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.
Yesterday I put up several posts about the binary nature of sex. On one of them I reported that several of us had signed a letter to the Presidents of three ecology/evolution societies who had issued a missive to Trump and all the members of Congress (I don’t think their missive has yet been sent). I wrote this:
Note that the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the American Society of Naturalists (ASN), and the Society of Systematic Biologists issued a declaration addressed to President Trump and all the members of Congress (declaration also archived here), a statement deliberately aimed at contradicting the first Executive Order by declaring that sex is not binary but a spectrum—in all species!
A first version of our own letter, signed publicly by 20 people (there are now almost 40) can be read here.
If you want us to consider adding your name to our letter above—for we’re still accumulating signatures—please click on the link below, which is an early version of the letter with some signatures.
At the bottom of the letter, you will see this form:
If you want your name to be added to the letter that will be sent to the SSE, ASN, and SSB, please go to the site above and fill in the blanks. And all of them please, as people are leaving off titles, emails and sometimes last names. We’ll track down titles and the like, but that’s about all we can do to recover missing information.
The deadline for signing is a week from Monday: 5 p.m. Chicago time on March 3.
We ask only two things: you be affiliated with biology in some way (training in biology sufficient to adjudicate the issues is sufficient), and that you be willing to have your name publicized, not only to the societies but on this website (I’m not sure if I’ll post the final version, though). Your response will automatically be added to an Excel document from which we’ll draft the final letter. Your email address will always be kept confidential Thanks!
h/t to Luana Maroja for drafting the letter and collecting many of the signatures.
And so we come to the last sex post of the day—about a new piece by Richard Dawkins on his Substack site, The Poetry of Reality. Richard points to what he sees as arrant hypocrisy in the statement on biological sex by the Presidents of the SSN, ASN, and SSB. As I mentioned in my first post today:
Note that the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the American Society of Naturalists (ASN), and the Society of Systematic Biologists issued a declaration addressed to President Trump and all the members of Congress (declaration archived here), a statement deliberately aimed at contradicting the first Executive Order by declaring that sex is not binary but a spectrum—in all species!
Richard shows, in his post (click below to read), that even the Presidents of these societies act, in their scientific publications, as if sex is binary, and he considers the disparity between their statement and their scientific behavior to be hypocritical.
An excerpt:
The presidents of three American societies of evolutionary biologists and ecologists have written a joint letter to President Trump and members of the US Congress stating that “extensive scientific evidence” contradicts the view that “there are two sexes . . . [which] are not changeable.” Also the view that “sex is determined at conception and is based on the size of the gamete that the resulting individual will produce”. Their statement is false and their letter is riddled with hypocrisy. In my opinion Donald Trump is a loathsome individual, utterly unfit to be President, but his statement that “sex is determined at conception and is based on the size of the gamete that the resulting individual will produce” is accurate in every particular, perhaps the only true statement he ever made.
The fact is, of course, that paper after paper in the scientific literature refers without qualification or equivocation to “males” and “females”. Biologist authors correctly assume that their readers will know the meanings of “male” and “female” without further explanation, and will accept the authors’ unsubstantiated recognition of the sex of the animals they study. I shall quote just three examples, which happen to be papers authored by Carol Boggs, Daniel Bolnick and Jessica Ware, the three society presidents. A conceivable riposte would be that “humans are not animals”. But then at what point in the evolution of Homo sapiens did sex suddenly became non-binary, a single exception to the general rule pervading the whole of the animal and plant kingdoms? And indeed, the three presidents explicitly disavow human exceptionalism when they say, “Such diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans.”
You can read the three examples yourself, for free, in his piece. (I used different examples in my own post here.) Note in the last sentence above that the three Presidents imply that sex is a spectrum in all species! I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t make such a foolish assertion were they to rewrite their letter. But I’m not sure they have even sent that letter, and have heard noises that they haven’t.
After Richard gives his examples, he says this:
When I wrote this, I was unaware that Jerry Coyne had already made the same point, quoting three different papers written by the three society presidents. He was too polite to accuse them of hypocrisy.
Finally, I want to add something important: If you want us to consider adding your name to the letter above, for we’re still accumulating signatures, please click on the link below, which is an early version of the letter with some signatures.
At the bottom of the letter, you will see this form:
If you want your name to be added to the letter to the SSE, ASN, and SSB, please go to that site and fill in the blanks. I ask only two things: you be affiliated with biology in some way, and that you be willing to have your name publicized, not only to the society but on this website (I’m not sure if I’ll post the final version, though). Your response will automatically be added to an Excel document from which we’ll draft the final letter. Thanks!
As I reported recently, the Presidents of three organismal-biology societies, the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the American Society of Naturalists (ASN) and the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB) sent a declaration addressed to President Trump and all the members of Congress. (declaration archived here) Implicitly claiming that its sentiments were endorsed by the 3500 members of the societies, the declaration also claimed that there is a scientific consensus on the definition of sex, and that is that sex is NOT binary but rather some unspecified but multivariate combination of different traits, a definition that makes sex a continuum or spectrum—and in all species! The bolding below is mine:
Scientific consensus defines sex in humans as a biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. There is variation in all these biological attributes that make up sex. Accordingly, sex (and gendered expression) is not a binary trait. While some aspects of sex are bimodal, variation along the continuum of male to female is well documented in humans through hundreds of scientific articles. Such variation is observed at both the genetic level and at the individual level (including hormone levels, secondary sexual characteristics, as well as genital morphology). Beyond the incorrect claim that science backs up a simple binary definition of sex, the lived experience of people clearly demonstrates that the genetic composition at conception does not define one’s identity. Rather, sex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment. Such diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans.
