learning about and analysing racism in science must be to ensure that it is never repeated.

Nature 606, 225-227 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01527-z

Editor’s note: Melissa Nobles, Chad Womack, Ambroise Wonkam and Elizabeth Wathuti are currently working with Nature as guest editors to guide the creation of several special issues of the journal dedicated to racism in science. To the best of our knowledge, this Editorial is the first in Nature to be signed by guest editors. We are proud of this, and look forward to working with them on these special issues and beyond.

Disclaimer: The opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the authors’ organizations or their governing bodies.

References

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  3. Galton, F. Hereditary Genius (Macmillan, 1869). Google Scholar 
  4. Darwin, C. R. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (John Murray, 1871). Google Scholar 
  5. Herrnstein, R. J. & Murray, C. The Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994). Google Scholar 
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    www1.folha.uol.com.br

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    The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson (Scientific American)

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    scientificamerican.com

    Monica R. McLemore

    We must reckon with his and other scientists’ racist ideas if we want an equitable future

    December 29, 2021

    American biologist E. O. Wilson in Lexington, Mass., on October 21, 2021. Credit: Gretchen Ertl/Reuters/Alamy

    With the death of biologist E. O. Wilson on Sunday, I find myself again reflecting on the complicated legacies of scientists whose works are built on racist ideas and how these ideas came to define our understanding of the world.

    After a long clinical career as a registered nurse, I became a laboratory-trained scientist as researchers mapped the first draft of the human genome. It was during this time that I intimately familiarized myself with Wilson’s work and his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.

    His influential text Sociobiology: The New Synthesis contributed to the false dichotomy of nature versus nurture and spawned an entire field of behavioral psychology grounded in the notion that differences among humans could be explained by genetics, inheritance and other biological mechanisms. Finding out that Wilson thought this way was a huge disappointment, because I had enjoyed his novel Anthill, which was published much later and written for the public.

    Wilson was hardly alone in his problematic beliefs. His predecessors—mathematician Karl Pearson, anthropologist Francis Galton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel and others—also published works and spoke of theories fraught with racist ideas about distributions of health and illness in populations without any attention to the context in which these distributions occur.

    Even modern geneticists and genome scientists struggle with inherent racism in the way they gather and analyze data. In his memoir A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life, geneticist J. Craig Venter writes, “The complex provenance of ideas means their origin is often open to interpretation.”

    To put the legacy of their work in the proper perspective, a more nuanced understanding of problematic scientists is necessary. It is true that work can be both important and problematic—they can coexist. Therefore it is necessary to evaluate and critique these scientists, considering, specifically the value of their work and, at the same time, their contributions to scientific racism.

    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. The fact that we don’t adequately take into account differences between experimental and reference group determinants of risk and resilience, particularly in the health sciences, has been a hallmark of inadequate scientific methods based on theoretical underpinnings of a superior subject and an inferior one. Commenting on COVID and vaccine acceptance in an interview with PBS NewsHour, recently retired director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins pointed out, “You know, maybe we underinvested in research on human behavior.”

    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. For example, the associations of Black people with poor health outcomes, economic disadvantage and reduced life expectancy can be explained by structural racism, yet Blackness or Black culture is frequently cited as the driver of those health disparities. Ant culture is hierarchal and matriarchal, based on human understandings of gender. And the descriptions and importance of ant societies existing as colonies is a component of Wilson’s work that should have been critiqued. Context matters.

    Lastly, examining nurture versus nature without any attention to externalities, such as opportunities and potential (financial structures, religiosity, community resources and other societal structures), that deeply influence human existence and experiences is both a crude and cruel lens. This dispassionate query will lead to individualistic notions of the value and meaning of human lives while, as a society, our collective fates are inextricably linked.

    As we are currently seeing in the COVID-19 pandemic, public health and prevention measures are colliding with health services delivery and individual responsibility. Coexistence of approaches that take both of these  into account are interrelated and necessary.

    So how do we engage with the problematic work of scientists whose legacy is complicated? I would suggest three strategies to move toward a more nuanced understanding of their work in context.

    First, truth and reconciliation are necessary in the scientific record, including attention to citational practices when using or reporting on problematic work. This approach includes thinking critically about where and when to include historically problematic work and the context necessary for readers to understand the limitations of the ideas embedded in it. This will require commitments from journal editors, peer reviewers and the scientific community to invest in retrofitting existing publications with this expertise. They can do so by employing humanities scholars, journalists and other science communicators with the appropriate expertise to evaluate health and life sciences manuscripts submitted for publication.

    Second, diversifying the scientific workforce is crucial not only to asking new types of research questions and unlocking new discoveries but also to conducting better science. Other scholars have pointed out that feminist standpoint theory is helpful in understanding white empiricism and who is eligible to be a worthy observer of the human condition and our world. We can apply the same approach to scientific research. All of society loses when there are limited perspectives that are grounded in faulty notions of one or another group of humans’ potential. As my work and that of others have shown, the people most burdened by poor health conditions are more often the ones trying to address the underlying causes with innovative solutions and strategies that can be scientifically tested.

    Finally, we need new methods. One of the many gifts of the Human Genome Project was the creativity it spawned beyond revealing the secrets of the genome, such as new rules about public availability and use of data. Multiple labs and trainees were able to collaborate and share work while establishing independent careers. New rules of engagement emerged around the ethical, legal and social implications of the work. Undoing scientific racism will require commitments from the entire scientific community to determine the portions of historically problematic work that are relevant and to let the scientific method function the way it was designed—to allow for dated ideas to be debunked and replaced.

    The early work of Venter and Collins was foundational to my dissertation, which examined tumor markers of ovarian cancer. I spent time during my training at the NIH learning from these iconic clinicians and scholars and had occasion to meet and question both of them. As a person who uses science as one of many tools to understand the world, it is important to remain curious in our work. Creative minds should not be resistant to change when rigorous new data are presented. How we engage with old racist ideas is no exception.

    “The Last Refuge of Scoundrels” (SftP Magazine)

    Uncategorized, , , ,

    magazine.scienceforthepeople.org

    February 1, 2022

    New Evidence of E. O. Wilson’s Intimacy with Scientific Racism

    By Stacy Farina and Matthew Gibbons

    By Isabel Holtan

    The words “scientific racism” conjure up images of nineteenth century anthropologists measuring skulls with calipers. But it would be just as accurate to picture a Canadian psychologist in the 1980s obsessing over the size of genitals. That was J. Philippe Rushton, Professor of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Many have chronicled the story of Rushton’s disturbing attempts to enshrine his pseudoscientific beliefs about the biological basis of racial personality differences (from IQ, to sexual promiscuity, to criminality) into the scientific literature.1 But few know the full story, of which we present new evidence in this article, of the behind-the-scenes support Rushton received from eminent biologist E. O. Wilson.

    On December 26, 2021, Edward O. Wilson passed away at the age of 94. He is remembered fondly by most who interacted with him and engaged with his writings.2 He has a well-earned reputation as a fierce advocate for the conservation of biodiversity and a world-class expert on ants and other social animals.3 However, throughout his career, he faced charges of racism due to his attempts to use evolutionary theory to explain individual differences among humans in terms of their behaviors and social status. Wilson dodged these charges skillfully, almost never mentioning race in his work or public comments.

    Now that he has passed, the nature of his legacy has become a topic of intense debate. When Dr. Monica McLemore urged the scientific community to grapple with Wilson’s relationship with scientific racism in a Scientific American op-ed,4 she received swift and strong backlash from biologists and other supporters of Wilson. A few weeks later, Razib Khan, a blogger with a BS in genetics, wrote a letter of rebuttal claiming that these “accusations” are “baseless,”5 attracting dozens of academics to sign their names in support.6

    Racism in academia and education is a perennially relevant topic. The US Supreme Court recently agreed to hear cases that challenge affirmative action admissions at Harvard University and in the University of North Carolina.7 States throughout the country are banning or considering bans on the teaching of critical race theory.8 Demographics of faculty and graduate students in the US are far from reflecting the racial demographics of the country as a whole.9 Therefore, as Dr. McLemore put it, now is the time for “truth and reconciliation” as we confront how some prominent biologists have worked to lend credibility, both culturally and in the scientific record, to pseudoscientific notions of a biological racial hierarchy.

    Evolutionary ideas continue to be used by “race realists,” scientists and commentators alike, to promote ideology regarding the origin and implications of individual differences among humans that fall into socially-constructed racial groups.10 Anti-racism in evolutionary biology requires an honest confrontation of these issues. While many have done this important work through the decades, including Theodosius Dobzhansky, Jerry Hirsch, Stephen J. Gould, Richard Lewontin, and Joseph Graves Jr, there is still much more work to be done.11 When answering the question of why scientific racism persists to this day, we can look at how systems, and the people within those systems, work to maintain credibility of racist and deeply flawed ideas.

    Rushton died in 2012, but not before gaining a reputation as a prolific and outspoken racist. He spent the final decade of his life as head of the Pioneer Fund, a foundation that supports pseudoscientific research on race and is classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an extremist group with white nationalism as their core ideology. He also spent his time writing articles for Mankind Quarterly and giving presentations for conferences of the hate group American Renaissance.12 All the while, Rushton maintained his credentials as a tenured professor of psychology. To this day, many of his most infamous papers remain published, although some have been posthumously retracted in recent years.13

    We can’t know whether Rushton would have faded into obscurity without the professional support of his career by Wilson. However, while Rushton was a psychologist, he needed the backing of an evolutionary biologist to lend credibility to his biological claims.

