More wokeness in biology

January 28, 2025 • 12:15 pm

I thought I was clever when I decided that an alternative word for a woke person could be a “Passive Progressive”, but then was told that woke people aren’t passive because they create a lot of noise and kerfuffle. I still like my new term, though, as by “passivity” I meant “performativeness”.  That is, a woke person espouses progressive Leftist ideals but does not do anything to enact them, ergo the passivity.

But I digress. While poring through some scientific literature yesterday, I came upon an issue of The American Naturalist from July 2022. This used to be one of the go-to journals for publishing evolutionary biology, and I was a corresponding editor for a while, but in my view it’s slipped a bit. This issue, with its special section on “Nature, data, and power” is about as ideologically captured as you can get. And this was three years ago! Well, capture started well before that. If you want to read any of these articles, just click on the screenshots below (there are two because the section is so long. There are other real science papers not soaked in politics, but I haven’t put them down.

Which paper is your favorite?

 

32 thoughts on “More wokeness in biology”

  2. My “favorite” paper is the one, written by Lisa Weasel: “How Neanderthals Became White: The Introgression of Race into Contemporary Human Evolutionary Genetics”.

    Why?

    It insults the great geneticist Svante Pääbo, who won the Nobel Prize in 2022 “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.” Pääbo is “one of the founders of paleogenetics, he has worked extensively on the Neanderthal genome.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_P%C3%A4%C3%A4bo

    2. Just casually skimming the titles, I somehow landed on that one. Something about introgression by someone named Weasel?

      And that last one – this is the first time I’ve ever seen aliases listed for authors.

  3. These click on pictures don’t work well on iPhones. Text URLs work much much better.

    Do all the articles appear if I click anywhere on the block or is it necessary to click on specific ones? They’re too close together to press specific ones.

    With a text URL, if you press it, you get the option to “open in a new tab.” I cannot get that option with the pictures. It just leaves where I am and goes wherever.

    I’m done complaining for now.

  5. I’m so glad Jerry discovered that treasure trove from 2022. At the time I criticized the Branch et al. paper on “ableism” for some of my colleagues. My criticisms got me cancelled from the group lab meeting I’ve been attending for 20 years. Do check out the academic wheel of privilege (it’s awesome in its terribleness).

    I wrote:

    “1. The article reeks of presentism: the authors are certain that if they had been born 130 years ago there’s no way they would have ever joined the Eugenics Society. And that if RA Fisher had been born in 1990 instead of 1890 he would have been a MAGA Republican. We should be skeptical of such, ahem, unconcious or implicit biases.

    “2. I went to a lot of trouble and heartache to get out of Catholicism, dump original sin, and become an atheist biologist. My dad never forgave me for that. I’ll be god damned (so to speak) if I’ll let a couple of sociologists pat themselves on the back for “[promising] to do better” and then tell me that I need to “do the same” by atoning for the eugenicists of 100 years ago.

    “3. The authors write in a footnote that “[Fisher] advocated for voluntary sterilization of disabled people to prevent an increase in the prevalence of ‘feeble-mindedness’ and ‘grave transmissible defects’ in the human population” as if that’s a bad thing. I’ll defend (a version of) Fisher’s view in person but not here. It’s very personal.

    “4. Several of the authors self-identify as disabled but are fit (ha ha) enough to be highly successful academics at world-class universities where they have accumulated enough social clout to get their work invited for publication in a special section of (arguably) the top journal in their field. Freddie deBoer has a succinct and convincing argument that these are exactly the folks who should not be telling us about what it’s like to be disabled (and by extension should not be telling evolutionary biologists how to write about evolution – that hair shirt in the Statement of Authorship notwithstanding). The section of the article called “Is ‘Disability’ Actually Costly in Nature?” is a classic in the genre of argument that deBoer skewers in his essay.

    “https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-gentrification-of-disability

    “5. The authors claim that present-day evolutionary biologists’ language is weaponized to harm and damage marginalized communities. There is zero evidence in the article for this. The best the authors can do (p. 109) is to indict economists, news reporters, politicians, exercise instructors, and especially school teachers (“at the early stages of education”) for misusing “survival of the fittest”. It may be that the authors themselves heard “survival of the fittest” in high school and subsequently experienced “increased levels of internal ableism and discomfort”. That would have been an awful feeling, but it’s not a criticism of evolutionary biology in 2022.

