W. D. Hamilton, Ronald Fisher, and J. B. S. Haldane are also threatened. We never thought it would happen but it is happening… so fast.
Racism
Classifier of life forms Linnaeus gets the chop due to concerns about racism
The friend who sent this in wonders, will the Woke come for Darwin too? It’s a bit more complicated in that case. No one, after all, strikes a serious blow against science by attacking contemporary Darwinism. Darwinism is really more about atheism than about science — and the Woke are in a war on science, not on atheism.
Weaponizing the term “creationism” in debates on racism
That includes, for example, dragging it into debates over repatriation of the remains of Indigenous peoples.
Larry Elder: Can somebody text Dr. Martin Luther King… ?
West: The blacks-as-apes trope is used by some on the right and left alike. In 2018, we called out actress Roseanne Barr’s loathsome comparison of Obama Administration official Valerie Jarrett to an ape. Now we call out a progressive white activist in California who is trying to stigmatize a conservative black man as an ape.
More on how few Black people choose evolutionary biology…
Given the history, it would be harder to explain why they would than why they wouldn’t.
A license to harm Asians?
How sad that an anti-racist intervention likely to do little more than entrench social conflict is one of the few that actually recognizes the strands of racism woven through traditional Darwinism.
Apparently, some people have noticed the nonsense at Nature Communications about geology as not a safe field for persons of color
About that third comment above: There is no reason to put “scholarship” and “Nature Communications” in the same sentence if this “paper” is supposed to be an example of the type of thing it produces.
L&FP, 48: The conscience factor in consciousness
Conscience is a major aspect of our consciousness, one of the “first facts” of our embodiment in the world, thus part of the start-point for sound thinking. Hence, Cicero’s recognition that it was consensus even in his day that “[sound] conscience is a law”: Given word games that may crop up, let us note a Read More…
We are informed at Nature Communications that geology is not a safe field for persons of color due to rock hammers
Is it significant that the same people who simply do not want to accept that Darwin had transparent white supremacy beliefs think that geologists’ rock hammers are a big problem?
John West tries once again to get YouTube to accept a documentary about scientific racism
West: My documentary only tells one part of the story of racism, and it also only tells a part of the story of the influence of Social Darwinism on Western imperialism, which certainly extended to other nations besides Germany. Yet I hope my revised film will add something to the current conversation.
Historian Richard Weikart on acceptance of Darwinian evolution and racism …
Richard Weikart: I have done a good deal of research on this topic, and as it turns out, the vast majority of white supremacists today embrace Darwinian evolution and use it as evidence for their white supremacy.
At Evolution News and Science Today: The casual racism of Charles Darwin
Shedinger calls Allison Hopper’s piece in Scientific American, “startlingly vacuous,” which raises — once again — the question of why on earth the mag published it. It’s not as if there is no scholarship on the topic of Darwin and racism. Did the editors not want to address that scholarship? Well, we can’t read minds but we can make some reasonable guesses. How about: Create a big uproar and hope everyone will focus on that and not on the topic at hand? Shedinger also notes perceptively, “One does not become racist because of the view one holds on human origins. One becomes racist for other complex reasons and then reads that racism back into whatever view on human origins you hold.”
At PJ Media: A response to religious claims made in Scientific American’s “denial of evolution is white supremacy” piece
Bolyard: “I’m not here to debate the hows and whys of creationism. I’ll point you to Answers in Genesis for that. But I want to point out a couple of shameless strawmen in Hopper’s piece that discredit everything else she writes in this piece.” Of course. Hopper was almost certainly making it up as she went along, trusting that few readers had read or spent much time on the relevant literature.
Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne speaks out on a SciAm op-ed’s claims that denial of evolution stems from white supremacy
It seems obvious, on reflection, that Hopper’s piece is a disastrously clumsy effort on the part of Scientific American to get Woke. Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne thinks the mag is not just circling the drain but “approaching the drainhole.” To the extent that the editors couldn’t find someone who at least gets basic facts right, he has a point.
Science historian Michael Flannery offers resources on Darwin and racism
It may be helpful to keep in mind that opposition to slavery was not a radical position for a British gentleman like Darwin. Britain’s economy did not depend on slavery and most of the injustices of the Industrial Revolution were done to people who were not technically slaves. The issues around exploitation in his own environment were fought out on different grounds.