    Wilson and Rushton’s relationship is not a story of “guilt by association” or of honest mistakes and unfortunate missteps. It is a story about how racist ideas are woven into the scientific record with the support of powerful allies who operate in secret. While this story is extraordinary, it is not unusual.

    “Dear Ed, … The battle continues, and I am now committed to carrying it to a victory, i.e., allowing genetic and evolutionary perspectives on race to be treated as normal science. … Again, my deepest appreciation for it all, With best regards, Phil.”

    At the request of the Library of Congress, Wilson donated much of the contents of his office—letters, reprints, conference proceedings, etc.—to the national archive. The Wilson Papers comprises hundreds of boxes of documents and numerous digital recordings. We started exploring these holdings in September 2021, out of our broad interest in the Sociobiology debate. We did not intend to investigate scientific racism. However, the four folders labeled “Rushton, John Philippe” caught our attention. And in light of the controversy initiated by the Scientific American op-ed, we hope to share them and provide additional context for understanding Wilson’s legacy and the broader legacy of scientific racism.14

    One of the most striking documents is an impassioned letter from Wilson to Professor Case Vanderwolf, a neuroscientist in Rushton’s department at the University of Western Ontario. Vanderwolf’s department was in the process of defending their decision to sanction Rushton for scholarly misconduct, including denying Rushton salary increase and disallowing him from teaching. This was at the height of Rushton’s infamy, sparking student protests and international media coverage. E. O. Wilson wrote a strong letter of support for Rushton that harshly criticized the Department of Psychology and University of Western Ontario with dramatic flair.

    “Dear Professor Vanderwolf: First rule for one who finds himself in a hole: stop digging. The University of Western Ontario is in a deep hole, being on the verge of violating academic freedom in a way that will give it notoriety of historic proportions.” Wilson’s letter begins, dated July 3, 1990 (box 143, folder 9). This was only months after Rushton made appearances on American talk shows by Geraldo Rivera and Phil Donahue to defend his claims about racial differences, fueling the broad notoriety that became characteristic of his late career.15

    Wilson’s letter continues, “To be sure, you and Professor Cain have found fault with Professor Rushton’s writings on race, but some noted specialists in human genetics and cognitive psychology have judged them to be sound and significant.” Wilson asks Vanderwolf to consider a poll that “found that a large minority of specialists of human genetics and testing believe in a partial hereditary basis for black-white average IQ differences.” Further, Wilson states that the National Association of Scholars (a right-wing advocacy group) is soon to publish an analysis “concluding that academic freedom is the issue in this case and that Rushton’s academic freedom is threatened.” The National Association of Scholars remains actively involved today in fighting affirmative action in higher education admissions and against the teaching of critical race theory.

    Vanderwolf replied a week later (box 143, folder 9) to clarify that he was not involved with the investigation, as Wilson had assumed, but was instead simply another professor at the University of Western Ontario who was greatly opposed to Rushton’s work. Vanderwolf writes to Wilson, “My disagreement with Rushton is that I believe he misrepresents data in his publications and that he is willing to accept the most dubious kinds of publications on par with well-conducted studies if they happen to agree with his own views. Would you accept an article in Penthouse Forum as evidence that black men have larger penises than white men? Rushton did.” Vanderwolf later detailed these and other criticisms in publications with the aforementioned Professor Cain.16

    Rushton thanked Wilson in a hand-written note (box 143, folder 9) dated July 17, 1990. “Dear Ed … Vanderwolf has been one of my harshest critics and the letters from you [Wilson] have given him cause to pause, and think.” Rushton promises to keep Wilson posted and states, “The battle continues, and I am now committed to carrying it to a victory, i.e., allowing genetic and evolutionary perspectives on race to be treated as normal science.” Rushton signs off with “Again, my deepest appreciation for it all, With best regards, Phil.”

    This exchange is not what spared Rushton’s career—from what we can tell, it was inconsequential to the investigation. But it is possible that the relationship that had developed in the decade prior between Rushton and Wilson contributed significantly to establishing Rushton’s scientific credibility, which he used successfully to appeal the charges of unethical scholarship by his institution and remain a tenured professor for the rest of his life.

    In 1986, Wilson sponsored Rushton’s paper “Gene-culture coevolution of complex social behavior: Human altruism and mate choice” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).17 PNAS is one of the most prestigious journals in the world, and publishing in this journal is a signal of merit and broad interest in an author and their work. However, unlike most journals, submitting to PNAS requires sponsorship from a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Sponsorship is not only an endorsement of the quality of the publication but an agreement to act as handling editor, sending the manuscript out for peer review and giving recommendations for revision and acceptance.

    The peer reviews were a mix of positive and negative feedback (box 143, folder 11). The first review was “highly favorable but [the reviewer] has some quibbles” and the second by a “friendly critic” was “very unfavorable.” Wilson asked Rushton to decide whether criticisms from the second reviewer could be “safely bypassed” while Wilson attempted to solicit another “tough but friendly reviewer.” Two months later, Wilson wrote to Rushton to inform him of his decision to accept the article. While there is no record in the collection of what happened in the interim, two months hardly seems enough time to overhaul the work, address the “very unfavorable” reviews, and make satisfactory revisions toward publishing in a prestigious journal such as PNAS.

    “Rushton is breaking the taboo and may, after hair-raising persecution, eventually get away with it. Free discussion, permitting fresh ideas and release of tensions, may be possible in the next ten years.”

    A year later, Rushton again asked Wilson to sponsor a PNAS article (box 143, folder 11). Wilson declined. This time, the article is explicitly about race, promoting Rushton’s now infamous ideas about applying r-K selection theory to racial differences.18 A few months later, Rushton submitted the paper to Ethology and Sociobiology, for which Wilson provided a strong positive review (box 143 folder 11), although it was eventually rejected.

    In Wilson’s September 1987 letter declining to sponsor this paper, he states, “You have my support in many ways, but for me to sponsor an article on racial differences in the PNAS would be counterproductive for both of us.” He recounts an incident of being attacked for his views and continues, “I have a couple of colleagues here, Gould and Lewontin, who would use any excuse to raise the charge again. So I’m the wrong person to sponsor the article, although I’d be glad to referee it for another, less vulnerable member of the National Academy.”19

    Despite Wilson’s self-perceived vulnerability, he stuck his neck out for Rushton on many occasions. He behaved in many ways like a mentor. The relationship between the two men is almost heartwarming, until you start reading Rushton’s overtly racist work.

    On July 1, 1989, Rushton received an evaluation from the Chair of the Promotion and Tenure (P&T) Committee, Dr. Greg Moran, rating his performance as “Unsatisfactory” (box 143, folder 11). Moran summarizes, “The members of the P&T committee were unanimous in their judgment that your overall performance in 1988–1989 was below the minimum acceptable level for a faculty member in this department.” While Rushton published extensively during this period, members of the committee “were of the unanimous opinion that your work on the genetic basis of race differences is substantially flawed and that your published record indicates serious scholarly deficiencies.” Rushton appealed the decision, and in his defense, he chiefly cited his numerous publications, some of which Wilson had helped to shape with his feedback in years prior through formal and informal communications (box 143 folder 11).

    ​​April 4, 1990, Wilson wrote to the Appeals Committee at the University of Western Ontario to support Rushton’s appeal of his Unsatisfactory rating (box 143 folder 9). Wilson argued that Rushton’s data and interpretation were “sound, being adapted in a straightforward way from well documented principles of r-K selection in biology.” He goes on to say that many other unnamed biologists agree with Wilson’s assessment, but added, “You may wonder why almost none have published their opinions. The answer is fear of being called racist, which is virtually a death sentence in American adademia [sic] if taken seriously. I admit that I myself have tended to avoid the subject of Rushton’s work, out of fear.”

    Wilson’s aforementioned July 1990 letter to Professor Vanderwolf, while ultimately inconsequential, calls attention to a message of support for Rushton from the National Association of Scholars through their publication Academic Questions. What Wilson does not mention is that Wilson himself solicited support for Rushton from the National Association of Scholars in a letter to its founder Stephen Balch on November 6, 1989 (box 143 folder 10). On December 5, 1989, Wilson writes to Rushton, copying Balch, with the following message: “I am very heartened by the response of the National Association of Scholars (Academic Questions) to your case… Much as they like, your [Rushton’s] critics simply will not be able to convict you of racism, and there will come a day when the more honest among them will rue the day they joined this leftward revival of McCarthyism.”

    A year later, on October 18, 1991, Rushton wrote Wilson an extensive letter of appreciation for his ongoing support (box 143, folder 9). Rushton had won his appeals, and the proceedings against him by his university had concluded. He boasted of a “solid” victory, “This year, on July 1, 1991, I received a rating of ‘Good’ despite an even greater percentage of my research being devoted to race differences.” He talks about his return to teaching “despite pickets, demonstrators, and the occasional class disruption.” He describes the important role that the National Association of Scholars played, facilitated by Wilson, in Rushton’s public defense.

    In this same letter, Rushton tells Wilson that he compiled a book of supportive letters, including from Wilson himself. “A copy sat in the departmental coffee room for several months and bolstered those colleagues who might otherwise have felt I was too isolated to support. It is uplifting to look at that book and realize the strength of character of those, such as yourself [Wilson], who came forward to articulate principles in aid of so unpopular a cause. I remain immensely grateful for your help.”

    Rushton never missed an opportunity to express his gratitude for Wilson’s support, and he was convinced that it played a major role in keeping his job. Rushton remained a Professor of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario for the remainder of his career, lending him credibility as he toured the country speaking to groups of neo-Nazis.