    “But I get it: young evolutionary ecologists are encouraged to produce cargo-cult scholarship like this (complete with creedal statements like “Data and R code have been deposited in the Dryad Digital Repository…”) in order to pass the DEI filter for jobs at UCLA or Berkeley and claim one of the outer rings on the Academic Wheel of Privilege.

    “https://twitter.com/deepseadawn/status/1571536733480841218”

    1. Bravo! It must have taken some balls to write that devastating rebuttal. I hope it didn’t impact your career.

    2. Just today I ran into a fellow book lover I used to see at all the book sales. After talking a while I asked if he was interested in books on evolution. He immediately mentioned being careful about Eugenics, as if that’s what evolution was about.

  6. So I tried to read the one about endocrine disrupting chemicals, and … I could not get very far. The density of po-mo jargon got to me. It must be my heteronormative White supremacist logic, and my presumption that there are animals with “normal” anatomy and that “normal’ is supposedly optimized. And why is the word “normal” always in quotes?

    2. I think Mike H is teasing us by citing Scientific American. 🤬 That’s not what the normal distribution means at all.

      Normal just means perpendicular or orthogonal in the sense that the random events such as coin tosses, dice throws, card draws with replacement, and meiotic crossover events that produce probability distributions of outcomes are uncorrelated with one another — knowing one outcome doesn’t tell you anything about the next outcome. (Exceptions to orthogonality — linkage disequilibrium — led to the hypothesis that genes were located on chromosomes iirc, and that Mendel wasn’t entirely on the level.) This condition will produce a histogram that as the number of trials approaches infinity will fit the equation for the normal or Gaussian distribution. There is no reason to put scare quotes around normal here as it is value-neutral. It just is (what it is!) Unless, of course, the expression, (d(e^x)) / dx = e^x, is racist. After all, 2+2 = 4 is racist….

      Now, if you are going to say an individual human subject who is 7’ tall or a coin toss outcome of 5 heads is “normal” or not, you have to put some arbitrary fences on the normal distribution. Who says the middle 95% should be “normal” just because it is close to 2 standard deviations (1.96 actually) on either side of the mean? Why not include the middle 99%, or accept 3 SDs? Why call both tails “abnormal”? Why insist that both tails be the same size? Why not say the top 95% or 99% is “normal” and pathologize only the bottom 5% or 1%? Or vice versa? And why use any of those fences? Blood pressure and cholesterol values are roughly normally distributed in humans. Yet the attributable risk of stroke and heart attack rises well before the value crosses the top 5% fence. So we don’t talk of “normal” BP and cholesterol at all. We say “desirable levels.” But what is “desirable height” in a man? The minimum height that makes him mate material? Or the height that maximizes his success? What if his great height is due to a pituitary tumour that will make him go blind?

      I think putting scare quotes around “normal” in describing an individual (not the normal distribution itself) is a way of indicating that normal is doing some work behind the scenes that we are willing to discuss. “Put a pin in that and I promise we’ll come back to that before we break.” It’s also a way of making it a fighting word, like someone snidely referring to so-called “justice”, which is unfortunate.

      1. The new normal is mean of the chinese people (or indians )? Perhaps the distribution is multimodal, so is not gaussian.

    3. Guilty as charged. I was waiting for Bryan to remind us that putting “normal” in quotation marks is one of the tactics used to queer the topic by implying that its norms or expectations are wrong or problematic.

    4. Critiques of power are always welcome, irrespective of who holds it, especially if a dominant paradigm operates by brutality and erasure for hundreds of years.

  8. AmNat has been… shall we say, overtly doctrinal for many moons. 30+ years ago I sent them a MS about a serendipitous series of detailed, multi-modal measurements a colleague & I made on ant behavior during a 7+ magnitude earthquake – a literally earth-shaking experience for us. As it turned out, the ants couldn’t care less. The AmNat rejection was delicious. First, no hypothesis was generated in advance of the earthquake; thus the MS was unscientific. Second, only one earthquake was recorded. An N = 1 also rendered the MS unscientific. Third, & most important, the MS contradicted the native wisdom of historically marginalized people & was thus in any event not worthy of publication.

