Social Darwinism - no, sociobiology - no, evolutionary psychology - explains why the Woke Mob and Mean Libruls are so wrong about everything!

Also, why can't those annoying wimmin and minorities leave pore white male biologists alone?

Skeptical Inquirer, a popular science magazine that has done great work for decades in debunking various kinds of pseudoscience and religious-magical superstition, has also been characterized by a philosophical materialism that sometimes slips into a superficial scientism. And some of its writers let their religious atheism or agnosticism lead them into “village atheist” kinds of arguments.

And those kinds of lapses are often associated with a conservative political position.

That is the case with an article in their July/Aug 2023 edition by Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja that complains about the influence of politics on professional scientific research.¹ Left-leaning politics, in particular. The topic is totally valid. But their arguments have a definite Social Darwinist bent to them. It’s not only lefties’ politics that can lead debunkers astray.

And they position themselves as brave truth-tellers, swimming against the stream of what conservatives call Wokeness these days:

We aren’t under the illusion that calling attention to these points … will push ideology completely out of science. Progressive ideology is growing stronger and intruding further into all areas of science. And because it’s “progressive,” and because most scientists are liberals, few of us dare oppose these restrictions on our freedom. Unless there is a change in the Zeitgeist, and unless scientists finally find the courage to speak up against the toxic effects of ideology on their field, in a few decades science will be very different from what it is now. Indeed, it’s doubtful that we’d recognize it as science at all. [my emphasis]

Near the end of the piece, they add, “most biologists are liberal.” Whatever that means. Supporting parliamentary democracy? Condemning slavery?

They write that in the article they “concentrate on our own field of evolutionary biology” and that their “scientific research, teaching, and the popular understanding of science. Our ultimate concern is biology research—the discovery of new facts.”

This is a related video², but my comments here refer specifically to the text:

They offer six bullet-points stating what they see as dangerous claims of bio-Wokeness, quoted here with my commentary.

1. Sex in humans is not a discrete and binary distribution of males and females but a spectrum.

Their argument here is a Social Darwinist bait-and-switch. They blur the difference between questions of biological reproduction and gender identity. The first is, well, biological. The second is very much socially constructed and maintained (and changed). And the reproductive male-female dichotomy is by no means determine erotic attraction between or among genders.

2. All behavioral and psychological differences between human males and females are due to socialization.

“All” is doing a lot of work there! Are we seriously having this discussion? Of course, all sorts of internal chemistry and health conditions affect individual behavior. But Social Darwinists and characters like Jordan Peterson like to claim that a broad range of social structures and gender behavior are biologically determined by sex.

An example of Coyne’s and Maroja style of argument here: “The false idea that human males and females are born biologically identical in behavior and psychology is a form of what we call ‘biological egalitarianism’.”

This really is a Jordan Peterson level of analysis, i.e., rhetorical and frivolous.

3. Evolutionary psychology, the study of the evolutionary roots of human behavior, is a bogus field based on false assumptions.

“Evolutionary psychology” is the term present-day Social Darwinists prefer to use for their outlook, the older term having acquired quite a lot of unpleasant associations over time. The same thing happened with its more recent self-description as “sociobiology.” This whole field has never gotten very far away from Herbert Spencer and the Bell Curve in its understanding of society.

They give this benign-sounding definition of the concept - in italics in the original: “our brains and how they work—which yield our behaviors, preferences, and thoughts—sometimes reflect natural selection that acted on our ancestors.” The “sometimes” in that description means: almost always in everything that relates at all to gender roles and oligarchic structures in society. Traditional male roles are good, and rule by the wealthiest is good, because Biology. Pay no attention to older arguments that didn’t hold up to any serious scrutiny, because “now the field has reached an explanatory maturity that has to be taken seriously.” You know, DNA sequencing and other sciencey stuff like that.

Being brave truth-tellers standing up to the Woke Mob, Coyne and Maroja are alarmed that the academic field of psychology is so unsupportive of Social Darwinism evolutionary psychology: “The dismissal of evolutionary psychology is motivated by a blank slate ideology of human nature that sees humans as almost infinitely malleable, with few genetic constraints on our behaviors. We’ve already mentioned that Marxism has almost certainly influenced this attitude ...” (my emphasis)

No doubt, “critical race theory” must also be influencing this inexplicable reserve about the field.

4. We should avoid studying genetic differences in behavior between individuals.

Because, you know, Mean Libruls, and those intolerant Woke minorities, and wimmin. And Commies.

At this point, the argument pretty much lands in the why-are-them-libruls-so-afraid-at-looking-at-how-dumb-black-people-are-huh?-huh? territory.

(Full disclosure: I’ve taken the Bill Gates mind-control COVID vaccine and I have been exposed to people suffering from the Woke Mind Virus. So you may want to consult RFK Jr. or your favoite QAnon website to get the Real Story on this.)

The phrase “genetic differences in behavior” is a “tell” to watch for in dealing with Social Darwinists. Studying genetic determinates of jaw shape or height or rate of hair loss is one thing. They are physical traits that can be measured and linked to genetic heritage.

But “behavior” is a much broader concept involving complex interactions with others. It is a social concept, in other words, that involves behavior in society. Defining “big ears” involves agreement on what qualifies as “big” and can be defined by physical measurements. “Arrogance” or “humility” involve a wide range of social interactions in the context of particular cultural contexts and can’t be measured with a ruler.

5. “Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.”

They put it in quotation marks because they are presenting it as obviously wrong.

The article goes on for six pages beyond that. Including a sixth bullet point whining that wimmin and them thar minorities have dumb arguments about decolonization and stuff. But it’s all just more flopping around in the Social Darwinist mud hole, e.g., why it’s really important to study the relationship of race to intelligence. (“Intelligence” being an even squishier concept than “behavior” in this context.) All for good humanitarian reasons, of course! Also: Lysenko, postmodernism, Steven Pinker quotes.

I will be very curious, though, to see what kind of pushback Skeptical Inquirer gets from this one and what kind of responses they print. Because this is really sad.

If one is interested in reading more analytical takes on present-day Social Darwinism, these sources are available.

• Downes, Stephen M (2021): Evolutionary Psychology. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/evolutionary-psychology/> (Accessed: 2023-20-07).

• Four Fallacies of Pop Evolutionary Psychology. Scientific American 11/02/2012. <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/four-fallacies-of-pop-evolutionary-2012-12-07/> (Accessed: 2023-20-07).

• Johan J. Bolhuis et.al. (2011): Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology. PLOS Biology 07/19/2011. <https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001109> (Accessed: 2023-20-07).

• Kenrick, Douglas T. (2019): "evolutionary psychology". Encyclopedia Britannica, 19 Mar. 2019, <https://www.britannica.com/science/evolutionary-psychology> (Accessed: 2023-20-07).

• Witt, Jonathan (2021): Evolutionary Psychology: Checkered Past, Checkered Present. Evolution News 12/02/2021. <https://evolutionnews.org/2021/12/evolutionary-psychology-checkered-past-checkered-present/> (Accessed: 2023-20-07).

An older book giving an informative look of how strongly social assumptions have affected the study of the difference between races and between men and women have prejudiced “hard” scientific studies is Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981/1992). The “man” in the title was not a generic word for “humans” but a deliberate choice.

1. Coyne, Jerry & Maroja, Luana (2023): The Ideological Subversion of Biology. Skeptical Inquirer 47:4, 34-47. Online version: <https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/the-ideological-subversion-of-biology/> (Accessed: 2023-20-07).

2. The Ideological Subversion of Biology with Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja. Center for Inquiry YouTube site 07/07/2023. <> (Accessed: 2023-20-07).