    It wasn’t enough for Wilson himself to support Rushton’s work. He also encouraged his friend and colleague Bernard Davis to do the same in May of 1990 (box 50, folder 19). At Wilson’s goading, Davis penned a letter in support of Rushton’s work on racial differences in IQ to The Scientist. Wilson wrote to Davis, “Rushton is breaking the taboo and may, after hair-raising persecution, eventually get away with it. Free discussion, permitting fresh ideas and release of tensions, may be possible in the next ten years.”

    Why was Wilson so sure that Davis would be willing to speak on Rushton’s work on race? While Wilson was cautious to rarely mention race publicly, Davis clearly had no such reservations. Davis was a professor at Harvard Medical School who was an outspoken opponent of affirmative action, particularly when it came to Black students earning admission to Harvard.20 Wilson’s papers reveal a close relationship with Davis (Box 50, 2 folders, Box 51, 6 folders), finding common ground and supporting each other against criticism leveled by Richard Lewontin.

    “[About] our favorite anti-racists of the Left, … my way of putting it would be that anti-racism is the last refuge of scoundrels.”

    Davis frequently had Wilson’s back, especially throughout Wilson’s most high-profile controversy: the debate with Lewontin and Gould, who were outspoken and relentless critics of Wilson’s Human Sociobiology. By Wilson’s own account in the previously quoted September 1987 letter to Rushton, the two Harvard colleagues and critics had a chilling effect on his ability to support Rushton’s race science. One might wonder whether Wilson would have been far bolder, like Davis, without constant pressure from scientists like Lewontin and Gould.

    This feud is well documented and has been the subject of much discussion about the nature of politics and ideology among scientists. But for Davis and Wilson, the “correct side” of the debate was obvious. In a letter to Davis (box 51, folder 5), Wilson provided some commentary about their “favorite anti-racists of the Left.” Wilson pontificated that arguing for equity among groups of people was ideologically similar to racism, adding the evocative phrase “my way of putting it would be that anti-racism is the last refuge of scoundrels.”

    This is one story of many that can be found among the letters of this famous biologist. The collection also includes correspondences between Wilson and notorious “race scientists” Arthur Jensen and Richard J. Herrnstein, and of course intense sparring with Gould and Lewontin. We encourage those with an interest to explore the collection.

    But this is a part of a much bigger story. Close ties between biologists and white supremacists continue to exist. Racists are often thrilled for an opportunity to see their ideology lent credibility by biologists, especially those of great renown. If we are to address the history and present of racism in the field of biology and in our society at large, we need to contextualize these stories. On the one hand, we may recognize how the system can nurture racist ideologies that are legitimized by scientists; on the other, we may draw inspiration from and continue the work of those “scoundrels” who relentlessly “raise the charge” against racist pseudoscience.

    —

    Stacy Farina and Matthew Gibbons are a wife and husband team with an interest in the history of science. Dr. Farina is an Assistant Professor at Howard University with a PhD in Evolutionary Biology. Matthew Gibbons has a BA in Humanities and works in public health.

    Notes

    1. Andrew S. Winston, “Scientific Racism and North American Psychology,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.516; Joseph L. Graves, “What a Tangled Web He Weaves: Race, Reproductive Strategies and Rushton’s Life History Theory,” Anthropological Theory 2, no. 2 (June 1, 2002): 131–54, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1469962002002002627.
    2. Scott Neuman, “E.O. Wilson, Famed Entomologist and Pioneer in the Field of Sociobiology, Dies at 92,” NPR, December 27, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/12/27/1068238333/e-o-wilson-dead-sociobiology-entomology-ant-man; Felicia He, “E.O. Wilson, Renowned Harvard Biologist Known as ‘Darwin’s Natural Heir,’ Dies at 92,” The Harvard Crimson, December 31, 2021, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/12/31/edward-wilson-obit/; Bert Hölldobler, “Edward Osborne Wilson, Naturalist (1929-2021),” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 119, no. 5 (February 1, 2022), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2200201119.
    3. Doug Tallamy, “Remembering E.O. Wilson’s Wish for a More Sustainable Existence,” December 27, 2021, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/remembering-eo-wilsons-wish-for-a-more-sustainable-existence-180979298/.
    4. Monica R. McLemore, “The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson,” Scientific American, December 29, 2021, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-legacy-of-e-o-wilson/.
    5. Razib Khan, “Setting the Record Straight: Open Letter on E.O. Wilson’s Legacy,” Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning (blog), January 19, 2022, https://razib.substack.com/p/setting-the-record-straight-open.
    6. After the revelation that the blogger held white nationalist views, several academics retracted their signatures. But many maintain that they are in agreement with the blog’s contents.
    7. Adam Liptak and Anemona Hartocollis, “Supreme Court Will Hear Challenge to Affirmative Action at Harvard and U.N.C,” The New York Times, January 24, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/us/politics/supreme-court-affirmative-action-harvard-unc.html.
    8. Liz Crampton, “GOP Sees ‘huge Red Wave’ Potential by Targeting Critical Race Theory,” POLITICO, January 5, 2022, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/05/gop-red-wave-critical-race-theory-526523.
    9. Maya L. Gosztyla et al., “Responses to 10 Common Criticisms of Anti-Racism Action in STEMM,” PLoS Computational Biology 17, no. 7 (July 2021): e1009141, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009141.
    10. Nuno M. C. Martins, Michael J. Carson, and the Genetics and Society Working Group, “What Can Current Genetic Testing Technologies Tell You About ‘Race’?” Science for the People, November 19, 2021,  https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/lewontin-special-issue/genetics-of-race-gswg/.
    11. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (W. W. Norton, 1996); Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (Haymarket Books, 2017); Joseph L. Graves Jr, The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (Rutgers University Press, 2003).
    12. Mankind Quarterly is “a pseudoscientific journal founded after the Second World War to argue against desegregation and racial mixing.” See Angela Saini, “The Internet Is a Cesspool of Racist Pseudoscience,” Scientific American Blog Network, accessed January 31, 2022, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-internet-is-a-cesspool-of-racist-pseudoscience/.
    13. J. P. Rushton, “RETRACTED: An Evolutionary Theory of Health, Longevity, and Personality: Sociobiology and r/K Reproductive Strategies,” Psychological Reports 60, no. 2 (April 1987): 539–49; J. P. Rushton, “RETRACTED: Contributions to the History of Psychology: XC. Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (with Reference to Oriental-White-Black Differences): The 1989 AAAS Paper,” Psychological Reports 71, no. 3 Pt 1 (December 1992): 811–21; J. P. Rushton, “RETRACTED: Race and Crime: International Data for 1989-1990,” Psychological Reports 76, no. 1 (February 1995): 307–12; J. Philippe Rushton and Donald I. Templer, “RETRACTED: Do Pigmentation and the Melanocortin System Modulate Aggression and Sexuality in Humans as They Do in Other Animals?,” Personality and Individual Differences 53, no. 1 (July 1, 2012): 4–8.
    14. The materials presented in this article have not, to our knowledge, been made available to the participants on either side of the debate on Wilson’s legacy.
    15. Antony Violanti, “A Researcher, or a Racist? Ontario Professor Draws Fire for Theory That Links Intelligence and Race,” Janurary 16, 1991, The Buffalo News, https://buffalonews.com/news/a-researcher-or-a-racist-ontario-professor-draws-fire-for-theory-that-links-intelligence-and/article_a8e0861e-2725-5c7d-829b-0327202b671a.html.
    16. C. H. Vanderwolf and D. P. Cain, “The Neurobiology of Race and Kipling’s Cat,” Personality and Individual Differences 12, no. 1 (January 1, 1991): 97–98, https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(91)90138-2; Donald P. Cain and C. H. Vanderwolf, “A Critique of Rushton on Race, Brain Size and Intelligence,” Personality and Individual Differences 11, no. 8 (January 1, 1990): 777–84, https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(90)90185-T.
    17. J. P. Rushton, C. H. Littlefield, and C. J. Lumsden, “Gene-Culture Coevolution of Complex Social Behavior: Human Altruism and Mate Choice,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 83, no. 19 (October 1986): 7340–43, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.83.19.7340.
    18. In summary, r-K selection theory was a term coined by Wilson to describe how evolutionary forces may act to produce two types of reproductive strategies: “r” in which organisms produce many offspring with little parental care and “K” in which organisms produce few offspring and care for them greatly. In his pseudoscientific analyses, Rushton proposed that people of African ancestry were “r” strategists and people of European and Asian ancestry were “K” strategists. Rushton was swiftly and widely criticized for using heinously inappropriate and racist lines of evidence and reasoning, from a scholarly and ethical perspective.
    19. Helen Fisher, “‘Wilson,’ They Said, ‘Your All Wet!,’” The New York Times, October 16, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/16/books/wilson-they-said-your-all-wet.html.
    20. R. D. Davis, “Academic Standards in Medical Schools,” The New England Journal of Medicine 294, no. 20 (May 13, 1976): 1118–19, ​​https://doi.org/10.1056/nejm197605132942013.

    Michael Balter: When the Hagiography Stops and the Truth-Telling Begins: The Legacy of E.O. Wilson

    Uncategorized, , , , , ,

    michaelbalter.substack.com

    Michael Balter

    Feb. 7, 2022

    Jim Harrison/ Wikimedia Commons

    When an illustrious person dies, the hagiography usually starts while the body is still warm. The death of biologist E.O. Wilson last December 26 was no exception to this general rule. Of course, it’s considered impolite and in bad taste to speak ill of the dead right after they leave us; it can be the worst form of talking behind someone’s back. Yet there are no firm rules about when it is okay to do so. In some cases, colleagues, journalists, and other commenters never get around to “warts and all” portraits of the departed, especially when there are inconvenient truths involved. But all too often, defenders of the deceased’s reputation take it upon themselves to police the conversation, and attack those who do want to examine the warts, especially if they do it “too soon.”

