EO Wilson: When science meets politics.
Science denial harms both science AND anti-racism
Columnist Danny Finklestein writes considered and thought provoking comment pieces for the London Times. A recent article is entitled: “It isn’t racist to believe in genetic differences“ [paywall]. The piece came in the wake of the Boxing Day 2021 death of Nobel Laureate biologist EO Wilson. It’s broad thrust is surely correct — science denial is absurd and dangerous.
Of course, defining a social construction like racism, or saying what is isn’t as Finklestein does, isn’t a scientific matter. It’s largely political and ideological. It’s silly in all the ways for white scientists to presume to tell non-white people what is and isn’t racism. Finklestein, however, isn’t a scientist and as a Jew is well able to see the world through the prism of people who have suffered terrible racism. He’s also a politician, as a Conservative peer in the UK’s upper house The House of Lords, and this is clear enough in the piece.
This Scientific American comment piece which is the source of Finklestein’s ire comes close to being a parody of a misconceived application of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to science.
The author, Dr Monica McLemore is Black and wholly entitled to her own definition of racism. On the other hand, she is a scientist and as such certainly errs in failing to separate empiricial evidence from (righteous) social values. She gets hopelessly muddled in her understanding of social science, too, and in doing so does it no favours.
In the article, Wilson’s personal racism is taken as read, as is that of a number of historical figures including Gregor Mendel. Their science aside, some of these figures, including Sir Francis Dalton, had personal views which if uttered by someone today would certainly be racist. But the inclusion of Mendel in this group, whose peas offered no perspective upon race as far as anyone knows, signals that McLemore is not simply referring to racist views, nor to provenly erroneous theories, but to empirical evidence and scientific method itself.
Perhaps the most extraordinary passage is:
“His [Wilson’s] 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”.
This is pure science denial. The interaction of nature and nurture is of course exceedingly complex and much studied; yet without the dichotomy the notion of interaction itself makes no sense. The passage also seems to deny a function for heredity altogether. Meanwhile, the entire field of modern evolutionary biology is casually dismissed as something “spawned” rather than founded, while Wilson’s Nobel Prize winning appliction of scientific method is reduced to the status of a deviant opinion.
Another passage refers, apparently in the pejorative, to; “the so-called normal distribution of statistics”. Is the author really challenging the notion of normal distribution? Another runs:
“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”.
This is simply polemic, and it’s most unscholarly by any standards. One of the most difficult areas of scientific discourse is the group variation scientists, apparently including Dr McLemore, agree exists between people who identify as Black, Asian, Jewish and white. Plenty of scientists argue ostensibly that it is racist to partly ascribe such variation to genetics. But of course, as Professor James Flynn demonstrated with his views about inferior black parenting, for many people ascribing variation wholly to culture is no less racist than partly ascribing it to genetics.
One way out of this dilemma, employed by some non-scientists, is to simply deny the variation altogether. It is not possible for a scientist to credibly deny the variation, however, so McLemore takes the other way out by insisting that all variation is caused by structural racism. But how can she know? Structural racism, as appears to exist for example in the relationship between the US justice system and wider society, is certainly capable of taking a terrible toll. But without study, the attribution of all social, educational and economic variation, and much more besides, to structural racism is surely an absurdity in scholarly terms?
It is not absurd in political terms, however. And in the end, McLemore’s piece relies on new US postmodern thinking which weaponises standpoint theory and sometimes appears to seek to theorise scientific method out of existence. This is all very well for social theorists, if highly arguable, but not for anyone claiming to root their argument in scientific method.
As pointed out elsewhere at Troubling Nature, racism is a social construction which means what its users intend it to mean, so in theory empirical facts can be considered racist. But how would such an assumption help anyone? More fruitfully, scientists and social scientists might together explore how science, including biology and genetics, can move ahead in directions not considered racist. This requires give and take in both directions, and a recognition of the multiple epistemologies humans apply to how they know things.
But if multiple epistemologies are to be taken into account in this way, it is literally essential that we are clear about what each one is. Science denial amounts to the opposite.
Scientific American needs to consider whether it wishes to be a science publication; the McLemore article on EO Wilson suggests it sees its future elsewhere.