A number of biologists I talked to had strong objections to both this wonky declaration, which of course is based not on biology but on ideology (see my posts here and here), as well as to its implication that biologists, including members of the three societies, generally agreed with it. But the societies did not poll their members before issuing a general statement in their name!
The statement is in fact is a prime but embarrassing example of societies being ideologically captured to the extent that they misrepresent science to cater to “progressive” liberalism. The object of course is not foxes, horses, or oak trees, but humans; this is meant to reassure people who feel that they are “nonbinary” in gender that nature is just like them. (For an excellent analysis of the issue, and a defense of the binary nature of sex, see Richard Dawkins’s article here.)
Luana Maroja of Williams College, my frequent partner in crime, was even more concerned, and so she penned a letter which she sent last night to the Presidents of the three societies. With a little help from me, she managed to get 23 biologists to sign the letter (as expected, many demurred and wouldn’t sign). I reproduce Luana’s letter below with permission; Except for Luana and me, I have left off the signers’ names because I didn’t ask them if they wanted to go public about such a touchy subject.
To wit:
Dear presidents of the Tri-societies: ASN, SSB and SSE,
While we agree that Trump’s executive orders are misleading, we disagree with your statements about the sex binary and its definition. In animals and plants, binary sex is universally defined by gamete type, even though sexes vary in how they are developmentally determined and phenotypically identified across taxa. Thus, your letter misrepresents the scientific understanding of many members of the Tri-societies.
You state that: “Scientific consensus defines sex in humans as a biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia, and secondary sex characteristics.”
However, we do not see sex as a “construct” and we do not see other mentioned human-specific characteristics, such as “lived experiences” or “[phenotypic] variation along the continuum of male to female”, as having anything to do with the biological definition of sex. While we humans might be unique in having gender identities and certain types of sexual dimorphism, sex applies to us just as it applies to dragonflies, butterflies, or fish – there is no human exceptionalism. Yes, there are developmental pathologies that cause sterility and there are variations in phenotypic traits related to sexual dimorphism. However, the existence of this variation does not make sex any less binary or more complex, because what defines sex is not a combination of chromosomes or hormonal balances or external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. The universal biological definition of sex is gamete size.
If you and the signers of this letter do not agree on these points, then the Tri-societies were wrong to speak in our names and claim that there is a scientific consensus without even conducting a survey of society members to see if such a consensus exists. Distorting reality to comply with ideology and using a misleading claim of consensus to give a veneer of scientific authority to your statement does more harm than just misrepresenting our views: it also weakens public trust in science, which has declined rapidly in the last few years. Because of this, scientific societies should stay away from politics as much as possible, except for political issues that directly affect the mission of the society.
Respectfully,
Jerry Coyne, Professor Emeritus, Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago
Luana S. Maroja, Professor of Biology, Williams College
THE NAMES OF 21 OTHER SIGNERS ARE REDACTED
I doubt the Societies will pay this letter any attention, as they seem to be doubling down on the sex-is-a-spectrum-in-all-species view. This is performative flaunting of virtue that will accomplish nothing. But we and the other signers want the public to know that this view of biological sex is not held by all biologists, and hardly represents a scientific consensus. (If there is a consensus, it is most likely the gametic definition described by Dawkins.) If you want to write your own letter rather than sign a group effort, the email addressed of two Presidents are given in their letter, and it’s easy to google that of the ASN President. And if you did sign the letter and want that to be public, simply say it in the comments below.
As a former President of the SSE, I am ashamed of what that society has done, and they should be ashamed of themselves for truckling to the latest ideology. They can of course issue statements bearing on issues of evolution, but this one simply distorts the facts. And, as I reported yesterday, the SSE has seen fit to make more general declarations about politics.
About a week ago, the Washington Post published, starting on its front page, a long article arguing that race is a purely social construct without reality or utility, and thus should be eliminated. The author Sydney Trent, is a science journalist who covers social issues, and that may explain why the article was replete with scientific problems, among them the neglect of existing research on ethnic groups (my preferred term for “race”). You can see the article by clicking on the headline below. Since it’ll probably be paywalled if you subscribe, I found the whole article archived here.
Leaving aside the misleading “science says” (science doesn’t say anything, scientists do; and not all scientists agree that race isn’t real), I’ll show you three small excerpts of Trent’s piece:
Yet unlike in decades past, more ordinary Americans are coming to see “race” for what it is, [Carlos] Hoyt maintains. In interviews he conducted for his doctoral thesis and book, these people describe gradually awakening to the idea — through traumatic personal experiences with discrimination, through foreign travel or something they read — that they had been sold a bill of goods. “Race,” they decided, does not exist.
. . . The truth, [Adrian] Lyles, 37, said, is that “race has no quantifiable metric,” like socioeconomic status, for example, he said. “Where you have unreliable input, your data is trash.”