    I don’t doubt that Wilson is being rightly praised for his advocacy of biodiversity conservation and his contributions to our understanding of the natural world, especially that of ants and other insects. But the inconvenient truth is that Wilson, back in 1975, gave a major boost to genetic and evolutionary explanations for human behavior when he published his massive tome, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, to the acclaim of those convinced that biology played a bigger role in human affairs than previously appreciated, and the condemnation of those who thought it played an even lesser role.

    In doing so, it has been argued, Wilson also provided considerable cover to racists who have long argued that inequities in human societies—most notably, socioeconomic differences between Blacks and whites in the United States—are due to biological differences rather than structural flaws in our society. And yet, at the time Wilson’s book was published, those who objected to his ideas—or more specifically, their application to human societies—were the ones who got accused of being politically motivated.

    The first round of Wilson obituaries reflected this political bias very clearly. The “Sociobiology Wars,” as they came to be known, were treated in some obits as a kind of quaint and colorful ancient history, caricatured by one of their most memorable episodes: Anti-racist activists dumping a pitcher of water on Wilson’s head during a debate at the 1978 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

    In his obituary of Wilson for the New York Times, evolution writer Carl Zimmer gave short shrift to the critics of sociobiology, describing the Sociobiology Wars as follows:

    In a letter to The New York Review of Books, some denounced sociobiology as an attempt to reinvigorate tired old theories of biological determinism — theories, they claimed, that “provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.”

    In her book “Defenders of the Truth” (2000), Dr. Segerstrale wrote that Dr. Wilson’s critics had shown “an astounding disregard” for what he had written, arguing that they had used “Sociobiology” as an opportunity to promote their own agendas. When Dr. Wilson attended a 1978 debate about sociobiology, protesters rushed the stage shouting, “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” A woman dumped ice water on him, shouting, “Wilson, you are all wet!”

    Likewise, in Science’s Retrospective of Wilson, Stuart Pimm of Duke University dismissed sociobiology’s critics in similar terms:

    In his 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Ed reported a monumental survey of the wide range of animal societies, including our own. That natural selection might shape human behaviors was questioned by some. Many critics made ad hominem attacks, which were short on scientific content. Ed responded vigorously, noting that the adaptive value of animal behaviors was not in dispute, however disturbing this might be to political philosophies. During this time, someone famously threw water onto Ed at a meeting—the amount involved grows with every telling of the story. When Ed told it, it was with a twinkle and an appreciation of this unique honor.

    For anyone who was not around at the time, these hagiographic accounts (please read their entire texts for support for that statement) might leave the impression that the only opponents of Wilson’s application of sociobiological thinking to human affairs were crazy left-wing activists. But the truth is that noted scientists, including Wilson’s Harvard colleagues Richard Lewontin, Ruth Hubbard, and Stephen Jay Gould, were among those who carefully examined Wilson’s ideas and found them to be in the long and sordid tradition of racial thinking about human biology. At around the same time, Harvard Medical School geneticist Jon Beckwith and others founded a Sociobiology Study Group to discuss and analyze Wilson’s book and develop a critique of his ideas, based both on solid science and the history of scientific racism.

    I was around at the time, a graduate student in biology at UCLA and a member of Science for the People, the organization Beckwith and some other Wilson critics belonged to. Since most of the action was on the East Coast, especially in Boston and Cambridge, MA, I was not an active member, other than subscribing to the group’s eponymous magazine. But I did follow things closely, including the infamous water pitcher episode, and the 1976 publication of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, which greatly expanded on the idea that humans were largely at the mercy of our genes (a conclusion that Dawkins, with limited success, has tried to refute.)

    But now, barely a month after Wilson’s death and while the hagiography is still more or less in full swing, we are suddenly faced with revelations that leave little doubt Wilson was—behind the scenes, and despite his public protests—a racist, or minimally, a sympathizer of race science (which is the same thing.) The scoop goes to Science for the People magazine in its new incarnation (the publication was moribund for many years), in a February 1 article by Stacy Farina and Matthew Gibbons, a wife and husband team (Farina is an assistant professor at Howard University with a PhD in evolutionary biology, and Gibbons works in public health.)

    Digging into Wilson’s letters held at the U.S. national archives, Farina and Gibbons came across a trove of correspondence between Wilson and the late scientific racist J. Philippe Rushton, who died in 2012. I will leave it to readers to look at this painfully clear article, but in my view it leaves no doubt that Wilson wholeheartedly supported, encouraged, and cheered on Rushton’s bogus and long discredited attempts to show that differences between Blacks and whites in IQ, socioeconomic status, and other measures were based on biological racial differences. There is no ambiguity here, which is making it very difficult for Wilson’s apologists to question the evidence (although they will still try.)

    And it turns out that while Farina and Gibbons were working in the archives, an independent pair of historians of science, Mark Borrello of the University of Minnesota and David Sepkoski at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, were looking at the same documents and coming to the same conclusions. Their somewhat more comprehensive analysis, published on February 5 in The New York Review of Books, leaves little doubt about Wilson’s real thinking. And should it be that much of surprise? Nearly all the obituaries of Wilson emphasize his roots in Alabama and the segregated University of Alabama, and depict him as a southern gentleman scientist—without any examination of the possibility that the prejudices of growing up in the south might have left their mark on Wilson’s psyche.

    This new evidence matters greatly, because over all these years the conceit of Wilson and his defenders has been that they were champions of scientific truth, and their critics were driven by politics and ideology. Indeed, the term “race realism,” used by Rushton and other scientific racists as a bludgeon against anti-racists and an attempt to depict them as cowards who cannot face what science allegedly tells them, can now clearly be seen as evidence of Wilson’s own attitudes and biases (Wilson was no shrinking violet in defending his ideas, as even the hagiographic retrospectives make clear.)

    In their next to last paragraph, Borrello and Sepkoski lay out clearly what is at stake in a proper and accurate understanding of Wilson’s real legacy when it comes to his writings on sociobiology, which have been very influential in the years since:

    Preserving a naively hagiographic picture of his career obscures the extent to which racist and sexist bias remains a glaring vulnerability of the science that has been built on his theories; indeed, such bias can motivate and blind scientists to deeply flawed interpretations of data. Racism in science, today, rarely announces itself with a white hood. Rather, it persists in tacit and unspoken assumptions, and hides behind claims of the inherent objectivity of scientific research. 

    In what follows, I would like to go back over the history of the Sociobiology Wars, and attempt to salvage—as others have tried over the years—the true history of these debates. They did not consist only of activists running around with water pitchers, a very minor part of the story, but serious and conscientious scientists trying to point out fallacies in a theory of human behavior that has left its damaging marks in today’s discourse about race and justice.

    My purpose is not to do a deep dive into sociobiology and the arguments pro and con, but simply to remind readers—and alert those new to the debate—that there were serious scientific issues involved, not just left vs. right politics.

    “The use and abuse of biology”

    The late anthropologist Marshall Sahlins/ Elkziz/ Wikimedia Commons

    In 1976, the year after Wilson’s Sociobiology was published and the same year Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene appeared, Marshall Sahlins—a major figure in anthropology who died last year—published his own contribution to this literature: The use and abuse of biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology.

    It’s a slim volume, only 120 pages, but certainly not a political diatribe. Sahlins argues, in effect, that anthropology is too important and too laden with its own facts and data to be left to geneticists, evolutionary biologists, and other scientists who often know more about ants and fruit flies than about human beings. Moreover, as Sahlins points out with many examples from societies around the world, human culture is too complicated—too cultural, as it were—to be reduced to simple biology, or even complex biology.

    Sahlins spends a lot of the book discussing sociobiological notions of kinship and kin selection, which have been key to the thinking of sociobiologists over the decades (Wilson developed his own spin on how natural selection was acting, which I will get to shortly.) In essence, organisms, including humans, act in such ways as to increase the likelihood that their genes will get passed on to future generations. While not all proponents of this concept endorse Dawkins’ depressing contention that genes evolved to “swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control”—especially because the lumbering robots included us humans—the idea that human behavior can be largely explained by what is best for the replication of our genes has stuck hard in much biological thinking, even today.

    (I should point out here that sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists—the latter being sort of latter-day sociobiologists—are always quick to insist that they recognize a role for the environment, and Wilson always did so when criticized. The problem is that it’s a no-brainer that environment is involved, and this disclaimer often serves to justify returning to a focus on genes as if some sort of technicality has been dealt with.)

    In his book, Sahlins provided a lot of examples of cultures, studied by anthropologists, in which kinship is not defined by those who are genetically closest, but in all kinds of other ways, including ties that have nothing to do with genealogy. In doing so, he paints a much more realistic portrait of human relationships, in which we often may be more willing to die for someone who is not genetically related to us at all than a close relative (eg, an estranged sibling or parent.)

    Sahlins writes:

    The reason why human social behavior is not organized by the individual maximization of genetic interest is that human beings are not socially defined by their organic qualities but in terms of symbolic attributes; and a symbol is precisely a meaningful value—such as “close kinship” or “shared blood”—which cannot be determined by the physical properties of that to which it refers.

    Before leaving Sahlins, I should qualify what I say above by pointing out that he did not argue that a “political framework” should not be used in analyzing sociobiology and its weaknesses in explaining human behavior. But what he did insist on is that the politics is at its root anthropological, ie, the way we describe human societies. Thus sociobiology is itself profoundly political, he concluded:

    What is inscribed in the theory of sociobiology is the entrenched ideology of Western society: the assurance of its naturalness, and the claim of its inevitability.”

