Thread by @mbeisen

I recently read @AliceDreger's "Galileo's Middle Finger" which is an account of her efforts to change how intersex newborns are treated by the medical profession, but also series of profiles of academic outcasts and how their work and ideas landed them in hot water.

It's not a perfect book, but I am extremely glad it was recommended to me. I learned a ton and I emerged with a really deep respect for Dreger, and a feeling that academia would be far better if there were more people with her courage.

Interestingly, one of the people she writes about is EO Wilson, focusing on accusations that peaked in the late 1970s that he, and more broadly the sociobiology field he helped to launch, were racist.

A few years after this, I sat in on a sociobiology class taught by Wilson and some of his students (who I subsequently had as TAs in other classes). He mostly talked about social insects, which is what I was interested in, but human evolution also came up frequently.

And some of Wilson's students (one TA in particular) were taking sociobiology in strange, creepy and sometimes unambiguously racist directions. While Wilson pushed back on these ideas scientifically, he also was clearly encouraging them to push the limits of their thinking.

Thus it's not really completely fair to dismiss the sins of sociobiology (and there are many) as out of Wilson's control, and I don't think it's completely unreasonable to hang these sins of the students on the mentor here.

This is the dangerous intellectual territory that anyone working on human genetics and evolution inhabits - valid scientific ideas rooted in reality can be easily distorted to support and promote racist ideas.

And both in person and in his writing I thought Wilson was too complacent about this risk - seeming to feel that it was sufficient for his work didn't cross the line and for him to disavow the work of those who did. This was, and still is, inadequate.

It's an admittedly difficult thing to navigate. I'm not sure what the right way to exist as a human evolutionary geneticist (especially one who works on behavior) is - it's one of the reasons I'm not one. But that difficulty should not shield people from criticism.

Indeed I think the field today is a mess. While more people speak about the dangers of racism in human genetics research, manifestly racist ideas about population differences are now part and parcel of the science. But that is a topic for another day.

I'm actually not here to talk about Wilson. I'm here to talk about his critics and defenders. The year after I sat in on Wilson's sociobiology class, I sat in on Lewontin and Gould's famous evolution class. And, oddly, this class was more about Wilson than Wilson's was.

Lewontin and Gould were, a decade earlier, the leaders of an anti-Wilson/anti-Sociobiology crusade that sought to suppress sociobiology research and get Wilson ostracized by the scientific community.

Having just taken Wilson's class, I was astonished at how often they, especially Gould, intentionally mischaracterized Wilson in order to make their facile retorts land to this mostly undergraduate audience. (They did this to others too - including often each other).

I don't know what they thought they were getting out of this - I guess they were trying to establish themselves as the "right kind of evolutionary biologist" to an adoring crowd. But to me it just made them look like dishonest asshole and naked opportunists.

Which brings us to today. What strikes me most about the public response to the SciAm article about Wilson (which is too lame to really warrant much discussion IMO) is that it too is being led by naked opportunists.

Despite what they would like you to believe, there is absolutely nothing brave in Razib Khan and Jerry Coyne rising to Wilson's posthumous defense because expression outrage at the sins of woke science bolsters their brands.

Is this a reason to discount what they have to say? No. Sometimes we agree with people whose other ideas we utterly repudiate. It happens in politics. It happens in science. But that doesn't mean we have to abet them in their brand building.

One can agree with the contents of Khan's and Coyne's defenses of Wilson and see them for what they are - an effort to get readers to transmogrify their feeling that Wilson was unfairly maligned into thinking that of Khan and Coyne as well.

We can debate whether it's the right or the wrong thing to do to have signed Khan's letter - or to have signed it and unsigned it. But the deeper problem is that there somehow wasn't a letter to be sign that wasn't written by someone who also pens a lot of racist BS.

I'm not sure why this is. Is it that there's nothing that needs defending? Certainly not. We should all be worried when fact-free, intellectually dishonest hit jobs enter the scientific discourse.

That the SciAm piece didn't land is a more a reflection to its poor construction than a testament that the scientific community is willing to stand up for intellectual freedom and defend scientists when they are unfairly attacked.

And I want to be clear that I'm not saying scientists shouldn't be criticized or should be immune from consequences for their ideas and actions - as people know I am far from averse from attacking other scientists for their work and actions.

Rather I fear (and this is ultimately the point of @AliceDreger's book) that we do not have a culture in which people who think that a particular attack is unfair feel comfortable speaking up in defense of their colleagues.

It is this failure that leaves the door open to grifters like Khan and Coyne, but more importantly it reflects a serious lack of courage in us all (and I unflinchingly include myself here) that we should all lament and try to fix moving forward.

When I say 'grifters' I mean it metaphorically - I don't think they are doing this for money. Rather I see their defenses of Wilson as part genuine desire to defend him *and* and part effort to divert the outrage they evoke to the maligning of Wilson to their own outcast status.

Also, for the people genuinely asking why people have a problem with Khan (not his acolytes who know and are just trolling) I'd point you to this:

undark.org/2017/02/28/rac…

He a fantastic writer with incredible intellectual breadth. In his writing, he expresses strong genetic/genetic ancestry determinist views that verge into dangerous territory. In this he is hardly unique (not that this is exculpatory).

The reason he is viewed as an almost a singular figure is that he has chosen - repeatedly - to associate with people and organizations that are unabashedly racist. He is too smart, and has done this too many times, to brush it aside as naiveté, as he often seems to suggest.

And it is because, in doing so, he willingly lends scientific credibility to reprehensible ideas that there is such objection to other scientists lending him any of their credibility.