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Dr Adam Rutherford Profile picture
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30 Jun, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Hmmm, this looks a lot like scientific racism to me. paging @TinaLasisi for her take.
@TinaLasisi Of course, the relationship between scientific racism and swimming is deep. The myth of buoyancy due to <something something> bone density is commonly held, and used to explain the stark absence of black swimmers at all levels of swimming competence.
In fact, the reasons why far fewer black people in the USA can swim are entirely socioeconomic: pools were built in white areas after legal segregation ended in 64; no role models, no parents who swim.
And of course the main reason is not being taught how to swim. It's absurd to have to say it, but people can't naturally swim, and if you're not taught how to swim then you can't swim.
Super lolz, until you discover that the death from drowning rate for black children in the US is 3 times higher than for white kids. This is systemic structural racism that is literally lethal.

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More from @AdamRutherford

Dr Adam Rutherford Profile picture
26 Jun
An interesting tale of science communication, journalism and the culture wars has just dropped - ​🧵
​@JenniferRaff @ewanbirney @aylwyn_scally @minouye271 + I recently published a paper about the lexicon of genetics, and how it needs to be addressed
bit.ly/3ddQu96
We argue that certain terms are confusing, scientifically invalid, and some are wedded to the racist history of our field.
Last night, the Telegraph published a hit piece on it
bit.ly/3xWvPOI
...which misrepresents the arguments, misquotes the paper, and spells two of our names wrong. Nice work.
I wonder if this might be some latent revenge, as I have a previous run in with the author over some of the most comically wrong reporting of a science story ever
Read 10 tweets
Dr Adam Rutherford Profile picture
21 Jun
New paper klaxon! @JenniferRaff @ewanbirney @aylwyn_scally @minouye271 and I have been working on this a while: sparking a conversation about the lexicon of genetics, which continues to utilise scientifically redundant, confusing and racist terminology.

arxiv.org/abs/2106.10041
We’re definitely not prescribing or policing language, but want to prompt a dialogue with colleagues in similar and adjacent fields about our terminology m, datasets and tools, and move towards a lexicon that both serves the science and frees us from a racist past.
This is to be a conversation, so please please please let us know what you think. This is a preprint, it is also in with a journal, but this is a community effort to move genetics forward. 🧬
Read 5 tweets
Dr Adam Rutherford Profile picture
23 May
In 1877, Rhodes wrote in his will about forming a secret society devoted to the British conquering the entire world, as the ‘Anglo Saxon race’ were the finest people on Earth and deserved to rule over and occupy every other country. His ambition was pretty much equal to Hitler’s.
I know we bandy words like white supremacy and racist around rather easily these days, and false comparisons to Hitler has its own law - but Godwin’s Law does not apply when the comparison is justified, and Rhodes was a literal white supremacist with a comic book global ambition
Nigel Biggar must know this, yet writes the same anti-intellectual and anti-history piece for the Telegraph week on week, presumably high on the attention, like an addicted one trick pony.
Read 4 tweets
Dr Adam Rutherford Profile picture
14 May
New paper out today, finally, on the misplaced confidence about a so-called geographical ‘homeland’ of Homo sapiens, and how to avoid ‘inference pitfalls’ from weak data.

authors.elsevier.com/c/1d3iS15SlTrL…
Led by @DrEleanorScerri, @cschlebu, @liisaloog and @mt_genes, it’s a response to Chan et al (2019), a Nature paper which we didn’t think was very good, and was misleading about how we can understand human origins.
Thanks to a dizzying array of colleagues from a range of disciplines @huw_groucutt, @Turi__King, @chiarabarbieri, Guido Barbujani, @ChikhiLounes, @ChrisStringer65, Mattias Jakobsson, @DrAEriksson, @DrManica, @SarahTishkoff, @aylwyn_scally, Chris Brierley,
Read 4 tweets
Dr Adam Rutherford Profile picture
9 May
Okey doke artichoke. This article from the Telegraph is pure culture wars bullshit. What they are proposing is traditionally called History of Science, and is taught everywhere.
Assessment of historical figures and their views is literally part of history, and yes, Darwin held views which were typical for his time, but deserve to be aired and understood. Here's a feature I wrote on this very subject earlier this year bit.ly/3pQWacz
The foundations of modern science are inextricably entwined with empire building and colonialism, as human taxonomy was used in service of subjugation. Linnaeus was a key figure in that classification. Here's a feature I wrote on this bit.ly/3txIapY
Read 11 tweets
Dr Adam Rutherford Profile picture
3 May
‘It is commonly believed that psychic ability... runs in families.’

The genetics of psychics. An n=23 ‘study’ that shows journal publishing is a spooooky scam👻🧬

NB one of the authors is a standard issue race weenies🤡

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Think of the work and person-hours that have been wasted to squeeze out this shart. They had to find the ‘psychics’ - or, to give them their full title, ‘not psychics’ - match them with also ‘not psychics’, sample them, sequence their 🧬, analyse that, write it up, submit it...
The journal editors had to read it, send it out to peer review, receive comments, email the authors, make corrections. And at no point did anyone go ‘hold on a minute! This is a tiny pebble of ploppypoop, that makes us, the journal, science and academia look ridiculous’. 🧬💩
Read 5 tweets

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