Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
We’ve met Agustín Fuentes before. An anthropologist at Princeton, he’s trying to carve a niche for himself by defending woke science, most notably by being the most prominent person to publicly accuse Darwin of racism and sexism, and in so doing committing some scientific missteps. Here’s what I wrote at the time: Here’s a Fuentes … Continue reading Agustin Fuentes once again flaunts his virtue via misleading statements
A few weeks back, Agustín Fuentes, a biological anthropologist and primatologist at Princeton, wrote an op-ed in Science about Darwin’s racism and sexism as Fuentes’s way of “celebrating” the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s pair of books The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. What Fuentes did was treat Darwin as if he … Continue reading Bob Richards answers Agustin Fuentes
On May 21 the anthropologist Agustín Fuentes published a tirade in Science against Darwin for being racist, sexist, and white supremacist—the inevitable takedown of a man who was far more liberal than his Victorian contemporaries (Darwin was, for one thing, an ardent abolitionist). And yes, Darwin did entertain some views that were racist and sexist, … Continue reading One response to Agustín Fuentes’s Darwin-dissing
If you want a combination of an author and a venue guaranteed to produce ideologically-motivated nonsense, it’s Agustin Fuentes writing at Scientific American. The combination of a badly misguided author, distorting biology for political reasons, with a magazine devoted to promulgating “authoritarian progressive” ideology disguised as science, gives me the same feeling I’d have if … Continue reading Agustín Fuentes grossly misrepresents the sex binary in (guess where?) Scientific American; argues that those who accept a binary do so out of bigotry, transphobia, and racism
On May 21, Princeton anthropologist Agustín Fuentes published a takedown of Darwin in a Science op-ed on the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Asserting that Darwin was a racist, a white supremacist, and a man whose ideas justified “colonialism” as well as “genocide,” Fuentes’s piece was over the … Continue reading Our letter to Science about Agustín Fuentes’s Darwin-bashing
On May 22 I discussed, or rather criticized sharply, a takedown of Darwin published in Science by by Agustín Fuentes, a primatologist and biological anthropologist at Princeton University. This year is the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s two-part book: The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. And while there was a good article in the same issue … Continue reading Robert Wright takes apart Agustín Fuentes’s critique of Darwin
Send in your photos, folkx! (That’s the ideologically correct spelling of “folks”.) I am in desperate need of wildlife pictures. Here’s today’s contributor, as described in a previous post: Today’s photos come from Rosemary Alles, who lives in South Africa and works for a conservation organization that partners with local people. Her narrative and captions are … Continue reading Readers’ wildlife photos
On March 8, I wrote a critique of this article, which appeared in American Scientist (click sceenshot to read): When I wrote my piece, I had grown weary of people making the same tired old arguments against the sex binary, arguments like saying that sex isn’t binary because male orangutans come in two forms (“flanged” … Continue reading A good refutation of a bad article on the supposed “spectrum” of sex
