Right then chums, as well as a new series of Rutherford and @FryRsquared on Radio 4, we also have a new book out this week, crammed full of stories, about how humans invented science to bypass our natural physical and psychological limits. 🧵bit.ly/3oLa82Q
Here’s a quickie: we talk about confirmation bias – my own that I always look at the clock at 11.38, and @FryRsquared that she has a magic orchid that reflects her successes and failures, like in E.T. ‘There’s a sucker born every minute’ as PT Barnum once said.
@FryRsquared EXCEPT he never said it at all. In upstate New York farm, in 1869, the petrified body of a 10-foot-tall fossilised remains of an ancient Native American were discovered and soon became a huge scientific and tourist attraction.
It was a meeting of ghouls and scientists, Davenport, Laughlin and Madison Grant, alongside RA Fisher and Sewall Wright, and shows how close the emerging study of heredity was with the political ideology of eugenics science.org/doi/pdf/10.112…
And some more context, including the role of @ScienceMagazine in the promotion of eugenics at the time (which was fairly typical)
Thanks to everyone flagging up Lionel Shriver’s piece in the Spectator. I have read it, and it is very unsophisticated Replacement Theory, and lands straightforward far-right conspiracy theory talking points which haven’t changed in more than a century.
These ideas, robustly present by racists such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddart in the 1st decades of the 20th century formed the ideological basis for eugenics policies in the US, and later in Nazi Germany. Hitler cited Grant’s work as ‘his Bible’.
Shriver’s piece echoes these sentiments very specifically. She is biologically and historically illiterate on this matter. Her words are very specifically reminiscent of those of Tom Buchanan in Gatsby too:
Because I believe bay leaves to be a fiction, and people who use them are bay shills, in the pocket of Big Bay, I am conducting a blinded Bolognese experiment. Results as and when they happen. #Science
For the new followers, this, plus film stuff, comics, lots of genetics, eugenics and race pseudoscience, dog pics and general snark on grifters, is fairly typical twitter.
Crikey. I am extremely thrilled to be awarded the @royalsociety David Attenborough Prize. Like so many of us, he was my first inspiration in science, and triggered a lifelong love of evolution and genetics which continues to burn royalsociety.org/grants-schemes…
Thanks to all the people who gave me opportunities, in science and in talking about science. There are too many to name, but Georgina Henry at the Guardian, Deborah Cohen in the BBC Radio Science Unit, my editor @jennyjennylord, my supervisors Jane Sowden and Hazel Smith…