Kulturkampf

[benji]

Evolution educators—even if sticking to E.coli, fruit flies, or sticklebacks—must confront the ways that evolutionary science has implicitly undergirded and explicitly promoted, or has naively inspired so many racist, sexist, and otherwise harmful beliefs and actions. We can no longer arm students with the ideas that have had harmful sociocultural consequences without addressing them explicitly, because our failure to do so effectively is the primary reason these horrible consequences exist. The worst of all being a human origins that refuses humanity.

So many of us are still thinking and teaching from the charged tradition of demonstrating that evolution is true. Thanks to everyone’s hard work, it is undeniably true. Now we must go beyond this habit of reacting to creationism and instead react to a problem that is just as old but is far more urgent because it actually affects human well-being.

Bad evolutionary thinking and its siblings, genetic determinism and genetic essentialism, are used to justify civil rights restrictions, human rights violations, white supremacy, and the patriarchy. And as a result, evolution is avoided and unclaimed by scholars, students, and their communities who know this all too well.

In Why be against Darwin? Creationism, racism, and the roots of anthropology,* Jon Marks explains how early anthropologists, in the immediate wake of Darwin’s ideas, faced a dilemma. If they were to continue as if there were a “psychic unity of (hu)mankind” then they felt compelled to reject an evolution which was being championed by some influential scientific racists. Marks writes, “So either you challenge the authority of the speaker to speak for Darwinism or you reject the program of Darwinism.” Anyone who knows someone who’s not a fan of evolution, knows that the latter option is a favorite still today. And it’s not  creationism and it’s not science denial. It’s the rejection of what we know to be an outdated and tainted notion of evolution. No one can update and clean up evolution as powerfully as we can if we do it ourselves, right there, in the classroom.

For actively dismantling evolution’s racist/etc past and present, may I suggest checking out and maybe assigning (+ the Marks article linked above):

10 Facts about human variation by Marks

Is Science Racist? by Marks

Racing around, getting nowhere* by Weiss (fellow mermaid) and Fullerton

That Marks book says, that yes, science is racist and it's time to move on:

Marks’ concern isn’t so much that the content of science is racist as it stands, but that it is constructed in such a way as to allow what he views as evil factual premises into its knowledge base. He highlights four of the foundational pillars of science that he views as epistemological vulnerabilities. These are: (i) naturalism, the idea that the natural world can be comprehended without recourse to the supernatural (which Marks claims is impossible due to the characteristics of human thought, while riffing on creationism); (ii) experimentalism, the idea we can study the world in controlled settings (which Marks says is impossible because things are different everywhere); (iii) rationalism, the idea that reason should govern scientific practice; and (iv) accuracy, the idea that scientific ideas should be factually correct.

Marks claims that all these premises are unusual and do not make for a better mode of thought when compared to other modes of thinking.

Semi-related, I discovered that believing that humans are naturally sexed is capitalism, colonialism and white supremacy:

Coloniality of White Feminism and Its Transphobia: A Comment on Burt

In this comment, I challenge Burt’s colonial epistemological framework in her theorizations of sex, gender, and transness. Drawing upon anti-racist, decolonial, and trans of color feminisms, I argue that transphobia is inherent to white feminisms due to its roots in colonialism. Heteropatriarchy and cisnormativity are products of colonialism, and feminists who espouse transphobic discourses invariably reproduce colonial and white supremacist frameworks of patriarchy and gender violence.