. . . In 2003, the completion of the Human Genome Project — which found that humans globally share 99.9 percent of their DNA — gave waste to the notion of “race” among the vast majority of scientists. But the public appears barely to have noticed. The idea still lives everywhere — in discrimination and criminal profiling, in the rise in hate speech and acts, in the recent Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action in college admissions, in the rhetoric of social justice advocates and the new capitalization of Black and White in the media. Racial categorization persists on job applications, medical forms, and most critically to Hoyt due to its high visibility, the Census.
Implicit in Trent’s effort to dethrone the term is the misguided idea that if you think “races” have any biological reality, then that buttresses racism. That need not be true, but, historically, belief in races has been associated with the idea of a racial hierarchy in various traits (most often intelligence), and so I prefer to use “populations” or “ethnicity”, which doesn’t carry that historical taint.
Trent concludes that racial categories should be eliminated everywhere, especially on the census. The problem is that from the DNA figures above, she concludes that “racial categories”—the half-dozen or so “races” recognized in the past (white, black, Asian, and so on)—have no biological significance. But she conflates “racial categories”, the named “boxes” above, with “race”, which I take to mean “a population that is genetically distinguishable from other populations of our species”.
Classical “races” were assumed to be absolutely demarcated geographically and morphologically, and to be separated by substantial genetic differences. We know now that this conception of “race” isn’t true. There are no absolutely clear-cut categories into which everyone fits, genetic differences between even the “classical” races are not large, and there are “races within races”: populations that can be distinguished genetically from other populations often put into the same classical race. Again, that’s why I use “ethnicity” or “population” to refer to such groups.
But there is no doubt that ethnicity, and even the “old fashioned” races, carry meaningful biological information and are genetically differentiable. If they weren’t, then you wouldn’t be able to pay companies like 23andMe to suss out your ancestry, or to trace the history of human migration by using genetic differences between populations. (23andMe told me from my DNA that I am 97.2% Ashkenazi Jew and 2.8% Eastern European, which matches perfectly with what I know from my family history.)
Ethnicity reflects evolutionary history, and if you use thousands of DNA sites (as you see in my letter below, even 99.6% identity between people—not 99.9% as Trent wrote—still leaves, in a genome of 3 billion base pairs, at least 12 million variable nucleotides. That variation is largely correlated with ancestry and geography, so that, for example, the DNA of most Europeans allows you to identify their birthplace to within 500 miles. Luana Maroja and I described the real situation in our recent paper (“The ideological subversion of biology“) in Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine published by the Center for Inquiry. (The race material is under point #5 of the paper.)
And, as I say in my published letter, one study showed that if you ask people to self-identify their “old fashioned” race (they used 3,636 Americans who self identified as either African American, white, East Asian, or Hispanic), and then independently look at their DNA in a blind study, you find that when you compare the DNA with the self-identification, you find a 99.84 percent match! That means that even the widely-reviled “classical” races are genetically differentiable using cluster analysis. This is not surprising because these groups evolved in different parts of the world, and for much of their history they evolved in semi-isolation, leading to the accumulation of differences in the DNA by either genetic drift or natural selection.
At any rate, the Post‘s article was scientifically misleading, and so I set out to correct it by writing a letter to the paper. Mirabile dictu, they published it, and you can find it by either clicking on the screenshot or by simply reading my letter reproduced below the headline.
They edited it fairly heavily for length, so I had to leave out stuff like locating someone’s birthplace from their genes. Still, I think I did make the point that there is substantial genetic variation among people and diagnostic genetic variation among ethnic groups, and that this variation is useful in several ways. If I could make one change, it would be to re-insert something that was cut and that I missed when I reviewed the edits: I would have inserted “large differences in” at the point where I put an asterisk in the letter below.
If you get the paper version of the Post, the letter is on page A27; if you have an online subscription, it’s here (or see my letter and another one by clicking the headline below). They changed the title of Trent’s article after the online version was published to what you see above.
The letter:
The Oct. 19 front-page article “A categorical no to the concept of race” argued that human “race” is a social construct without biological meaning. But there is important scientific data showing that race is indeed associated with diagnostic and useful biological differences.
Scientists have long rejected the simplistic view of races as groups distinguishable by appearance, geographic origin and * genes. But rejecting this view of “racial categories” and arguing that humans “share 99.9 percent of their DNA,” misses important genetic differences between populations. In fact, while humans share 99.6 percent of their genome, our genome has more than 3 billion base pairs, leaving more than 12 million DNA sites that vary among people.
This variation is correlated with ancestry and geography. It is used, for example, by genealogy services to tell people about their ancestry. In forensics, it’s used to identify criminals and bodies. And DNA variation is used to map the location of genes causing disease, an effort with great medical promise because the frequency of genetic diseases such as schizophrenia varies among populations.
Even the old-fashioned concept of race shows that it is not just a social construct. A large sample of Americans who self-identified as African American, White, East Asian or Hispanic was subject to blind analysis of their DNA. The subjects fell into four genetic clusters, revealing a 99.8 percent match between self-identification and DNA classification. Clearly, even old views of race involve meaningful genetic differences reflecting the evolutionary history of our species.