    There is an interesting wrinkle in Wilson’s view of how natural selection operated, however, which eventually diverged from the strict focus on kin or individual selection. Dawkins and others before him, including the British evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith, waged a fierce war against the concept of group selection, in which natural selection is postulated to act on groups of individuals rather than individuals themselves. Wilson, however, eventually threw in his lot with advocates of “multilevel” selection (what might perhaps be called group selection lite, or kin selection heavy), particularly in collaboration with the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson (no relation)—the proposition that evolution can act on both the group and individual level. The two Wilsons published, in 2007, a paper in The Quarterly Review of Biology, “Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology,” which led some diehard kin selection theorists to declare that E.O. Wilson had betrayed his own cause.

    Thinking and studying sociobiology

    Jonathan Marks /University of North Carolina

    Marshall Sahlins’ foray into the sociobiology wars was just one example of anthropologists trying to weigh in with their own insights into human behavior. One of the best critiques, in my opinion, was penned by Jonathan Marks—now an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and author of “What it means to be 98% chimpanzee” and “Why I am not a scientist”—when he was still a graduate student at the University of Arizona.

    In a 1980 paper for the Arizona Anthropologist, “Sociobiology, Selfish Genes, and Human Behavior: A Bio-Cultural Critique”, Marks engaged in a witty but cogent skewering of sociobiology’s misconceptions. Among his most important criticisms, in my view, is the use by sociobiologists of what the naturalist Ernst Mayr called “beanbag genetics,” in which genes are imagined as discrete entities which code for complex behaviors such as altruism, aggression, selfishness, conformity, and other attributes. Looking at genes that way made the mathematics of calculating the effects of kin selection on evolution easier, Marks pointed out; but it has resulted in severe oversimplifications that actually obscure what is going on, especially in the evolution of human behavior (if, indeed, human behavior is something that actually genetically evolves.)

    Marks wrote:

    Given the knowledge that a simple behavior such as aggregation in slime molds involves the interaction of fifty genes (May 1976), one may conclude that ‘conformity’ in humans, if genetically based, would be a very formidable genetic system.

    This critique, by Marks and others, was prophetic. Modern genetic research reveals that there are unlikely to be individual genes for “altruism” or other traits that geneticists have tried to mathematically model in the past, but rather a constellation of hundreds or thousands of genes involved, each one adding a tiny statistical weight to the genetic makeup of an individual—and, in the end, rendering the notion of genetic determinism for any human trait essentially meaningless. This is certainly the lesson of today’s Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS), which often require cohorts of many thousands of subjects to detect any genetic variation at all. (For more on this, I highly recommend the writings of Eric Turkheimer, a behavior geneticist who has questioned some of the commons assumptions of his field.)

    Marks again:

    Sociobiology of humans, without theoretical underpinnings in ‘beanbag genetics’… is a statement of social philosophy, not science; for without genes for altruism, one cannot speak of its evolution, except in a metaphorical sense. And to accept a metaphor as literally binding is surely a breach of logic.

    I recommend reading Marks’ entire paper, as well as Chapter 9 in Jon Beckwith’s memoir, Making Genes, Making Waves, “It’s the Devil in Your DNA,” a chronicle of the Sociobiology Study Group and the Sociobiology Wars which certainly corresponds to how I myself remember them. Beckwith points out that the publication of Wilson’s Sociobiology was accompanied (as his death is now) with multitudes of uncritical media stories heralding the new biological explanations for sometimes mysterious human behavior—in the New York Times, People, Cosmopolitan, Playboy, Time (a cover story), Reader’s Digest, and even House and Garden.

    To try to counter these one-sided accounts, Beckwith and other critics of sociobiology argued that genetic determinism (they insisted that was what sociobiology was, even if glossed up in a more sophisticated scientific veneer) was a key principle of eugenics, Nazism, and, in our day, attempts to justify unequal treatment of different groups in employment, housing, education, and other areas of life.

    And of course, sociobiology was not the end of it. Some researchers believe that evolutionary psychology is the heir to sociobiology, with its panoply of “just-so” evolutionary stories for complex human behavior; and that every few years or so there is a media frenzy over recycled theories of human racial differences (The Bell Curve, published in 1994 by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, is still the subject of lively debate today; for evidence that racially motivated theories in science are again on the rise, please see Superior: The return of race science by Angela Saini.)

    Jon Beckwith/ Harvard Medical School

    It’s going to be interesting to see what Wilson’s defenders and apologists make of his newly revealed correspondence with Rushton. Some will no doubt insist that Wilson was simply encouraging Rushton’s right to free academic inquiry, not endorsing his racist conclusions. I think that’s going to be a hard case to make; and the inquiry into Wilson’s true views is not likely to be over. There will be other letters, hidden away in archives or in the files of his friends, which may also see the light of day.

    Wilson vociferously insisted, from the 1975 publication of his famous book to pretty much the day he died, that his critics were driven by political bias, but not him. That was never a credible claim. Now, with the revelations of his personal racism, it has no credibility at all.

    Suggested reading.

    Beckwith, Jon. Making Genes, Making Waves: A social activist in science. (2002)

    Sahlins, Marshall. The use and abuse of biology: An anthropological critique of sociobiology. (1976)

    Saini, Angela. Superior: The return of race science. (2019)

    Segerstrale, Ullica. Defenders of the Truth. (2000)

    In addition, Jon Beckwith provided me with a detailed bibliography of papers by members of the Sociobiology Study Group and other critics:

    Sociobiology: The Debate Evolves. A Special Double Issue (The Philosophical Forum: A Quarterly, vol XIII, nos 2-3, 1981-82) 

    Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature, by Philip Kitcher (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1985)

    Allen, E. et al. Against Sociobiology. The New York Review of Books. pp. 182, 184-6 (Nov. 13, 1975)  Reprinted in A. Caplan- . in The Sociobiology Debate.  ed. by A. Caplan.  Harper & Row. New York . pp. 259-264 (1978) 

    Alper, J.S., Beckwith, J.. Chorover, S., Hunt, J., Inouye, H., Judd, T., Lange, R.V., and Sternberg, P.  The Implications of Sociobiology: Science.192:424-427 (1976). 

    Alper, J., Beckwith, J., and Miller, L.  Sociobiology is a Political Issue. in The Sociobiology Debate.  ed. by A. Caplan.  Harper & Row. New York 476‑488 (l978).  

    Alper, J., Beckwith, J. and Egelman, E. Misusing Sociobiology. The Harvard Crimson. Nov. 19, 1979.  

    Beckwith, J. Triumphalism in science. (A review of The Triumph of Sociobiology, by J. Alcock., Oxford Univ. Press, 2001). American Scientist. 89:461-472 (2001). 

    Beckwith, J.  The Political Uses of Sociobiology in the United States and Europe.  The Philosophical Forum. XIII, #2, Winter, l98l, p. 3ll‑32l.  

    Beckwith, J.  Biological Backlash: A book review of K. Bock. Human Nature and History: A Response to Sociobiology.  Technology Review. Oct. l98l. p.30.  

    Can Skeletons Have a Racial Identity? (New York Times)

    Uncategorized, , , ,

    nytimes.com

    Sabrina Imbler

    A growing number of forensic researchers are questioning how the field interprets the geographic ancestry of human remains.
    Forensic anthropologists have relied on features of face and skull bones, known as morphoscopic traits, such as the post-bregmatic depression — a dip on the top of the skull — to estimate ancestry.
    Credit: John M. Daugherty/Science Source

    Oct. 19, 2021, 2:30 a.m. ET

    Racial reckonings were happening everywhere in the summer of 2020, after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis by the police. The time felt right, two forensic anthropologists reasoned, to reignite a conversation about the role of race in their own field, where specialists help solve crimes by analyzing skeletons to determine who those people were and how they died.

    Dr. Elizabeth DiGangi of Binghamton University and Jonathan Bethard of the University of South Florida published a letter in The Journal of Forensic Science that questioned the longstanding practice of estimating ancestry, or a person’s geographic origin, as a proxy for estimating race. Ancestry, along with height, age at death and assigned sex, is one of the key details that many forensic anthropologists try to determine.

    That fall, they published a longer paper with a more ambitious call to action: “We urge all forensic anthropologists to abolish the practice of ancestry estimation.”

    In recent years, a growing number of forensic anthropologists have grown critical of ancestry estimation and want to replace it with something more nuanced.

    Criminal cases in which the victim’s identity is entirely unknown are rare. But in these instances, some forensic anthropologists argue, a tool like ancestry estimation can be crucial.

    The assessment of race has been a part of forensic anthropology since the field’s inception a century ago. The earliest scholars were white men who studied human skulls to support racist beliefs. Ales Hrdlicka, a physical anthropologist who joined the Smithsonian Institution in 1903, was a eugenicist who looted human remains for his collections and sought to classify humans into different races based on certain appearances and traits.

    An expert on skeletons, Dr. Hrdlicka helped law enforcement identify human remains, laying the blueprint for the professional field. Forensic anthropologists thereafter were expected to produce a profile with the “Big Four” — age at death, sex, height and race.

    In the 1990s, as more scientists debunked the myth of biological race — the notion that the humans species is divided into distinct races — anthropologists grew sharply divided over the issue. One survey found that 50 percent of physical anthropologists accepted the idea of a biological concept of race, while 42 rejected it. At the time, some researchers still used terms like “Caucasoid,” “Mongoloid” and “Negroid” to describe skeletons, and DNA as a forensic tool was still many years away. Today in the U.S., the field of forensic anthropology is 87 percent white.

    The anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka, right, in 1925.
    Credit: Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy

    In 1992, Norman Sauer, an anthropologist at Michigan State University, suggested dropping the term “race,” which he considered loaded, and replacing it with “ancestry.” The term became universal. But some researchers contend that little changed about the practice.

