Thread by @M_Methuselah

Apropos of nothing, I'm going to write a thread that recounts some of my experiences over the past year as an evolutionary biology master's student, focused on instances that have shaped my understanding of the political climate and biases present in my department.

1. In an ecology class I took in my first semester, one of my professors was vocally anti-Trump during lecture.

Most of the time it was "appropriate," in the sense that it was in the context of general criticism of any Republican administration blocking action on climate change.

However, the comments were invariably followed by a quick and general anti-Trump sentiment that had no place in a community ecology lecture.

What struck me most was how offhand they were, as if everyone in the room invariably agreed, and it was as much venting as pontificating.

2. Over the course of the first semester, every active professor affiliated with the department gave a quick 20 minute presentation on their research to all of the first years.

One professor works on evo-devo of vertebrate/mammalian brain and neuroanatomy.

After his talk, one of the women in my program asked what he thought about evolutionary psychology. In posing the question, she was tripping over herself to express that she heard it was bad/inaccurate, as if she needed everyone to know that she didn't have the wrong opinons.

Even if the question was asked with genuine intellectual curiosity, I found it disturbing that she needed to prime anyone who might hear it with that kind of preface.

And this was in a room full of people who would emphatically agree that Homo sapiens did/does in fact evolve.

The professor responded by saying that he disagrees with evolutionary psychology, citing some specific thing about how its proponents claim that every evolved behavior corresponds to the evolution/presence of a specific neural circuit, which he said was an incorrect premise.

This struck me as odd, because I was under the impression that evolutionary psychology recognizes domain-general behaviors and mechanisms.

So I felt like this was a correct criticism of the premise he was refuting, but an incorrect attribution of the premise to evo-psych.

I didn't press the issue, because it was a Friday morning and I didn't want to get into a discussion/argument about evo-psych with a professor that I'd never met before then.

Either way, I couldn't tell if he understood the field, or if his dismissal was couched in ignorance. (And of course, that kind of ignorance of related science by a scientist is often motivated by political bias, but I have no evidence that this was the case in this instance.)

3. After a department Halloween party, I got into a long conversation/argument with a fellow master's student about freedom of speech. He made an offhand comment about something related to politics, and I made a mistake and decided to press the issue instead of ignoring it.

He argued that Nazis should be denied freedom of speech on the grounds that their ideology is inherently violent, and that they advocate for genocide etc.

I asked the standard questions about who decides who should be censored and who should have the power to do the censoring.

There was a disconnect when he argued that it's easy to have an objective standard to identify Nazis (for the purpose of censoring them) while dismissing my experience that I've been labeled a Nazi (by would-be censors) because I support free speech for everyone, including Nazis.

To his credit, we were able to end it amicably even in disagreement, and it hasn't affected our friendship or working relationship.

The problem is that I feel disincentivized from discussing issues regarding freedom of speech so long as I'm in a professional/academic setting.

4. The postdoc in my lab is politically engaged. He's overtly team blue, but thankfully he tends to focus exclusively on the "mechanics" of politics, like election numbers, districts, number of congressional seats, etc, rather than specific policies.

While I’ve never seen it, he says that my advisor (who is from the UK) has spent a lot of time in his office reading The Guardian and focusing on Brexit. Both are Remainers, which is valid in the context of international scientific collaboration, regulation, and funding issues.

There is no specific incident or interaction in this example, and I generally don't like to talk politics in person anyway, but it follows the trend where anytime I get a glimpse of individual/department political opinions or sentiment, they all lean in the same direction.

I can't tell if it's because almost everyone is tacitly left-leaning, so the relatively sparse instances where people share political opinions are sampled from that skewed distribution, or if the only people who are comfortable sharing happen to be from that side of the aisle.

I can't really comment on that, because I happen to fall into both categories, where my opinions tend to be left-leaning, but I feel increasingly uncomfortable with the prospect of sharing any heterodox or dissenting opinion.

5. We had a dissertation defense a few weeks ago on the ecology of an invasive species. The advising professor (the same one from my first example) who introduced the candidate stated that this species has been referred to as "a North American menace" or something like that.

After this comment, a well respected emeritus professor in the audience interjected by stating something to the effect of:

"I think we all know who the REAL American menace is."

This not so subtle reference to Trump elicited chuckles, and was received favorably by the room.

I know that it sounds like I made it up. It sounds like one of those "that definitely happened" stories. But I swear that it actually happened.