Jerry A. Coyne, Chicago The writer is emeritus professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago.
There was also another letter making a different point about racial designations, and I’ll add that, too:
The front-page article “A categorical no to the concept of race” explained how treating race as objective rather than socially constructed has led to demographic confusion while shoehorning people into categories at variance with how they view themselves. As an example, the article mentioned the recent custom of uppercasing “Black” and “White” in American news media. The Post ought to champion a more nuanced standard, perhaps by using lowercase for how people (whose self-identification might be unknown) are viewed by others and uppercase for how they view themselves. The majuscule would then carry the same connotation of intentional membership as it does in the distinction between “Republican” and “republican” or between “Deaf” and “deaf.”
Charles H. Bennett, Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.
Thanks to a reader who encouraged me to write my letter.
The conference on academic freedom at Stanford included a panel on STEM with chemistry professor Anna Krylov from USC, Mimi St. Johns, an undergraduate in computer sciences at Stanford, Luana Maroja, Professor of Biology at Williams College, and me. Luana (who’s written on this site before) and I were to handle biology, and we divided up the task beforehand. Luana teaches undergrads as well as doing research, and so is able to observe the current impact of ideology on both areas. She thus had a more personal take on “the existential threat” of ideology to biology, and Bari Weiss, who was in the audience, published Luana’s remarks on Bari’s substack site. You can see them for free below (but subscribe if you read often); I’ll give a few excerpts:
Luana’s intro recounts her “woke tipping point,” which happened to be hearing an authoritarian proclamation by—who else?—Reza Aslan:
As an evolutionary biologist, I am quite used to attempts to censor research and suppress knowledge. But for most of my career, that kind of behavior came from the right. In the old days, most students and administrators were actually on our side; we were aligned against creationists. Now, the threat comes mainly from the left.
The risk of cancellation at Williams College, where I have taught for 12 years, and at top colleges and universities throughout this country, is not theoretical. My fellow scientists and I are living it. What is at stake is not simply our reputations, but our ability to pursue truth and scientific knowledge.
If you had asked me about academic freedom five years ago, I would have complained about the obsession with race, gender and ethnicity, along with safetyism on campus (safe spaces, grade inflation, and so on). But I would not have expressed concerns about academic freedom.
We each have our own woke tipping point—the moment you realize that social justice is no longer what we thought it was, but has instead morphed into an ugly authoritarianism. For me that moment came in 2018, during an invited speaker talk, when the religious scholar Reza Aslan stated that “we need to write on a stone what can and cannot be discussed in colleges.” Students gave this a standing ovation. Having been born under dictatorship in Brazil, I was alarmed.
Then the two areas of danger: teaching and research. Luana dwells on something I alluded to in my bit: the misguided denial of the sex binary, a fundamental observation in animals that is not only instructive about evolution, which repeatedly produces two and only two sexes in animals, but also enlightens is the very basis for sexual selection, which is responsible for a lot of the differences between males and females in animals.
The restriction of academic freedom comes in two forms: what we teach and what we research.
Let’s start with teaching. I need to emphasize that this is not hypothetical. The censorious, fearful climate is already affecting the content of what we teach.
One of the most fundamental rules of biology from plants to humans is that the sexes are defined by the size of their gametes—that is, their reproductive cells. Large gametes occur in females; small gametes in males. In humans, an egg is 10 million times bigger than a sperm. There is zero overlap. It is a full binary.
It goes on, but you can read for yourself. Luana does, however, highlight how this denial on teaching, which has a humorous sidelight:
In psychology and public health, many teachers no longer say male and female, but instead use the convoluted “person with a uterus.” I had a colleague who, during a conference, was criticized for studying female sexual selection in insects because he was a male. Another was discouraged from teaching the important concept of “sexual conflict”—the idea that male and female interests differ and mates will often act selfishly; think of a female praying mantis decapitating the head of the male after mating—because it might “traumatize students.” I was criticized for teaching “kin selection”—the the idea that animals tend to help their relatives. Apparently this was somehow an endorsement of Donald Trump hiring his daughter Ivanka.
Yes, one distraught student did somehow connect Trump and Ivanka with kin selection!
The ideological basis of this distortion? It’s the attempt to validate the diversity of gender identities by claiming there’s a diversity of sex as well. But there’s not: sex is binary while gender, which is more continuous, is bimodal, with most gender identities grouping at the male and female sociosexual roles but with many identities in between. Still, one shouldn’t confuse biological sex and gender, which, unlike sex, is a human social construct based on one’s individual choices. The bimodality of sex is a biological fact that says exactly nothing about the moral rights of individuals of different genders.
And then there’s the effect on research, with ideology not only limiting access to data but also what what you can publish. Be your results true or not, some journals won’t consider them at if they see potential for psychological “harm”:
But the field that is most directly affected is research related to humans, especially those dealing with evolution of populations.
As an example: The NIH now puts barriers to access to the important database of “Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP).” The database is an amazing tool that combines genomes (the unique genetic makeup of each individual) and phenotypes (the observable characteristics of each individual) of millions of people. These phenotypes include education, occupation, health and income and, because the dataset connects genetics with phenotype at an individual level, it is essential for scientists who want to understand genes and genetic pathways that are behind those phenotypes.