  10. Ugh. Great journal—at least when I was active in the profession.

    All I can say in defense of this is that they lumped these papers into a “Special Section,” obviously aware that what they were publishing was “problematic.”*

    *I couldn’t resist using that trigger word.

  11. I suspect that if a journal called The American Naturist existed it wouldn’t make the same mistake!

  12. How about these to capture the essence of wokeness?

    🔹 Performative Progressive
    🔹 Theatrical Left
    🔹 Virtue Grandstander
    🔹 Symbolic Ally
    🔹 Woke Pageantry
    🔹 Progressive Pantomime
    🔹 Ideological Exhibitionist
    🔹 Social Justice Spectacle
    🔹 Moral Peacocking
    🔹 Hashtag Crusader

    Just playing off Ceiling Cat’s “passive progressive”!

    1. Missing, Roz, in your epithets, which fundamentally imply harmless LARPing, is the gleeful zeal in ruining someone’s career or getting her in serious expensive trouble with Human Rights Commissions or professional regulators. They aren’t merely pantomiming stabbing someone up under the ribs, they’re actually doing it, for real, albeit metaphorically short of actual murder. They’ve gotten real people fired and ruined their tradable reputations, people who haven’t accumulated their FU money yet and now probably never will. And they brag publicly about going after the next victims.

      Maybe some cross between assassin bugs and dung beetles.

      I don’t think they are so much passive progressives as carrying on the mission with other skills and tactics. I need Bryan to explain the dialectic.

      1. Important points, Leslie. Indeed, my epithets were intended as a gentle mockery of the woke, though you’re right—a disproportionate number are outright sadistic. I hold no illusions about them changing. However, there are cultural wokesters who grew up with wokeness as the pinnacle of academic virtue, unknowingly chasing a façade.

        I remember my first “red-pill” moment in 2015, during my PhD program—an environment where performative wokeness was expected—when I began to see progressive ideology for what it was.

        I hold some hope for those like me—those not driven by sadistic power and capable of questioning the ideals they’ve absorbed. A bit of witty mockery might just nudge them toward something more intellectually rigorous than wokeness. But yes, sadly, it’s the sadists who are dictating the woke norms and defining not just the progressive left but much of liberalism.

      1. Oh bother. My muse is now prodding me to expand that TTTO “Take a Letter Maria”. So far I am resisting….

  13. Oh, how annoying! I’ll go with “Transforming Restoration Science:…” on the basis of the use of the word: paradigm — twice — first two sentences of the abstract. It speaks to me also on account of our own floodplain reset project, really something, working with the heavy equipment operators who very likely didn’t vote as I did. (I feel so expansive.) Our project site might do with a culturally sensitive designation, maybe some combination honoring ancestors, something involving fusion of Yiddish, Gaelic, and Coast Oregon Penutian.

  14. Pseudo-Woke Fake Leftist or just Pseudo-Woke is IMHO, a better, more descriptive label for this cult. Woke has an original meaning which the Pseudo-Woke have revised just as they revised “woman”, “man”, “sex” and “gender”, not to mention “terrorist” which they refer to HAMAS as “the resistance”.
    “woke” – original meaning: aware of and opposed to discrimination and bigotry based on identity (mainly used by Black Americans)
    – new meaning: Agree with every bit of nonsense pushed by the Pseudo-Woke ideologues.
    “woman” – original meaning: Adult human female
    – new meaning: Anyone who claims to be a woman. Any disagreement with that defines you as a TERF.
    “man” – original meaning: Adult human male
    – new meaning: Anyone who claims to be a man….
    “terrorist” – original meaning: Someone or a group which uses terror to get people to go along with their agenda or to draft new recruits to their fights.
    – new meaning: Jews having the audacity to defend themselves against people who if they weren’t attacking Jews, would be terrorists per the old definition.
    “sex” – original meaning: the characteristics which make an organism male or female
    – new meaning: whatever the fuck we say it is.
    “gender” – original meaning: “sex” but used by people who believe the word “sex” is too risque.
    – new meaning: whatever the fuck we say it is.

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