A once respected biology journal indicts evolutionary biology for ableism

> A defensive approach will not work. As a common example, we need to refrain from claiming that whatever ableist or eugenic connotations terms such as “fitness” and “selection” may have in the public sphere, we understand their apolitical technical definitions. This does not hold water because our views, and especially the views of scientists new to the field, are inevitably shaped by the public sphere and public discourse around evolutionary biology—hence the persisting popularity of survival of the fittest in general biology narratives and manuscripts.

This seems like a deeply stupid strategy. This sets up a whack-a-mole game of constantly changing apolitical technical language as the new terms then become co-opted by misuse or bad actors. This literally just happened with "woke", which used to be a positive term and is now used pejoratively.

For people so concerned with the impact of history they seem particularly inclined to ignore it when it suits them.

The more interesting criticism of the paper are only paraphrased without quotes, I'm not sure I understand the arguments here without reading the original paper in full.

There is one part I think that is interesting from an entirely different point of view, and that is that "fitness" is probably not the best term for this concept in evolution. I don't think I've ever heard evolution explained without the caveat that "fitness" in evolution doesn't mean what we understand commonly as fitness. It's more about the survival of the best adapted one, and not the strongest one.

There are some terms in biology that are far from ideal, but they stick because we used them for a long time. Another example is the "central dogma of molecular biology", Crick later admitted that he misunderstood what dogma actually means when he coined that term. The term is simply wrong in this case, but it still remains.

I want my master branches back, GitHub.

As someone once said, "everything woke goes to shit". There are few ideologies as pervarsive and corrodive as Wokeness. At the end of the day, it's ultimately about power and ruling over people's thought process.

>The piece’s hectoring tone, which tells us what we MUST do, pervades the entire paper, especially the final section, “A path forward.” Oh, and here’s part of the acknowledgments—the obligatory self castigation

That's par for the course:

1. Point out a non-existent problem (or amplify it to gigantic proportions if it does).

2. Pontificate how it affects some marginalized group(s) and how the problem's day-to-day existence mortally affect the livelihood of said group(s). It's important you're talking on behalf of the group(s) and that you don't provide any evidence.

3. Try to introduce some methodology and/or framework to solve the problem. It's important this new framework be the only "path forward", and morally justified to bully others to accept it even if it has no merits.

>(I have yet to understand what unlived experience is! And what do white settlers have to do with ableism?)

Neither do I!

>The paper, as you’ll see, is really an indictment of biology and undergraduate genetics for not using sufficiently woke language.

It seems that ship unfortunately sailed a long time ago. Nowadays it's about denying reality, and being forced to participate in some individuals' theatrics and self-image or else you'll be labeled a -phobic or -ist.

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On a different note, give Coyne's books (Faith vs Fact and Why Evolution Is True) a read. Highly recommended.

But evolution as a process, as much as we can ascribe these terms to a stochastic process, is inherently abelist and eugenicist? Like, that's what natural selection is.

Both the author's analysis and the reviewed paper are dumb.

This seems to be pretty much in line with the US national average of abled vs. diasbled people with at least a Bachelor's degree. [0] I'm sure there are still barriers that exclude disabled people from higher learning that we can and should work on deconstructing, but there's also a fundamental issue of some disabilities making people less able to perform academic work.

And this to me seems to be the crux: I have the bad suspicion that people talking about ableism have the goal of fundamentally disavowing disucssion about ableness. But this is from my point of view pretty fundamental to how I view the world, and it seems basically delusional to me to deny the differences in ableness we have as humans.

This article has given me a lot to think about, and I should read more on the topic, any suggestions very welcome!

[0] https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/people-with-a-disability-l...

https://www.britannica.com/art/newspeak

Yeah. So shut up. Your ideas don’t count!

The basic principle behind all of these 'isms, is they operate on the same mechanism, which originates in a few places, notably psychotherapy, where by beginning with an inconsistent premise (see Godel), you can prove anything within its downstream system of logic. Once you have accepted that, you will accept anything built on top of it. Logically, it is a universal solvent, where if you can introduce inconsistency into a line of reasoning, it dissolves the bonds of logic and reason by rendering them inconsistent and decoheres the ideas built on them. The reason you do this theraputically is to temporarily separate a patient from the logic of the story they tell about themselves as a means to relieve suffering long enough for them to process feelings about the events that led them to that conclusion. However, it got applied to literary criticism, and expanded from there.

You can riff on a critical theory infinitely, seemingly proving conclusions in it effortlessly because of its base logical inconsisency. In this case, and pretty much all mainstream critical theories, the mechanism is a positive conclusion from a negative premise. The negative premise in these 'isms is that anti-badness is a positive value, principle, or ideal. A critical theory frames reality in terms of this negatively defined lens, and then shows how otherwise neutral and real things do not meet the condition of being anti-bad.

Hence why you get someone riffing on insufficient anti-badness in a science journal and seeming to make sense, assuming you have accepted the underlying negatively defined fallacy that anti-badness is a sufficient or necessary condition for anything.

However, the effect of this is similar to that of the therapist, where it creates a dependency on the critic to resolve the inconsistencies they have caused. It's mesmerism, and "problematic" has become the universal slogan charlatanism. The hardest part about unpacking it is getting people to admit how thoroughly they have been fooled.

Once you are arguing in terms of whether you are not ablist or anti-bad enough, you have already taken the bait, and you are arguing at a disadvantage within the inconsistent framework of rules in the critical theory, which was designed to distract and keep you from resisting their seizure of the reins of the journals, institutions, funding bodies, and other "means of production," just like they do whenever a society develops industrial capability. They exploit your trust, agreeableness, and good nature, tell you that you have a false consciouness, and that you have been terrible this whole time, and that only their approval can heal.

There's one way out, which is perhaps also ablist because it requires the use of one's middle finger, but it's the only way.