The NIH now denies scientists access to this data and other related datasets. Researchers report getting permits denied on the grounds that studying their genetic basis is “stigmatizing.” According to one researcher, this happens even if the research has nothing to do with race or sex, but focuses on genetics and education.
But why is education attainment any more stigmatizing than health? Especially when all individuals in the database are anonymous? Given the large genetic variation between individuals in a group and the large environmental effect on phenotypes (especially those related to education), are results for the group level even that relevant?
Learning about what differentiates education attainment and occupation is more than an academic curiosity. Understanding the genetic pathways behind phenotypes might help us find solutions and help struggling children.
The denial or rejection biological truth affects two areas of evolutionary biology most of all: the idea that there are differences between groups, and the fact that differences between individuals, and averages between groups, might have a genetic basis. Ideologues reject both because difference implies ranking, and this supposedly implies superiority/inferiority, which in turn implies bigotry. And the notion that individual or group differences might be partly based on genes somehow makes them easier to reject than if they were cultural.
The facts are the facts, but why on earth should we judge the worth of a human or group based on biology? That’s an example of the “appeal to nature”, a fallacy that, in short, says “what we see in nature is what should be a model for behavior for humans.” This is bogus in two respects. If we base equality and worth of people on observations of nature, our morality then becomes contingent in biology, and is malleable to any alterations in what we know about nature. Further, what we see in nature is not always good, with many things far from models of human behavior. Nature is red in tooth an claw; there’s murder, theft, forcible copulation, and a whole host of things we want no part of. In fact, the appeal to nature already assumes a preexisting morality based not on biology but on other factors: preference, reason, utilitarianism, and the other bases of ethics. What is happening when we claim that all groups are identical in a given trait or traits, that all people within a group are identical for traits , and that there are more than two biological sexes, is the reverse of the “appeal to nature”. Instead of asserting that what we see in nature gives us guidelines for how to behave, the ideologues reverse the fallacy (which remains a fallacy): how we decide to behave in humans tells us what we must see in nature—and if we have to distort nature to see what gives us comfort, well, distort it we must.
This distortion is, as Luana emphasizes: an existential threat to biology—and to science in general. Her closing:
The censors and gatekeepers simply assume—without evidence—that human population research is malign and must be shut down. The costs of this kind of censorship, both self-imposed and ideologically based, are profound. Student learning is impaired and important research is never done. The dangers of closing off so many avenues of inquiry is that science itself becomes an extension of ideology and is no longer an endeavor predicated on pursuing knowledge and truth.
The kerfuffle continues about whether mātauranga Māori, or “Maori ways of knowing”, constitutes an independent form of science that should be taught in school science class as coequal to what we know as “real science”. As I’ve pointed out before, this coequality is simply ludicrous, for mātauranga Māori is a collection of religious beliefs, superstitions, false assertions (e.g. biological creationism), as well as a few practical truths (e.g., how to trap eels). In other words, it’s by no means equivalent to modern science, and the well-meaning but misguided notion of supporting Maori students (as well as confusing all students) by teaching them “their own science” is a recipe for disaster and scientific backwardness. Even New Zealand’s Royal Society is supporting this disaster:
Richard Dawkins has pointed out the same thing:
Equally daft case for teaching Viking “ways of knowing” in Norwegian science classes, Druid “ways of knowing” in British science classes . . . Navajo, Kikuyu, Yanomamo “ways of knowing” etc. All different. Truths about the universe don’t depend on which country you are in.
Now I think I can speak for Richard when I say that neither of us are trying to denigrate the Maori people themselves, who have a proud history (as well as a history of oppression) that is well integrated into modern “colonial” culture. What we are trying to do is simply defend science and ensure that students who are seeking to learn science are not at the same time swallowing a hefty dose of untruths, religion, and mythology. And so we fight on, knowing that the desire to placate the indigenous people is sufficiently strong among Kiwi academics and government officials that they’re willing to degrade science to support ethnicity. But what they’re doing is disadvantaging Maori youth by buttressing their “ways of knowing” as “science”. That will not help any of them who wish to pursue scientific careers.
Previously I had been unclear about whether mātauranga Māori would be taught as equivalent to modern science in high school alone, or also at university. The following advertisement for a teaching fellow came to my attention, and it clearly implies that yes, universities are going to pollute science with mythology, falsehoods, and superstition.
Click on the screenshot to read the whole thing. Note that this is at the University of Auckland—the premier university in the country.
It’s pretty clear from the list of goals below that Maori ways of knowing are going to be taught as biological science. Bolding below the title is mine:
Te Whiwhinga mahi | The opportunity
Te Kura Mātauranga Koiora | School of Biological Sciences (SBS) is seeking to appoint a permanent, full-time Professional Teaching Fellow (PTF) to support the School’s teaching practice and enhance curriculum development in terms of Māoritanga.
The Kaiwhakaako Mātauranga Koiora will work in partnership with other SBS academic staff to support teaching and learning practices that facilitate appropriate integration of indigenous knowledge, te reo, tikanga, mātauranga Māori, and kaupapa Māori into the curriculum. To achieve this, the successful candidate will work collaboratively with academic staff to understand the opportunities and challenges for incorporating Te Ao Māori into the biological curriculum and will identify potential pathways for curriculum redevelopment and redesign that will support both Māori and non- Māori staff and students, and the wider community in Aotearoa New Zealand.
