I may have mentioned this article from Trends in Ecology & Evolution before, as it outlines all the possible harms that the language of ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB) can cause. Click to read:
Here’s one bit:
In recent years, events such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and waves of anti-Black violence have highlighted the need for leaders in EEB to adopt inclusive and equitable practices in research, collaboration, teaching, and mentoring.
As we plan for a more inclusive future, we must also grapple with the exclusionary history of EEB. Much of Western science is rooted in colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, and these power structures continue to permeate our scientific culture.
Here, we discuss one crucial way to address this history and make EEB more inclusive for marginalized communities: our choice of scientific terminology.
By now you should be familiar with this kind of writing, which can be simply copied from one scientific field practicum to another. Chemistry and physics have their own papers calling for a new inclusive terminology, too.
And once again we see the unproven assertion that the “colonialist, white supremacist, and patriarchal” nature of EEB has excluded minorities, and also that the language of the field practicum has been partly responsible for that exclusion.
This is doubly fallacious. It is neither the nature nor the language of science that has kept minorities out of the EEB pipeline, but racism in the past, bigotry whose effects have never been repaired, creating a longstanding underclass. It is change in the nature of society, not in the nature of science, that will create the equal opportunity allowing oppressed people access to careers in science.
And frankly, I consider the claim that the language of our field has contributed to that exclusion a risible proposition. “Field”, for example, which refers to an area of study, has been deemed racist because it harkens back to the days of the plantation. The folks at Stanford have decreed that it’s to be replaced by “practicum.” Thus the age-old ecological tradition of “fieldwork” is now supposed to be “my practicum of studying ecology in the outdoors.” That suggestion would be hilarious if it weren’t true.
Further, the journal American Naturalist has suggested that EEB is ridden with ableist terms, including the population-genetic concept of “fitness”. (By the way, that is my most-viewed post of all time, with nearly 150,000 views.) If any disabled person has been kept out of EEB by this term, or any others, I’d like to know about it, for of course this article gives no such instances.
The article above links to a fill-in form in which you can suggest your own inclusive or innocuous term to replace harmful ones. Go to this page by clicking on the screenshot:
This is part of “The EEB Language Project,” which aims to increase equity in the field practicum by changing words. You are invited to note your own “harmful term”, suggest a more inclusive replacement term, and then give comments. In this way the language of EEB will be Newspeaked into equity.
Now despite the patronizing nature of this project, much less its futility, it’s amusing for those of us in EEB to think of such terms. A colleague and I came up with half a dozen in just five minutes. Here’s one that, I’m sure, has stifled diversity in the field greatly. But to explain it, I must give a biology lesson.
Harmful term: “Heterozyote advantage”.
What it means: This is an example of where the genetic constitution at a single locus (chromosome site) is such that the heterozygote, containing two different gene forms, has a “fitness advantage” (substitute your own less ableist language) over either of the two homozygotes. The classic example (and one of the few we know of) involves the genetic disease sickle-cell anemia.
There are two forms at this gene, which produces the beta chain of hemoglobin: “S“, the so-called “normal allele” (substitute more inclusive language), and the mutant form (you can say “alternative allele”) s, responsible for causing the debilitating disease sickle-cell anemia.
The “s” allele arose when a mutation in the DNA coding for the beta chain (in the genetic code, GAG—>GTG), changed the amino acid in position six of the Hb β chain from glutamic acid to valine. That changes the charge of the hemoglobin molecule, affecting its behavior in the presence of the parasite. If you have only one copy of the mutant form (allele), ergo are a heterozygote with the genetic constitution Ss, you produce half normal and half abnormal hemoglobin, but half is good enough to allow you good health. And if you have two copies of the normal allele (SS), you’re of course also fine.
But if you have two copies of the sickle-cell allele (ss); you get sickle-cell disease, and will have a painful illness and in all probability die young.
The twist in this story is that if you are a heterozygote in West Africa, where malaria is prevalent and often fatal, the heterozygote has both good health and protection against malaria compared to the normal and abnormal “homozygotes”, SS and ss. We’re not sure why this is, but the presence of the single sickle-cell allele in a carrier makes its blood cells break open prematurely when infected by the malarial parasite. This impedes reproduction of the sporozoan parasite that causes malaria so Ss “carriers” gain some protection against the infectious disease. Normal homozygotes (SS) have blood cells that rupture on schedule, so if you’re SS, you can get malaria and die.