    When Shanna Williams, a forensic anthropologist at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville, was in graduate school around a decade ago, it was still customary to sort skeletons into one of the “Big Three” possible populations — African, Asian or European.

    But Dr. Williams grew suspicious of the idea and the way ancestry was often assigned. She saw skulls designated as “Hispanic,” a term that refers to a language group and has no biological meaning. She considered how the field might try, and fail, to sort her own skull. “My mom is white, and my dad is Black,” she said. “Do I fit that mold? Am I perfectly one thing or the other?”

    The body of a skeleton can provide a person’s age or height. But the question of ancestry is reserved for the skull — specifically, features of face and skull bones, known as morphoscopic traits, that vary across different groups of humans and can occur more frequently in certain populations.

    One trait, called the post-bregmatic depression, is a small indentation located on top of some people’s heads. For a long time, forensic anthropologists assumed that if the skull was indented, the person may be Black.

    But forensic anthropologists know little else about the post-bregmatic depression. “There’s not been any understanding as to why this trait exists, what causes it, and what it means,” Dr. Bethard said.

    Moreover, the science linking the trait and African ancestry was flawed. In 2003, Joe Hefner, a forensic anthropologist at Michigan State University, used trait lists from a key textbook, “Skeletal Attribution of Race,” to examine more than 700 skulls for his masters thesis. He found that the post-bregmatic depression was present in only 40 percent of people with African ancestry, and is actually more common in many other populations.

    Of the 17 morphoscopic traits typically used to estimate ancestry, only five have been studied for whether they are heritable, making it unclear why the unstudied traits would correspond with specific populations. “There’s been this use and reuse of these traits without a fundamental understanding of what they even are,” Dr. Bethard said.

    Nonetheless, Dr. Hefner said, if nothing is known about a victim beyond the shape of their skull, ancestry might hold the key to their identity.

    He cited a recent example in Michican in which the police had a skull that they believed belonged to a missing woman, one of two who were reported missing in the county at the time. When Dr. Hefner examined it and searched the list of missing people in the area, he concluded that the skull might have come from a missing Southeast Asian male. “They sent us his dental records over and five minutes later we had identified this person,” Dr. Hefner said.

    Dr. DiGangi worries that these estimations could suggest to the police that biological race is real and increase racial bias. “When I say to the police, ‘OK, I took these measurements, I looked at these things on the skull and this person is African-American,’ of course they’re going to think it’s biological,” Dr. DiGangi said. “Why would they not?”

    To what extent this concern plays out in the real world is hard to measure, however.

    Dr. Shanna Williams, a forensic anthropologist and professor in South Carolina, grew suspicious of the idea of the way ancestry was assigned when in graduate school.
    Credit: Juan Diego Reyes for The New York Times

    For the past two years, Ann Ross, a forensic anthropologist at North Carolina State University, has pushed the American Academy of Forensic Sciences Standards Board to replace ancestry estimation with something new: population affinity.

    Whereas ancestry aims to trace back to a continent of origin, population affinity aims to align someone with a population, such as Panamanian. This more nuanced framework looks at how the larger history of a place or community can lead to significant differences between populations that are otherwise geographically close.

    A recent paper by Dr. Ross and Dr. Williams, who are close friends, examines Panama and Colombia as a test case. An ancestry estimation might suggest people from both countries would have similarly shaped skulls. But population affinity acknowledges that the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonization by Spain resulted in new communities living in Panama that changed the makeup of the country’s population. “Because of those historical events, individuals from Panama are very, very different from those from Colombia,” said Dr. Ross, who is Panamanian.

    Dr. Ross even designed her own software, 3D-ID, in place of Fordisc, the most commonly used forensic software that categorizes skulls into inconsistent terms: White. Black. Hispanic. Guatemalan. Japanese.

    Other anthropologists say that, for all practical purposes, their own ancestry estimations have become affinity estimations. Kate Spradley, a forensic anthropologist at Texas State University, works with the unidentified remains of migrants found near the U.S.-Mexico border. “When we reference data that uses local population groups, that’s really affinity, not ancestry,” Dr. Spradley said.

    In her work, Dr. Spradley uses missing persons’ databases from multiple countries that do not always share DNA data. The bones are often weathered, fragmenting the DNA. Estimating affinity can “help to provide a preponderance of evidence,” Dr. Spradley said.

    Still, Dr. DiGangi said that switching to affinity may not address racial biases in law enforcement. Until she sees evidence that bias does not preclude people from becoming identified, she says, she does not want a “checkbox” that gets at ancestry or affinity.

    As of mid-October, Dr. Ross is waiting for the American Academy of Forensic Sciences Standards Board to set a vote to determine whether ancestry estimation should be replaced with population affinity. But the larger debate — over how to bridge the gap between a person’s bones and identity in real life — is far from settled.

    “In 10 or 20 years, we might find a better way to do it,” Dr. Williams said. “I hope that’s the case.”

    Developing Algorithms That Might One Day Be Used Against You (Gizmodo)

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    gizmodo.com

    Ryan F. Mandelbaum, Jan 24, 2021

    Brian Nord is an astrophysicist and machine learning researcher.
    Brian Nord is an astrophysicist and machine learning researcher. Photo: Mark Lopez/Argonne National Laboratory

    Machine learning algorithms serve us the news we read, the ads we see, and in some cases even drive our cars. But there’s an insidious layer to these algorithms: They rely on data collected by and about humans, and they spit our worst biases right back out at us. For example, job candidate screening algorithms may automatically reject names that sound like they belong to nonwhite people, while facial recognition software is often much worse at recognizing women or nonwhite faces than it is at recognizing white male faces. An increasing number of scientists and institutions are waking up to these issues, and speaking out about the potential for AI to cause harm.

    Brian Nord is one such researcher weighing his own work against the potential to cause harm with AI algorithms. Nord is a cosmologist at Fermilab and the University of Chicago, where he uses artificial intelligence to study the cosmos, and he’s been researching a concept for a “self-driving telescope” that can write and test hypotheses with the help of a machine learning algorithm. At the same time, he’s struggling with the idea that the algorithms he’s writing may one day be biased against him—and even used against him—and is working to build a coalition of physicists and computer scientists to fight for more oversight in AI algorithm development.

    This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

    Gizmodo: How did you become a physicist interested in AI and its pitfalls?

    Brian Nord: My Ph.d is in cosmology, and when I moved to Fermilab in 2012, I moved into the subfield of strong gravitational lensing. [Editor’s note: Gravitational lenses are places in the night sky where light from distant objects has been bent by the gravitational field of heavy objects in the foreground, making the background objects appear warped and larger.] I spent a few years doing strong lensing science in the traditional way, where we would visually search through terabytes of images, through thousands of candidates of these strong gravitational lenses, because they’re so weird, and no one had figured out a more conventional algorithm to identify them. Around 2015, I got kind of sad at the prospect of only finding these things with my eyes, so I started looking around and found deep learning.

    Here we are a few years later—myself and a few other people popularized this idea of using deep learning—and now it’s the standard way to find these objects. People are unlikely to go back to using methods that aren’t deep learning to do galaxy recognition. We got to this point where we saw that deep learning is the thing, and really quickly saw the potential impact of it across astronomy and the sciences. It’s hitting every science now. That is a testament to the promise and peril of this technology, with such a relatively simple tool. Once you have the pieces put together right, you can do a lot of different things easily, without necessarily thinking through the implications.

    Gizmodo: So what is deep learning? Why is it good and why is it bad?

    BN: Traditional mathematical models (like the F=ma of Newton’s laws) are built by humans to describe patterns in data: We use our current understanding of nature, also known as intuition, to choose the pieces, the shape of these models. This means that they are often limited by what we know or can imagine about a dataset. These models are also typically smaller and are less generally applicable for many problems.

    On the other hand, artificial intelligence models can be very large, with many, many degrees of freedom, so they can be made very general and able to describe lots of different data sets. Also, very importantly, they are primarily sculpted by the data that they are exposed to—AI models are shaped by the data with which they are trained. Humans decide what goes into the training set, which is then limited again by what we know or can imagine about that data. It’s not a big jump to see that if you don’t have the right training data, you can fall off the cliff really quickly.

    The promise and peril are highly related. In the case of AI, the promise is in the ability to describe data that humans don’t yet know how to describe with our ‘intuitive’ models. But, perilously, the data sets used to train them incorporate our own biases. When it comes to AI recognizing galaxies, we’re risking biased measurements of the universe. When it comes to AI recognizing human faces, when our data sets are biased against Black and Brown faces for example, we risk discrimination that prevents people from using services, that intensifies surveillance apparatus, that jeopardizes human freedoms. It’s critical that we weigh and address these consequences before we imperil people’s lives with our research.

    Gizmodo: When did the light bulb go off in your head that AI could be harmful?

    BN: I gotta say that it was with the Machine Bias article from ProPublica in 2016, where they discuss recidivism and sentencing procedure in courts. At the time of that article, there was a closed-source algorithm used to make recommendations for sentencing, and judges were allowed to use it. There was no public oversight of this algorithm, which ProPublica found was biased against Black people; people could use algorithms like this willy nilly without accountability. I realized that as a Black man, I had spent the last few years getting excited about neural networks, then saw it quite clearly that these applications that could harm me were already out there, already being used, and we’re already starting to become embedded in our social structure through the criminal justice system. Then I started paying attention more and more. I realized countries across the world were using surveillance technology, incorporating machine learning algorithms, for widespread oppressive uses.

    Gizmodo: How did you react? What did you do?

