posted on February 03, 2022 09:06 PM by
u/completely-ineffable
48
u/blakestaceyprime16 pointsat 1643935800.000000
At the request of the Library of Congress, Wilson donated much of the
contents of his office—letters, reprints, conference proceedings,
etc.—to the national archive. The Wilson Papers comprises hundreds of
boxes of documents and numerous digital recordings. We started exploring
these holdings in September 2021, out of our broad interest in the
Sociobiology debate. We did not intend to investigate scientific racism.
However, the four folders labeled “Rushton, John Philippe” caught our
attention.
It’s been a while since our
last sneerquence, and this essay is a good one for bringing them
back.
In short, the essay details how, though he positioned himself more
moderately in public, Wilson’s private correspondence reveals how he
used his position and networks to promote the work of scientific
racists. Longtime sneerers may be reminded of when
leaked emails revealed Siskind was much more sympathetic to far
right weirdos and racists than he publicly claimed.
My first thought when I saw this doing numbers today was “fucking A, right after that massive kerfuffle about the Scientific American article that tried to cast Wilson in this light so ineptly everybody got to immediately let him off the hook in response, I’m sure the real story is gonna get the same traction” - by which I mean fuck, this is just gonna be a footnote forever in the main event, which is just gonna be the same old SJWs went for Wilson therefore race science is real crap until we all die in general conflagration
At least with people in EvoBio it seems like this article has changed some minds, or at least made them acknowledge the problems with Wilson more than they ever did before.
I grew up on Wilson's writing and never even got that vibe from him. He was mostly just a naturalist, and when he did briefly veer out of his lane it just seemed like he wanted biology and psychology to get along and work together - which they soon did, though probably not because of him. Very different vibe from a clumsily evasive Charles Murray, or even a too-cute-to-hear-the-critics Steven Pinker or a Richard Dawkins whose heart might actually have been in the right place but he's cursed with being an inveterate asshole and chooses all the wrong hills to die on. In comparison Wilson seemed aloof and even naive, baffled at why anyone associated him with that sort of controversy. His only big fights were pedantic esoteric ones about how natural selection works.
Having four "Rushton, John Philippe" folders in his file cabinet definitely does put him in another light. It's like that scene in the Watchmen miniseries when a character finds a very unexpected Klan robe in another character's closet. This is not aloof or naive or ambiguous.
> or a Richard Dawkins whose heart might actually have been in the right place but he's cursed with being an inveterate asshole and chooses all the wrong hills to die on.
I choked reading this. Funny and pretty accurate. I went to a talk of his at my uni some years back and it was mostly great, he can be really entertaining and informative, and how he answered student questions that engaged in good faith with his content was usually really enlightening... but he frustrates me so much with his insistence on stooping to the level of 'intellectual sounding, but actually vacuous zingers' whenever it comes to debating creationists. Sure, he's better at those zingers than they are, but god those conversations are useless and perhaps even harmful (I am persuaded by the arguments that the evolution-creation debates only serve to lend the latter group legitimacy they would otherwise not be afforded).
Curious what more morally dubious hills he's chosen to die on.
The classic one was when he reacted to complaints about treatment of women in the atheist community by [sarcastically writing about treatment of women in Islamist theocracies](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Elevatorgate#The_reaction). If we're being charitable maybe it's still coming from a clueless version of feminism, a topic that has always confused him, but boy is it not a helpful or constructive contribution to the issue at hand. (If we're being less charitable there's, at least, a Dawkins-to-Islamophobia pipeline that's spewed out a lot of shit.) He eventually climbed down from that one and apologized and tried to make it right.
And despite complaining about "radical feminists" (because they're simply doing feminism wrong, according to him), he's also gotten a little cozy with TERFs, as well as much less sophisticated transphobic tropes.
God he's such a dick lol. Pronouncing on how to feminism without any hint of awareness of the irony. Anyway, I'm pretty inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume it's a symptom of being a stupid, hotheaded smart person more than being a bad actor.
That said, I really wonder what we'll think of his legacy a few decades down the line. He's done a lot of great work as an academic and translated a lot of work for the popular eye, but the pipeline you mention is no joke. I think the likes of Sam Harris have Dawkins in part to thank for the demand for that kind of publicly styled intellectual.
Anyway, thanks for the receipts.
Back in the heyday of science blogging, Razib Khan called me a racist. The comment thread has apparently been lost to site rot, but as I recall, I shared a story about a young woman in India committing suicide out of fear that the LHC would destroy the world (maybe [this one](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7609631.stm)). My attitude was that this was a senseless tragedy that put a sharp point on the human cost of misinformation. The title of my blog post was "Doomsday fears claim a life". Razib Khan accused me of being racist against Indian people.
So EO Wilson is essentially a Siskind, but with actual academic
contributions?