At the time I just rolled my eyes, but the more that I think back on it, the more unsettled I am at how blatantly political/partisan statements keep being made in wholly inappropriate contexts, an by well respected and senior factulty, no less.

6. I participated in a semester-long discussion seminar led by my advisor on the genetics/genomics of speciation. One week we discussed this interesting paper on an instance of an introgressed chromosome acting as a sex-chromosome-like supergene.

cell.com/current-biolog…

In the paper, it describes white-throated sparrows with two plumage color morphs that display rigid disassortative mating, but these morphs both appear equally among the two sexes. The end result is a system that operates as if there are 4 putative sexes.

White morph males only mate with tan morph females, and tan morph males only mate with white morph females, but it remains one population because both types of mating pairs can produce both males and females of either color morph.

The paper describes behavioral differences between the color morphs, and states that white morph males are more promiscuous than tan morph males.

While discussing the paper, my advisor made a joke to the effect of: "As always, it's white males that tend to be the problem."

My feelings on this are complicated, but to simplify the context first:
a. my advisor is not white
b. I am a white male
c. I recognize it as a joke and wasn't offended by it
d. I know that my advisor wasn't actually being disparaging to me, etc.

I think he actually meant it as a joke, in the sense that he doesn't agree with the literal statement. If anything, it was a meta-joke about how that kind of statement is common/accepted discourse, taking the piss out of it a little bit.

The complication is on a meta-meta level. It was like an affirmation that it's appropriate to joke about white males, everyone knows that it's only appropriate to joke about white males, and everyone knows that everyone knows that it's only appropriate to joke about white males.

What do you do with that? Because one hand, jokes are fine, on the other hand, jokes are being made about a currently sensitive topic within a prescribed "safe zone," and deliberately staying within that safe zone affirms its presence as much as deliberately straying from it.

The joke itself was utterly harmless. However, it made me uncomfortable because it made me aware of the political background of the academic environment that the content of the joke deliberately fit within.

7. During a lab meeting late last year, we got into a discussion about issues related to academic publishing. Surprisingly, my advisor asked if anyone had heard anything about a certain recent hoax incident, because he saw some headlines and wanted someone to tell him about it.

Now I'd guess that most people here are more than just a little bit familiar with the Grievance Studies affair, but I was honestly shocked that it came back around to me in this context, that the news had that kind of reach.

So, somewhat excitedly, I gave a very brief summary of what had happened, and before I knew what I was doing, I namedropped @ConceptualJames, @HPluckrose, and @peterboghossian.

@ConceptualJames @HPluckrose @peterboghossian Then I had to stop, because I just painted myself into a corner. I was clearly familiar with the events and people involved, and I expressed approval at the premise and the outcome of the affair. But I couldn't exactly come out and just talk about the thrust of Grievance Studies.

@ConceptualJames @HPluckrose @peterboghossian That would require a complex discussion of academic feminism and intersectionality, and how it all relates to polarized politics, regressive cultural mores, and academic policy.

A complex discussion that wasn't going to happen right now in this context.

@ConceptualJames @HPluckrose @peterboghossian To go further, I'd need to reduce it to "academic feminism is poor scholarship."

And to anyone who isn't already intimately aware of that, especially in the political/academic climate that I was occupying, I know that such a statement is often conflated with "I'm a misogynist."

@ConceptualJames @HPluckrose @peterboghossian So I was able to quickly cobble together some generic statement about certain activist fields not requiring rigorous scholarship so long as it's dressed up in the correct language and has preapproved conclusions.

@ConceptualJames @HPluckrose @peterboghossian My advisor asked if any of the journals were reputable, because he suggested that it could be a case of pay-to-publish.

I mentioned that one of the papers got accepted into Hypatia, but he never heard of it. I don't blame him, but that made it hard to express how big this was.

@ConceptualJames @HPluckrose @peterboghossian After that, the discussion moved on and it was never brought up again.

I mention this incident because it made me aware of how I have to hide my "power level," so to speak, because I know the degree to which my opinions can be miscontrued, even when thoroughly explained.

@ConceptualJames @HPluckrose @peterboghossian And I know that many people don't want a thorough explanation. And I know that I don't want to go through such a long explanation, especially when it's been demonstrated that the audience is likely to be less than sympathetic.

So I've mostly just been keeping my mouth shut.

@ConceptualJames @HPluckrose @peterboghossian And that concludes the collection of my most salient brush ups with politics while currently earning my master's degree.