This is also clear from the qualifications for the job (again my emphasis):
Our successful candidate will bring:
Strong experience in teaching relevant to the tertiary sector, preferably in Biological Sciences
A post-graduate qualification in biology or related field, although we will also consider applicants with a biology undergraduate qualification and a relevant postgraduate qualification such as in education.
Well-developed understanding of principles of te Tiriti o Waitangi and their application in the work environment
Understanding of tikanga Māori and confidence navigating Te Ao Māori
Proficiency in te reo Māori is preferred
Experience of curriculum design and/or pedagogies to integrate mātauranga, tikanga and te reo Māori into courses for diverse cohorts of students.
It’s pretty clear, as other academics in New Zealand have told me, that the incorporation of mātauranga Māori into the biology curriculum is a foregone conclusion. That’s because it’s seen as a form of “inclusion”—misguided though it may be—and a form of inclusion that trumps teaching students real biology and other science.
I would urge New Zealanders and academics to stand up against this development, for its ultimate result will be the world viewing New Zealand’s science as a joke. By all means ensure that Maori have equal rights, and even affirmative action as reparations for their mistreatment, but for Ceiling Cat’s sake do not let their religion and mythology be taught as truth. It’s as if every biology class in American high schools and colleges were forced to teach Biblical creationism alongside evolutionary biology.
UPDATE: I left this comment after the Slate piece, but it appears to have been removed. I’m not sure why, as there are far more vitriolic comments in the thread.
Jerry Coyne
The claim that the idea of cooperation is novel and paradigm-shifting in evolutionary biology is palpably ridiculous. All of the examples given by the author are not only known, as well as many other examples of mutualism that long preceded Margulis (lichens, termites, cleaner fish and “cleanees”), but fit firmly within the neo-Darwinian paradigm. There’s nothing new here except the author’s claim that the idea of cooperation is novel. To anybody who’s studied evolutionary biology, this is nonsense. Further, the author apparently hasn’t read Prum, who actually tried to RESURRECT Darwin’s idea of sexual selection.
I have written a long critique of this piece at my website http://www.whyevolutionistrue.com. It’s the latest piece, and since I may not be allowed to post links, just go to my site and read it. The upshot: this piece evinces either ignorance or deliberate obfuscation, and is also misleading in that it tries to distort the history and nature of evolutionary biology in the service of an ideology (apparently socialism).
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Once again we have a collision between ideology and science, but in this case the perceived conclusions of science are in fact wrong, so the called-for revision of evolutionary biology in light of woke ideology isn’t needed. In a new article in Slate (see below), John Favini argues that evolutionary biologists are completely wedded to the paradigm of competition between individuals and between species, and further argues that the idea of individuals or species being cooperative is both reviled, new, and non-Darwinian. If you’re at all familiar with the history of reciprocal altruism, kin selection, and mutualism between species, you’ll know that these ideas—which all involve the evolution of cooperation—are both over half a century old and well ingrained in modern evolutionary theory.
But Favini is either unfamiliar with this literature, which is inexcusable for a graduate student in anthropology who claims a knowledge of biology, or hides it, which is duplicitous. I won’t make a judgment except that this article, which seems more attuned to the Discovery Institute (or even Salon), doesn’t belong in Slate, which is supposed to be a decent site. (Hitchens used to write for it.)
Favini is identified at the site as “a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Virginia and a freelance writer. He is interested in climate change, environmental politics, and science as a cultural domain.”
From this you can derive one speculation and one conclusion. The speculation is that Favini is a cultural rather than a physical anthropologist; the former tend to be social justice warriors who often downplay scientific facts in favor of their ideology (they often, for example, completely dismiss the idea of “race”, though it has a qualified reality that’s meaningful). Second, the “science as a cultural domain” bit is worrying, and in fact is what gave rise to the Slate article (click on screenshot below to see it).
Favini situates Darwin at the outset as a white, elite, Englishman subject to the social forces of his time, and predisposed to think about competition because his theory of natural selection originated after reading Malthus on competition. From this, throughout the article, he concludes that all of Darwinism, then and now, is marinated in the idea of competition.
. . . like all humans, Darwin brought culture with him wherever he traveled. His descriptions of the workings of nature bear resemblance to prevailing thinking on human society within elite, English circles at the time. This is not a mere coincidence, and tracing his influences is worthwhile. It was, after all, the heyday of classical liberalism, dominated by thinkers like Adam Smith, David Hume, and Thomas Malthus, who valorized an unregulated market. They were debating minor points within a consensus on the virtues of competition. In an especially humble (and revealing) moment, Darwin characterized the principles underlying his thinking as naught but “the doctrine of Malthus, applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.”
. . . More than just a cliché, though, the supposed naturalness of competition has played a central role in substantiating the laissez-faire variety of capitalism the majority of the American political spectrum has championed for the past four or so decades. Indeed, any non-market-based solution to social issues usually falls prey to claims of utopianism, of ignoring the fundamental selfishness of the human species. . . . To put it simply, we have let Darwinism set the horizon of possibility for human behavior. Competition has become a supposed basic feature of all life, something immutable, universal, natural.