In any case I am waiting for Yud to post something along the lines of
“anybody who hates Wilson is a bad person, as proven by the fact that
they make his private letters public, which is clearly worse than the
content of those letters, which I will not talk about because.. ugh…
reasons”
> So EO Wilson is essentially a Siskind, but with actual academic contributions?
What a shock, we're still dealing with the colonialist history of science and, more recently, the fact that eugenics was seen as a purely valid area of scientific inquiry until we all saw the consequences and suddenly realized it was morally repugnant.
Seriously, the intellectual provenance of a lot of what biologists and social scientists have to build on has a lot of *this* baked into it. And while we're moving past this stuff on the surface and a lot of good work is being done to help us substantively move past it as well, we've still got a long future of finding skeletons in closets ahead of us in these areas I suspect.
*the* book on the subject remains [Superior: The Return of Race Science](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior:_The_Return_of_Race_Science) by Angela Saini, which I heartily recommend to everyone. Sets out the entire structure of the race science promotional machine, bang bang bang. A lot of stuff you've already picked up will suddenly make sense.
Scott has academic contributions (or at least, he has at least one), that was one of the reasons his [True Name](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name) was used on wikipedia for a while. (your main point still stands that Wilson has more academic contributions, just felt the need to nitpick, Team Pedantic! Away!).
**[True name](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name)**
>A true name is a name of a thing or being that expresses, or is somehow identical to, its true nature. The notion that language, or some specific sacred language, refers to things by their true names has been central to philosophical study as well as various traditions of magic, religious invocation and mysticism (mantras) since antiquity.
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It is a story about how racist ideas are woven into the scientific
record with the support of powerful allies who operate in secret.
Poor Scotts worked so hard on making a kolmogorov garden for all the
various racists and anti feminists in science, but turns out it already
existed. (And indirectly creating incentives for people worried about
these groups to look for them).
(For the people who joined recently this post contains a bit of deep
lore about rhe kolmogorov option (keep naive racists/sexists/not pc
people save from exposure) and the whole waffeling about ‘kick out
people who are not polite, gardens’ by the various Scotts).
Would you accept an article in Penthouse Forum as evidence that black
men have larger penises than white men? Rushton did.
Reminds me of primalpoly’s ‘we went to the strip club’ research.
Kathryn Paige Harden is [upset to be associated](https://twitter.com/kph3k/status/1490016718638710784) with Wilson, but also self-identifies as a "soft/left hereditarian". What's her deal, I wonder?
Well, this is damning and depressing. Wilson was genuinely inspiring
as a scientist to a great many people over the years- myself included.
Really sucks to find out this sort of racist shit about him.
Ah, well. At least we haven’t yet (and are unlikely to) find similar
racist closet skeletons from Wilson’s rival Stephen Jay Gould! (If we’re
going to get any Gould skeletons, it would probably be evidence that he
was a secret communist, lol, not that it would be particularly
surprising.)
Yep, that’ll be worthy of a Spock eyebrow.
It’s been a while since our last sneerquence, and this essay is a good one for bringing them back.
In short, the essay details how, though he positioned himself more moderately in public, Wilson’s private correspondence reveals how he used his position and networks to promote the work of scientific racists. Longtime sneerers may be reminded of when leaked emails revealed Siskind was much more sympathetic to far right weirdos and racists than he publicly claimed.
So EO Wilson is essentially a Siskind, but with actual academic contributions?
In any case I am waiting for Yud to post something along the lines of “anybody who hates Wilson is a bad person, as proven by the fact that they make his private letters public, which is clearly worse than the content of those letters, which I will not talk about because.. ugh… reasons”
As soon as I saw the multi-page comment threads on Hacker News denouncing the Scientific American op-ed I just knew there was fire behind that smoke…
Poor Scotts worked so hard on making a kolmogorov garden for all the various racists and anti feminists in science, but turns out it already existed. (And indirectly creating incentives for people worried about these groups to look for them).
(For the people who joined recently this post contains a bit of deep lore about rhe kolmogorov option (keep naive racists/sexists/not pc people save from exposure) and the whole waffeling about ‘kick out people who are not polite, gardens’ by the various Scotts).
Reminds me of primalpoly’s ‘we went to the strip club’ research.
There’s a related piece in the New York Review of Books that can apparently be read for free with registration. A couple passages are quoted here.
Well, this is damning and depressing. Wilson was genuinely inspiring as a scientist to a great many people over the years- myself included. Really sucks to find out this sort of racist shit about him.
Ah, well. At least we haven’t yet (and are unlikely to) find similar racist closet skeletons from Wilson’s rival Stephen Jay Gould! (If we’re going to get any Gould skeletons, it would probably be evidence that he was a secret communist, lol, not that it would be particularly surprising.)