    BN: I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel; I wanted to build a coalition. I started looking into groups like Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Machine Learning, plus Black in AI, who is focused on building communities of Black researchers in the AI field, but who also has the unique awareness of the problem because we are the people who are affected. I started paying attention to the news and saw that Meredith Whittaker had started a think tank to combat these things, and Joy Buolamwini had helped found the Algorithmic Justice League. I brushed up on what computer scientists were doing and started to look at what physicists were doing, because that’s my principal community.

    It became clear to folks like me and Savannah Thais that physicists needed to realize that they have a stake in this game. We get government funding, and we tend to take a fundamental approach to research. If we bring that approach to AI, then we have the potential to affect the foundations of how these algorithms work and impact a broader set of applications. I asked myself and my colleagues what our responsibility in developing these algorithms was and in having some say in how they’re being used down the line.

    Gizmodo: How is it going so far?

    BN: Currently, we’re going to write a white paper for SNOWMASS, this high-energy physics event. The SNOWMASS process determines the vision that guides the community for about a decade. I started to identify individuals to work with, fellow physicists, and experts who care about the issues, and develop a set of arguments for why physicists from institutions, individuals, and funding agencies should care deeply about these algorithms they’re building and implementing so quickly. It’s a piece that’s asking people to think about how much they are considering the ethical implications of what they’re doing.

    We’ve already held a workshop at the University of Chicago where we’ve begun discussing these issues, and at Fermilab we’ve had some initial discussions. But we don’t yet have the critical mass across the field to develop policy. We can’t do it ourselves as physicists; we don’t have backgrounds in social science or technology studies. The right way to do this is to bring physicists together from Fermilab and other institutions with social scientists and ethicists and science and technology studies folks and professionals, and build something from there. The key is going to be through partnership with these other disciplines.

    Gizmodo: Why haven’t we reached that critical mass yet?

    BN: I think we need to show people, as Angela Davis has said, that our struggle is also their struggle. That’s why I’m talking about coalition building. The thing that affects us also affects them. One way to do this is to clearly lay out the potential harm beyond just race and ethnicity. Recently, there was this discussion of a paper that used neural networks to try and speed up the selection of candidates for Ph.D programs. They trained the algorithm on historical data. So let me be clear, they said here’s a neural network, here’s data on applicants who were denied and accepted to universities. Those applicants were chosen by faculty and people with biases. It should be obvious to anyone developing that algorithm that you’re going to bake in the biases in that context. I hope people will see these things as problems and help build our coalition.

    Gizmodo: What is your vision for a future of ethical AI?

    BN: What if there were an agency or agencies for algorithmic accountability? I could see these existing at the local level, the national level, and the institutional level. We can’t predict all of the future uses of technology, but we need to be asking questions at the beginning of the processes, not as an afterthought. An agency would help ask these questions and still allow the science to get done, but without endangering people’s lives. Alongside agencies, we need policies at various levels that make a clear decision about how safe the algorithms have to be before they are used on humans or other living things. If I had my druthers, these agencies and policies would be built by an incredibly diverse group of people. We’ve seen instances where a homogeneous group develops an app or technology and didn’t see the things that another group who’s not there would have seen. We need people across the spectrum of experience to participate in designing policies for ethical AI.

    Gizmodo: What are your biggest fears about all of this?

    BN: My biggest fear is that people who already have access to technology resources will continue to use them to subjugate people who are already oppressed; Pratyusha Kalluri has also advanced this idea of power dynamics. That’s what we’re seeing across the globe. Sure, there are cities that are trying to ban facial recognition, but unless we have a broader coalition, unless we have more cities and institutions willing to take on this thing directly, we’re not going to be able to keep this tool from exacerbating white supremacy, racism, and misogyny that that already exists inside structures today. If we don’t push policy that puts the lives of marginalized people first, then they’re going to continue being oppressed, and it’s going to accelerate.

    Gizmodo: How has thinking about AI ethics affected your own research?

    BN: I have to question whether I want to do AI work and how I’m going to do it; whether or not it’s the right thing to do to build a certain algorithm. That’s something I have to keep asking myself… Before, it was like, how fast can I discover new things and build technology that can help the world learn something? Now there’s a significant piece of nuance to that. Even the best things for humanity could be used in some of the worst ways. It’s a fundamental rethinking of the order of operations when it comes to my research.

    I don’t think it’s weird to think about safety first. We have OSHA and safety groups at institutions who write down lists of things you have to check off before you’re allowed to take out a ladder, for example. Why are we not doing the same thing in AI? A part of the answer is obvious: Not all of us are people who experience the negative effects of these algorithms. But as one of the few Black people at the institutions I work in, I’m aware of it, I’m worried about it, and the scientific community needs to appreciate that my safety matters too, and that my safety concerns don’t end when I walk out of work.

    Gizmodo: Anything else?

    BN: I’d like to re-emphasize that when you look at some of the research that has come out, like vetting candidates for graduate school, or when you look at the biases of the algorithms used in criminal justice, these are problems being repeated over and over again, with the same biases. It doesn’t take a lot of investigation to see that bias enters these algorithms very quickly. The people developing them should really know better. Maybe there needs to be more educational requirements for algorithm developers to think about these issues before they have the opportunity to unleash them on the world.

    This conversation needs to be raised to the level where individuals and institutions consider these issues a priority. Once you’re there, you need people to see that this is an opportunity for leadership. If we can get a grassroots community to help an institution to take the lead on this, it incentivizes a lot of people to start to take action.

    And finally, people who have expertise in these areas need to be allowed to speak their minds. We can’t allow our institutions to quiet us so we can’t talk about the issues we’re bringing up. The fact that I have experience as a Black man doing science in America, and the fact that I do AI—that should be appreciated by institutions. It gives them an opportunity to have a unique perspective and take a unique leadership position. I would be worried if individuals felt like they couldn’t speak their mind. If we can’t get these issues out into the sunlight, how will we be able to build out of the darkness?

    Ryan F. Mandelbaum – Former Gizmodo physics writer and founder of Birdmodo, now a science communicator specializing in quantum computing and birds

    How a Famous Harvard Professor Became a Target Over His Tweets (New York Times)

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    nytimes.com

    By Michael Powell, July 15, 2020

    The outcry over free speech and race takes aim at Steven Pinker, the best-selling author and well-known scholar.

    Professor Steven Pinker, in his office in Cambridge, Mass., in 2018. He has been accused of racial insensitivity by people he describes as “speech police.”
    Credit…Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times

    Steven Pinker occupies a role that is rare in American life: the celebrity intellectual. The Harvard professor pops up on outlets from PBS to the Joe Rogan podcast, translating dense subjects into accessible ideas with enthusiasm. Bill Gates called his most recent book “my new favorite book of all time.”

    So when more than 550 academics recently signed a letter seeking to remove him from the list of “distinguished fellows” of the Linguistic Society of America, it drew attention to their provocative charge: that Professor Pinker minimizes racial injustices and drowns out the voices of those who suffer sexist and racist indignities.

    But the letter was striking for another reason: It took aim not at Professor Pinker’s scholarly work but at six of his tweets dating back to 2014, and at a two-word phrase he used in a 2011 book about a centuries-long decline in violence.

    “Dr. Pinker has a history of speaking over genuine grievances and downplaying injustices, frequently by misrepresenting facts, and at the exact moments when Black and Brown people are mobilizing against systemic racism and for crucial changes,” their letter stated.

    The linguists demanded that the society revoke Professor Pinker’s status as a “distinguished fellow” and strike his name from its list of media experts. The society’s executive committee declined to do so last week, stating: “It is not the mission of the society to control the opinions of its members, nor their expression.”

    But a charge of racial insensitivity carries power in the current climate, and the letter sounded another shot in the fraught cultural battles now erupting in academia and publishing.

    Also this month, 153 intellectuals and writers — many of them political liberals — signed a letter in Harper’s Magazine that criticized the current intellectual climate as “constricted” and “intolerant.” That led to a fiery response from opposing liberal and leftist writers, who accused the Harper’s letter writers of elitism and hypocrisy.

    In an era of polarizing ideologies, Professor Pinker, a linguist and social psychologist, is tough to pin down. He is a big supporter of Democrats, and donated heavily to former President Barack Obama, but he has denounced what he sees as the close-mindedness of heavily liberal American universities. He likes to publicly entertain ideas outside the academic mainstream, including the question of innate differences between the sexes and among different ethnic and racial groups. And he has suggested that the political left’s insistence that certain subjects are off limits contributed to the rise of the alt-right.

    Reached at his home on Cape Cod, Professor Pinker, 65, noted that as a tenured faculty member and established author, he could weather the campaign against him. But he said it could chill junior faculty who hold views counter to prevailing intellectual currents.

    “I have a mind-set that the world is a complex place we are trying to understand,” he said. “There is an inherent value to free speech, because no one knows the solution to problems a priori.”

    He described his critics as “speech police” who “have trolled through my writings to find offensive lines and adjectives.”

    The letter against him focuses mainly on his activity on Twitter, where he has some 600,000 followers. It points to his 2015 tweet of an article from The Upshot, the data and analysis-focused team at The New York Times, which suggested that the high number of police shootings of Black people may not have been caused by racial bias of individual police officers, but rather by the larger structural and economic realities that result in the police having disproportionately high numbers of encounters with Black residents.

    “Data: Police don’t shoot blacks disproportionately,” Professor Pinker tweeted with a link to the article. “Problem: Not race, but too many police shootings.”

    The linguists’ letter noted that the article made plain that police killings are a racial problem, and accused Professor Pinker of making “dishonest claims in order to obfuscate the role of systemic racism in police violence.”