Regardless of the idea of “social Darwinism” (which Darwin never held and which has been completely abandoned by intellectuals), the facts of competition between genes (i.e., natural selection), competition between individuals (which produces natural selection), and competition between members of different species (which also produces natural selection as well as interesting aspects of ecology) are real and important. In fact, without competition between the different forms of genes for representation in later generations, we wouldn’t have natural selection at all!
And to the extent that natural selection is responsible for most interesting features of life, including biodiversity itself, it is “natural and universal.” But “natural” doesn’t mean that we have to put up with it, for we derail natural selection all the time by using doctors, dentists, and optometrists, and by using contraception. Further, we’ve tamed competition between individuals with laws against aggression, rape, and so on. Finally, we’re beginning to tame the competition between species by removing invasive species from places they don’t belong and by giving up the foolish idea that we humans should dominate all of nature.
Why is Favini attacking competition at such great length? We get a clue early in the article, as well as later. Early on, he says this:
Yet new research from across various fields of study is throwing the putative scientific basis of this consensus into doubt. Mind you, there have always been people, scientists and otherwise, who conceived of life outside a Darwinian paradigm—the idea of evolutionary biology is and has been a conversation among a mostly white and male global elite. Yet, even within centers of institutional power, like universities in North America, competition’s position as the central force driving evolution has been seriously challenged recently. In fact, criticisms have been mounting at least since biologist Lynn Margulis began publishing in the late ’60s.
You guessed it. It’s those damn white males, again, Jake! They are the ones with the power to push an unwarranted consensus about competition in the “elite universities.” According to Favini, it took a female, Lynn Margulis, to dethrone competition as the centerpiece of evolutionary biology. Well, that’s not quite true, because Darwinian speculations about cooperation, and the recognition that evolution can promote it both within and between species, has been an accepted part of evolution well before Margulis found that a form of “cooperation” was responsible for the advent of the eukaryotic cell. Later on, we’ll hear Favini touting the “heterodox voices” of indigenous Americans as helping dethrone the idea of competition, a woke concept that, sadly, isn’t true, either.
Favini then bangs on at length about all the supposedly non-Darwinian instances of cooperation that he says, have “fractured Western biology’s consensus on Darwin”. This is, to be gauche, pure bullshit. Most of these phenomena have been known for decades, and none of those pose any kind of challenge for Darwinism. They include the merging of two prokaryotes into a cell containing mitochondria, and, in plants, a cell containing chloroplasts. This “endosymbiosis” idea was a wonderful and true hypothesis pushed (but not originated) by Lynn Margulis. And it can be seen as an example of cooperation, in which the “big” cell benefits from having energy-generating organelles, while the organelles (which, like the cell itself, underwent evolution to promote the interaction) gain protection and sustenance.
Margulis’s theory was initially met with some resistance, but was quickly accepted after microscopic and especially DNA evidence showed that she was right. But the important thing in our discussion is that this is just one example of the kind of symbiosis that was accepted long before Margulis. Well known symbioses include those between leafcutter ants and fungi, between the termites and the protists and bacteria that help them digest cellulose, between the algae and fungi that constitute lichens, between cleaner fish and the “cleanees,” between clownfish and the sea anemones they inhabit, and the many species that have symbiotic bacteria or algae, like the bacteria that inhabit light organs and produce light in deep-sea fish (see photo at bottom).
It’s important to recognize that these examples of interspecific symbiosis (“mutualisms,” in which both partners benefit), are perfectly consistent with neo-Darwinism, and have never been seen as a challenge to the theory. Each species benefits from associating with the other, and natural selection will act and has acted to tighten the mutualisms. More recent findings of a mutualistic “microbiome” in ourselves and other species are also something that slots perfectly into a Darwinian paradigm, just as does another form of symbiosis: parasitism.
I’ll add here that cooperation within groups, beginning with kin selection that forges bonds between relatives (and explaining the wonderfully cooperative castes within a social-insect colony), and extending to “reciprocal altruism”, in which small bands of animals undergo individual selection to treat their groupmates better, has also never been problematic for Darwinism. With the recognition by Hamilton, Trivers, and others that genes in you are also genes in your relatives, and that genes for scratching the backs of others who scratch yours can also be advantageous, the multifarious forms of cooperation in nature have developed into a wonderful story and a true story, but also, contra Favini, an old story.
Favini, however, pretends that all this work on cooperation has upended evolutionary biology, fracturing our consensus on Darwinism. Given that all the examples he adduces haven’t tarnished evolutionary theory one bit, he’s just reaching wildly to pretend that he’s found something new. He even cites the renegade “Third Way” group of evolutionists who, to my mind, don’t pose any serious alternative to Darwinism:
Put simply, life is beginning to look ever more complex and ever more collaborative. All this has fractured Western biology’s consensus on Darwin. In response to all these new insights, some biologists instinctively defend Darwin, an ingrained impulse from years of championing his work against creationists. Others, like Margulis herself, feel Darwin had something to offer, at least in understanding the animal world, but argue his theories were simplified and elevated to a doctrine in the generations after his passing. Others are chartering research projects that depart from established Darwinian thinking in fundamental ways—like ornithologist Richard Prum, who recently authored a book on the ways beauty, rather than any utilitarian measure of fitness, shapes evolution. Indeed, alongside the research I have explored here, works by scientists like Carl Woese on horizontal gene transfer and new insights from epigenetics have pushed some to advocate for an as-yet-unseen “Third Way,” a theory for life that is neither creationism nor Neo-Darwinian evolution.