Thus we have a situation, but only in areas with malaria, where the normal homozygote is healthy but prone to malaria, the sickle-cell homozygote (ss) gets the genetic disease and dies young, but the heterozygote (Ss) is protected from both malaria and from sickle-cell disease. This is the classic case of heterozygote advantage (also called “heterosis”, “balanced polymorphism,” or “overdominance”).
If you measure the relative reproductive output of the three genotypes, giving the fittest one (Ss) a fitness of 1.0, you get these figures
SS = 0.85 (they produce 15% fewer offspring than Ss genotypes because of malaria)
Ss = 1.0. (genotype with highest production of offspring)
ss = about 0 (they don’t survive to produce any offspring).
Geneticists love this case because when the heterozygotes have the highest fitness, it actually maintains both alleles at stable frequencies in the population. Heterozygote advantage is a way to keep genetic variation in a malaria-ridden population. You can show that this fitness scheme will result in stable equilibrium allele frequencies of S = 0.87 and s = 0.13. As I said, this is a stable frequency, and if the gene frequencies deviate from it, they will return to the equilibrium.
In west Africa, the frequencies of the two alleles in fact match these predicted frequencies very well, supporting the value of mathematical population genetics. The frequency of homozygous ss individuals is the square of the frequency of the s allele, or about 1.7%. It is a sad but ineluctable result of population genetics that because heterozygotes are the fittest genotypes, roughly 2% of the offspring will be born with a fatal disease, and this is simply because the individual with two different alleles has the highest fitness. There is no single allele whose homozygote has the highest fitness, and so, generation after generation, this fitness scheme above produces a large number of doomed infants. (One could take the absence of such an allele as evidence against God, who could have created one. Apparently the death of genetically diseased infants serves some purpose in the deity’s scheme.)
In the U.S., where malaria is almost unknown, the fitness scheme above reverts to one in which the SS genotype has the highest fitness, Ss is a tiny bit lower (Ss individuals can have occasional sickling “crises”), and that of ss remains zero. Eventually, in areas lacking malaria, every individual will become SS and the “s” allele will be eliminated.
It is because of the ancestry of many American blacks from West Africa that one sees sickle-cell anemia almost exclusively in the offspring of two individuals descended from that area (Ss X Ss, one-quarter of whose offspring will have the disease). But in the U.S., lacking malaria, natural selection will eventually eliminate the “s” allele. It will, however, be very slow.
One last note: sickle-cell anemia was the first “molecular disease” ever discovered: a disease caused by a mutation in a single gene that alters the protein it produces. And it was discovered by none other than Linus Pauling and his colleagues, who published this famous paper in Science in 1949 (click screenshot to read, or go here if you’re paywalled).
Now, on to the language issue:
Why the term “heterozygote advantage” is harmful. You notice in the above discussion I’ve used several verboten terms in EEB, including “normal allele”, “mutant allele”, and “fitness.”
To that I will add the term “heterozygote advantage” itself, which is harmful in two ways. First, the term “hetero” privileges heterosexual individuals over other LGBTQ+ individuals. And the idea that Ss individuals have a “fitness advantage” is doubly harmful, for it not only incorporates the ableist term “fitness,” but suggests that one genotype has an “advantage” over the other two. In reality, the SS and ss individuals are to be seen as “differently abled”, although I can’t manage to find a way that ss individuals with sickle-cell disease are “abled”. Some deep thought may suggest a way.
What the term should be replaced with. This is dead obvious: “diversity advantage“. The Ss genotype is best because it has the most diverse allelic constitution, possessing two alleles instead of one. It privileges diversity over boring homogeneity, a result that is also a bonus.
From now on I suggest that my new term, which is mine, replace “balanced polymorphism,” “heterozygote advantage” (ableist), “overdominance” (that’s wholly offensive, conjuring up eugenics and superiority), and “heterosis” (again with the offensive “hetero”).
This is my contribution to inclusive language in EEB, which is mine. Lest you think the suggestion is dumb, remember that it’s no dumber than the notions of “relative fitness” and “fieldwork”, all slated for erasure in the new woke dictionary of EEB.