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.
Racism
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.
The Scientist’s obit on Harvard evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin (1929–2021) notes his takedown of the notion of “race”
At The Scientist: “He also wrote a seminal 1972 paper in which he argued there is more genetic variation within members of a population of humans than there is between members of different groups, undermining the idea that there is a genetic basis for the idea of race. “
At Scientific American: “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy”
Wow. Has the Darwin lobby hired itself a PR firm that recommended getting someone on board to accuse everyone who doubts Darwin of being a “white supremacist”? Quite simply, Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man is surely by far the most racist iconic document ever to be lauded by all the Right People! And getting someone to holler about “white supremacy” among Darwin doubters is, ahem, just a cheap shot, not a response to the stark raving racism in print of the actual document. Guys, try another one.
Haeckel’s biased, manipulative, dishonest drawings
It is strange that Haeckel has come up again, so let us first understand just how manipulative and dishonest he was in his books that popularised Evolutionism in Germany and elsewhere. As a start, here is his infamous drawing of heads of men and other primates: This was a time when photography was not ubiquitous, Read More…