Note that Favini gives Darwin only a bit of credit here, saying that “Margulis [felt] Darwin had something to offer.” DUHHH! And as far as Prum’s book on sexual selection for “beauty” goes, well, as you may recall, in that book Prum revives Darwin’s own theory of sexual selection! Did Favini even read the book? While Prum grossly exaggerates the ubiquity of and evidence for the “runaway” model of sexual selection, make no mistake about it: Prum’s theory is thoroughly Darwinian, incorporating Favini’s despised “utilitarian measures of fitness.” (Just look at the theoretical models of runaway sexual selection.)
I’ll add, to complete the record on Darwin, that he did not ignore cooperation. In The Descent of Man, for instance, he speculates on the origin of human altruism, although he floats a theory of group selection to explain it. He also ponders the evolution of cooperation in social insects, and, in the chapter on “Instinct” in The Origin, suggests that sterile castes can be produced by “family selection,” which many have taken to be one of the first inklings of kin selection among relatives.
It’s at the end of the piece that Favini’s mask slips as he plunges into wokeness, touting the insights of indigenous Americans (which haven’t influenced evolutionary theory), and then dissing capitalism, which he sees as the outcome of Darwinism rather than of economic and social forces.
First, the indigenous people:
This lack of agreement isn’t such a bad thing. Leaving the Darwinian consensus behind means a more capacious, diverse, and ultimately more rigorous science. The recent dissensus has opened up more room for important, heterodox voices like Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Kimmerer speaks of plants as highly intelligent beings and teachers, a sharp departure from the reductionist, utilitarian approach to plant and animal life that passed as scientific rigor within the Darwinian framework. Much of the recent research I have highlighted might count as what Kim TallBear, a scholar and enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, calls “settler epiphanies”—belated “discoveries” by settlers of Indigenous knowledge that was either ignored or outright suppressed by colonial land appropriation and attempted genocide.
Certainly ethnobotany and the knowledge of indigenous people included in that field, have been extremely valuable. A huge proportion of our drugs, for example, come from plants, some based on how they were used by locals. But indigenous peoples haven’t changed the scientific “way of knowing” with their “spiritual way of knowing” (something that Kimmerer seems to tout), nor have they made Darwinism swerve even a millimeter from its path. (Note Favini’s denigration of evolutionary biology as “reductionist and utilitarian”. It is of course neither.)
Finally, Favini lapses into socialism. But whatever its merits, socialism cannot and should not be justified by citing the evolution of cooperation, or by arguing that an unjustified view of evolutionary biology has severely impeded its acceptance by propping the notion that capitalism’s competitition is “natural” Social Darwinism might have been mildly influential at the time of Herbert Spencer, but that view has long since fallen by the wayside.
Overall, then, what we get in Favini’s piece is pure politics, with some Darwinism thrown in to demonize and blame for competition:
Far too many environmentalists assume that people, driven by innate self-interest, are bound to harm ecology, that we will inevitably clear-cut, extract, consume, so long as it gives us an advantage over the next guy. This leaves us deeply disempowered, with few solutions to climate change outside limiting humanity’s impact through some kind of population control. When competitive self-interest is revealed to be a mutable behavior, the causes of climate change come into greater clarity: not human nature, but an economic system that demands competition, that distributes resources such that a tiny elite can live tremendously carbon-intensive lifestyles while the rest of us struggle for a pittance. Leaving competition behind, we can also imagine richer solutions: climate policies that problematize the tremendous wealth of the few, that build economies concerned with collective well-being and sustainability.
. . . Science can play a critical role in liberating our imagination from competition’s grip. It can show us all the symbioses that make life possible. Such a science can remind us that we can act and be otherwise—that the shortsighted self-interest that motivates, for instance, continued fossil fuel extraction is endemic to capitalism, not to our species, much less to life itself. We can find ways to live collaboratively with the bewildering array of life that roots and scurries across our planet, but only if we reckon with competition’s hold on our thinking—for if we see life as merely a competitive struggle to survive, we will make it one.
I’ve pondered why Favini has so badly misrepresented the history and content of evolutionary biology, and the only conclusion I can reach is that he’s a woke cultural anthropologist who is willing to distort the nature and history of science in the interest of promoting a socialist program. But he’s dead wrong in claiming that evolution is completely obsessed with competition (except between genes when you talk about natural selection), and equally wrong about the evolution of cooperation having been completely neglected until Lynn Margulis came along.
Since Favini is young, I won’t be too hard on him, except to advise him to drop this particular hobbyhorse, as it will only hurt what reputation he has. Or, rather, what reputation he has among evolutionists, as cultural anthropology is largely a miasma of nescience.
A mutualism: a female anglerfish, Linophryne polypogon, with her light organ fueled by bacteria. Photo by Peter David in Wired. See this source for more information about the mutualism.
