In America today, university science is being taken over by those who deny the laws of nature. University science courses today teach genetics is bad, science is a myth, men can be women, women can be men, white people are evil, and white men are the most evil. In the early 70s, I was a liberal, teaching social psychology at two Universities. I saw the denial of empirical truth and natural law beginning among my colleagues. Then I happened on a biological approach to social interaction called Sociobiology. I strayed over to the biology department to take the course and never looked back, leaving social psychology behind and becoming a geneticist.
This denial of natural law happens in all totalitarian societies. In the 1930’s, the Soviet Union was at the forefront of genetics research in the world. Its scientists were making very important contributions to understanding heredity and how genes influence behavior. The USSR even attracted talented researchers from abroad such as American scientist Hermann J. Muller, who moved to Leningrad in 1934 with his family.
Unfortunately, this was also the time of growing repression under Stalin, marked with the rise of what has been termed as Lysenkoism which decreed that genes and human nature can be modified by the environment (e.g., the state). In 1948, Lysenko and Stalin declared Mendel and other geneticists enemies of the people and genetics “a bourgeois pseudoscience”.
The scientists who opposed this did not fare so well. Many were dismissed from their posts. Some were imprisoned. Some even killed. Only after the death of Stalin in 1953, was this ban on genetics reversed and the scientists freed.
Now American academia is going down the Soviet route. The author of Sociobiology, E. O Wilson, was recently subject to a hit job in the oldest science magazine in America: Scientific American. E. O. Wilson passed away on Dec. 26, 2021 and the magazine decided it was a good time to attack him and all geneticists as racist when he could no longer reply.
What proof did the author present to support this accusation? None. There was not a single quotation from Wilson showing any racist speech.
The author started off by saying Wilson’s field is fraught with racism: “Wilson was hardly alone in his problematic beliefs. His predecessors — mathematician Karl Pearson, anthropologist Francis Galton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel and others — also published works and spoke of theories fraught with racist ideas.”
Granted Karl Pearson and Francis Galton were proponents of eugenics, however Charles Darwin never advocated anything related to what later came to be called Social Darwinism. While Darwin is a stretch, the name from the list that really struck me was Gregor Mendel.
Seriously, how was Gregor Mendel a racist? This guy spent his entire life in a monastery in Brno (in what is now the Czech Republic) observing peas grow. Unless he wrote somewhere that yellow peas are racially superior to green peas, I don’t see why his name was on the list. However, his inclusion shows the real target of the author’s rant: genetics.
Wilson wrote several books on sociobiology, a field which aims to explain social behavior based on evolution and genetics. He applied it not only to the analysis of various types of animals, but also humans.
The author thinks Wilson is racist because he believed that genes play a role in a person’s behavior. You can argue the extent to which genes contribute, but anyone not brainwashed by a modern University knows that we all resemble our brothers and parents. The author apparently didn’t care that her arguments are transparently nonsense.
Then she goes on to attack all science and statistics while showing she understands neither: “First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against. The fact that we don’t adequately take into account differences between experimental and reference group determinants of risk and resilience, particularly in the health sciences, has been a hallmark of inadequate scientific methods based on theoretical underpinnings of a superior subject and an inferior one.”
No, that is not what the normal distribution is. The normal distribution is not about default humans. It’s about the fact that in many statistical studies, the characteristics of the population tend to cluster around a mean. So if the average height of the human population is 5 foot 7, then most individuals will be around that height. The outliers, the very tall or very short people, will be just a tiny minority.
The author then spouts this pearl of wisdom: “Other scholars have pointed out that feminist standpoint theory is helpful in understanding white empiricism and who is eligible to be a worthy observer of the human condition and our world.”
If you’re like me, you’ve never heard of “white empiricism.” So let’s look at the study. More classic nonsense: “White empiricism undermines a significant theory of twentieth-century physics: General Relativity. Albert Einstein’s monumental contribution to our empirical understanding of gravity is rooted in the principle of covariance, which is the simple idea that there is no single objective frame of reference that is more objective than any other. All frames of reference, all observers, are equally competent and capable of observing the universal laws that underlie the workings of our physical universe.”
And then: “Why are string theorists calling for an end to empiricism rather than an end to racial hegemony? I believe the answer is that knowledge production in physics is contingent on the ascribed identities of the physicists.”
And her conclusion: “Through the recognition of white empiricism, a bifurcated logic that serves white supremacist traditions in science while deontologizing marginalized Black women physicists, I propose that the Black feminist theory intersectionality should change physics — and not just through who becomes a physicist but through the actual outcomes of what we come to know.”
Social scientists today are trying to prevent anyone from knowing Nature’s truths and insure the adherence of all to their ever evolving dogma. Today that dogma includes: genetics is bad, science is a myth and so, men and women can switch sexes or even not have a sex. Some people, however, cannot escape their genetic make-up since white people are evil and white men the most evil. This dogma is different from most other dogmas. It is ever evolving. Some contend white people should not receive medicine for Covid. Others believe people of color should be punished less than whites for crimes they commit.
No telling where the witch hunt will go next. The Soviet Union shows what can happen when a society seeks to undermine Nature’s truths.
The author of Sociobiology did much more than rescue me from the clutches of woke-dom. E. O. Wilson is often called the father of biodiversity. He founded the Half-Earth Project, whose aim is to reserve half the planet for wildlife. Smithsonian Magazine quotes him as saying: “It’s been in my mind for years, that people haven’t been thinking big enough — even conservationists. Half Earth is the goal, but it’s how we get there, and whether we can come up with a system of wild landscapes we can hang onto. I see a chain of uninterrupted corridors forming, with twists and turns, some of them opening up to become wide enough to accommodate national biodiversity parks, a new kind of park that won’t let species vanish.”
We must protect the planet. In an interview with Vox, Wilson had this as his main message: “If we want to know what is on this planet and why it is a live planet — what contributes to that life and what it all means, ultimately, for human existence — we should try to save it all.”
This is the most important legacy of E. O. Wilson. This is what we should be fighting for. We will never get there if we start censoring science in order to promote a half-baked, contradictory, and every evolving ideology. The good news is that flouting natural law results in the natural punishments inherent to that natural law. You reap what you sow. A society which accepts denial of Nature’s laws will decline and disappear.
Those who deny natural law cannot build anything because the laws they question enable everything constructive. Their prominence today in American society augurs for a Soviet style collapse. Soon.
Resilience 