    But the article also suggested that, because every encounter with the police carries danger of escalation, any racial group interacting with the police frequently risked becoming victims of police violence, due to poorly trained officers, armed suspects or overreaction. That appeared to be the point of Professor Pinker’s tweet.

    The linguists’ letter also accused the professor of engaging in racial dog whistles when he used the words “urban crime” and “urban violence” in other tweets.

    But in those tweets, Professor Pinker had linked to the work of scholars who are widely described as experts on urban crime and urban violence and its decline.

    “‘Urban’ appears to be a usual terminological choice in work in sociology, political science, law and criminology,” wrote Jason Merchant, vice provost and a linguistics professor at the University of Chicago, who defended Professor Pinker.

    Another issue, Professor Pinker’s critics say, is contained in his 2011 book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.” In a wide-ranging description of crime and urban decay and its effect on the culture of the 1970s and 1980s, he wrote that “Bernhard Goetz, a mild-mannered engineer, became a folk hero for shooting four young muggers in a New York subway car.”

    The linguists’ letter took strong issue with the words “mild-mannered,” noting that a neighbor later said that Goetz had spoken in racist terms of Latinos and Black people. He was not “mild-mannered” but rather intent on confrontation, they said.

    The origin of the letter remains a mystery. Of 10 signers contacted by The Times, only one hinted that she knew the identity of the authors. Many of the linguists proved shy about talking, and since the letter first surfaced on Twitter on July 3, several prominent linguists have said their names had been included without their knowledge.

    Several department chairs in linguistics and philosophy signed the letter, including Professor Barry Smith of the University at Buffalo and Professor Lisa Davidson of New York University. Professor Smith did not return calls and an email and Professor Davidson declined to comment when The Times reached out.

    The linguists’ letter touched only lightly on questions that have proved storm-tossed for Professor Pinker in the past. In the debate over whether nature or nurture shapes human behavior, he has leaned toward nature, arguing that characteristics like psychological traits and intelligence are to some degree heritable.

    He has also suggested that underrepresentation in the sciences could be rooted in part in biological differences between men and women. (He defended Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard president who in 2005 speculated that innate differences between the sexes might in part explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers. Mr. Summers’s remark infuriated some female scientists and was among several controversies that led to his resignation the following year.)

    And Professor Pinker has made high-profile blunders, such as when he provided his expertise on language for the 2007 defense of the financier Jeffrey Epstein on sex trafficking charges. He has said he did so free of charge and at the request of a friend, the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, and regrets it.

    The clash may also reflect the fact that Professor Pinker’s rosy outlook — he argues that the world is becoming a better place, by almost any measure, from poverty to literacy — sounds discordant during this painful moment of national reckoning with the still-ugly scars of racism and inequality.

    The linguists’ society, like many academic and nonprofit organizations, recently released a wide-ranging statement calling for greater diversity in the field. It also urged linguists to confront how their research “might reproduce or work against racism.”

    John McWhorter, a Columbia University professor of English and linguistics, cast the Pinker controversy within a moment when, he said, progressives look suspiciously at anyone who does not embrace the politics of racial and cultural identity.

    “Steve is too big for this kerfuffle to affect him,” Professor McWhorter said. “But it’s depressing that an erudite and reasonable scholar is seen by a lot of intelligent people as an undercover monster.”

    Because this is a fight involving linguists, it features some expected elements: intense arguments about imprecise wording and sly intellectual put-downs. Professor Pinker may have inflamed matters when he suggested in response to the letter that its signers lacked stature. “I recognize only one name among the signatories,’’ he tweeted. Such an argument, Byron T. Ahn, a linguistics professor at Princeton, wrote in a tweet of his own, amounted to “a kind of indirect ad hominem attack.”

    The linguists insisted they were not attempting to censor Professor Pinker. Rather, they were intent on showing that he had been deceitful and used racial dog whistles, and thus, was a disreputable representative for linguistics.

    “Any resulting action from this letter may make it clear to Black scholars that the L.S.A. is sensitive to the impact that tweets of this sort have on maintaining structures that we should be attempting to dismantle,” wrote Professor David Adger of Queen Mary University of London on his website.

    That line of argument left Professor McWhorter, a signer of the letter in Harper’s, exasperated.

    “We’re in this moment that’s like a collective mic drop, and civility and common sense go out the window,” he said. “It’s enough to cry racism or sexism, and that’s that.”

    Scientists Call for Academic Shutdown in Support of Black Lives (Gizmodo)

    Uncategorized, ,

    Ryan F. Mandelbaum

    June 9, 2020

    Photo: Dean Mouhtaropoulos (Getty Images)

    White supremacy is baked into science and academia, from racist language in textbooks to a culture that excludes Black scientists from innovating and advancing at the same pace as their colleagues. But rather than more milquetoast statements and diversity initiatives, researchers want action. Organizers are asking the scientific community to participate in a work stoppage on Wednesday, June 10 to bring attention to racism in the world of research.

    Two groups of scientists, technologists, and diversity and inclusion specialists have come together to organize a shutdown and strike on June 10, with the hashtags #ShutDownAcademia, #ShutDownSTEM, and #Strike4BlackLives. They’re asking science professionals and academics to stop doing business as usual and to instead focus on long-term action: protesting, educating themselves on the issues that Black academics face, and drafting plans based on existing work done by Black leaders on how they’ll dismantle the racism entrenched in their respective fields. Hundreds of scientists, including Nobel Prize winners and high-profile groups, have signed a pledge to take part.

    “We need to hold our communities in STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] and academia accountable to ending anti-Black racism. This is critically important because of our role in society,” Brittany Kamai, an experimental physicist with a joint appointment at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Caltech, told Gizmodo. “It’s going to be hard, and it will be growth for the community. We’re asking the entire community of both STEM and academia to commit to growing together to eradicate this,” said Kamai, who is an organizer behind #ShutDownAcademia/#ShutDownSTEM and a Native Hawaiian.

    The ongoing protests against police violence targeting Black people in the U.S. served as the catalyst for #ShutDownAcademia/#ShutDownSTEM to collaborate with the physics-specific effort Particles for Justice. But these issues have long been bubbling up in the science community. A report earlier this year found that the already-dismal percentage of Black students receiving bachelors degrees in physics hasn’t changed in 10 years, in part due to a lack of support and mentorship as well as a decline in funding of historically Black colleges and universities.

    Discrimination against Black scientists rears its head in more insidious ways, too. Labs will still refer to various pairs of equipment as “master” and “slave,” while the most commonly discussed milestone in quantum computing is “quantum supremacy;” few, if any publishing outlets are actively working to evaluate this kind of language. Buildings on college campuses are named after racists and slave owners, and pseudoscience is often used to try to rationalize and justify racism.

    “When [the academic community] does try to show the value of diversity and inclusion, they do it by having those who are already marginalized do the work of their own liberation,” Brian Nord, research scientist at Fermilab, told Gizmodo. “They have us who are already embedded in that system and facing the problems that the system created do these activities and join these committees and all of these things that have ultimately been shown just to be window dressing… There has not been real investment and commitment in us.”

    This extra work, in turn, does not offer the same career advancement as, say, using that time to publish papers, and puts them at a disadvantage. When issues of police violence against Black people crop up, Kamai said, her peers have looked to places other than the academic community for support, such as Black-led scholar collectives.

    “We don’t want more diversity, inclusion, and equity seminars,” Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, assistant professor of physics and core faculty in women’s studies at University of New Hampshire, told Gizmodo. “We want people to take action, including participating in protests, for justice, now. We need people to be active in reforming the institutions they work within, rather than waiting for a top-down solution.” Prescod-Weinstein is one of the organizers of Particles for Justice.

    The groups are encouraging all scientists to use the day to educate themselves and their students, organize protests, contact their local representatives, and make action plans for how they’ll work to change science and academia beyond just a single day’s strike. Just as important, they encourage their Black colleagues to use the day to prioritize their needs and find community support.

    Kamai said that #ShutDownSTEM is not aimed at scientists who are directly participating in mitigating the global covid-19 pandemic. The Particles for Justice group encourages covid-19 researchers take a moment on Wednesday to reflect on how their work can contribute to these calls for justice.

    Nord told Gizmodo that he hopes physicists will apply the passion they bring to figuring out fundamental truths of the universe to the movement, as if his and all Black scientists’ lives depended on it. “That energy and creativity is what we need. We need them to bring their compassion and their willingness to learn new methods and new things from other people who already know how to do this.”

    These movements require non-Black allies to precipitate change, especially in fields like physics. “Particle physics is one of the academic disciplines with the lowest representations of Black scientists,” Tien-Tien Yu, assistant professor of physics at the University of Oregon, told Gizmodo. “The strike will bring this fact to the forefront, and it is important for us as a community to understand why this is so, but more crucially, to propose concrete solutions. But first, we hope that given that this is a Black-scientist led movement, we non-Black physicists finally learn to listen to what they have been saying all these years.”

    More than 3,100 academics have pledged to strike with Particles for Justice, including Nobel Prize in Physics winners Adam Riess and Art McDonald.

    Major scientific groups have already signed on to take part. The arXiv physics preprint server, where scientists often post their research papers ahead of publication, will not mail its daily announcement on Tuesday. Groups such as the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration, the Dark Energy Survey, and others have already agreed to postpone regular meetings or are planning discussions for their group members. The Canadian Association of Physicists has also announced its participation.

    Both Particles for Justice and #ShutDownAcademia/#ShutDownSTEM have listed actions that academics and science professionals can take in order to dismantle racism in their respective fields, if you’re hoping to get involved.

    Ryan F. Mandelbaum, Science Writer, Founder of Birdmodo