Well, this is awkward. Once again personal biases have throttled me for years.

Razib Khan was a colleague on ScienceBlogs. He’s a former student of the geneticist John Postlethwaite, a man I respect a great deal, and who was also on my graduate committee. Razib is a very smart man, and the times we have met he was pleasant and interesting. And for those reasons I’ve been reluctant to repudiate his racist views. Mea culpa, I confess, I am guilty of overlooking a great evil because it was incompatible with a casual friendship, and sometimes I’m a bit tired of burning all my ‘friends’ to the ground in the course of the past decade. At the rate I’m going, no one is going to come to my funeral.

As most of you already know, EO Wilson died recently, and one person has asked me why I didn’t mention it here on the blog. That’s also awkward. There’s a lot I liked about Wilson — funny, isn’t it, that people are complicated and have multiple parts to their self — but there were also things about him that deeply bothered me. I couldn’t just say, “good guy, he’ll be missed” because there was more to it than that. I read his book Sociobiology when it first came out (good grief, I have that very same volume with that paper cover, now I feel old) and loved the entomology, but was bothered by the bits where he tried to interpret human behavior in the light of ants. There were other little things over the years, but by the time of his death, Wilson had become revered and a saint of science, so again, it was hard to write an honest opinion of him, so I chickened out and just didn’t.

The wisdom of my caution was confirmed when Scientific American published an opinion piece titled “The Complicated Legacy of EO Wilson” by Monica McLemore. Uh-oh. As you can guess from the title, she wasn’t just going to buy into the idea that Wilson was a saint, and felt as I did that he was messy mix of good and bad, like most people. And then the usual suspects roared at her and yelled at SciAm and howled in protest. Jerry Coyne hated the article, of course. Michael Shermer made a big stink and complained on Quillette. It was too woke! Even if I had thought the SciAm article was out of line (I don’t), I would have been reluctant to side with those assholes. So I again stayed silent.

Sometimes you get tired of the battles, you know?

Now the conflict has flared up again. Razib Khan (remember him?) wrote an open letter to SciAm to argue that the article was “indecent. It was muddled and uninformed at best, disrespectful and misleading at worst”, and protested that, oh no, how dare you accuse EO Wilson of scientific racism, which was really weird coming from a guy who writes for VDARE and praises Steve Sailer. Maybe it was because relative to his usual associates, Wilson wasn’t racist. He was trying to whitewash Wilson as hard as he could, which is what I really find disrespectful. It’s really betraying his scientific legacy to pretend that his ideas never fueled scientific racism, or that he had no racist views of his own. Khan got a lot of high powered signatories to his letter, but then recently a couple of them, including Hopi Hoekstra (a former student of Coyne’s) had second thoughts and withdrew her name…and now that has got the whitewashers angry at her. How dare you think Wilson’s legacy was complicated? How dare you think Wilson ever contributed to a racist ideology?

Here’s a comment on Khan’s substack from David Sepkoski, a historian of science.

How about the fact that Wilson was a big supporter of Philippe Rushton, and argued that Rushton was being persecuted for promoting studies that showed Blacks are inferior to Whites? How does that fit your narrative?

Specifically, Rushton (if you don’t know who he was, just google him) was trying to get a paper published arguing that r/k selection differences apply to human “races,” ultimately trying to prove that Blacks care less for their offspring and have more babies. This was not a subtle argument. Wilson championed the paper, and after it was (correctly) rejected for publication, commiserated with Rushton by observing that he (Wilson) would like to be outspoken like Rushton (a Canadian), but would be “attacked” if he did.

And Wilson wrote a letter of support for Rushton when Rushton’s university was attempting to discipline him for, among other things, publishing a paper that argued that IQ is inversely correlated with penis size (again attributing these differences to “racial” populations).

I knew Wilson and I don’t think he was intentionally racist. But science–and biology, particularly–has a lot to answer for in the way it has turned a blind eye to enabling racism, sexism, and other forms of bias. This kind of sneering dismissal doesn’t help the cause of reckoning with bias in our society, nor does it “set the record straight.”

I agree that the essay in question could have had more detail and nuance, but the basic points it raises are worth engaging with, not dismissing. Nobody is immune from examination, and the constant stream of outrage every time someone critiques Wilson is disingenuous. Wilson campaigned for and engineered a lot of this outrage, from the moment the critiques of Sociobiology appeared, privately referring to his colleague Dick Lewontin as a “psychopath,” dismissing all criticism of his ideas as “Marxist,” and generally acting as if it was impossible to criticize his ideas on anything other than biased, ideological grounds.

Anticipating that the immediate response to this will be “what’s your evidence,” I can tell you that I have copies of the letters in question that I obtained at several openly accessible archives. I have an established track record as a historian of biology and am not making this shit up. Dismiss me if you want, but don’t pretend that nobody’s offered any substance.

He also posted a follow-up to some criticisms:

Well, in my view Rushton WAS a racist lunatic–his ideas are a matter of public record and you can make up your own mind. I’m not going to be posting archival documents on discussion boards, but I’m in the process of drafting an essay about Wilson and the larger issue of systemic racism in science that I hope to place in a magazine or journal soon (apparently not Sci Am, though! one thing I agree with in this substack essay is that Sci Am owes it to readers to allow for a back-and-forth, and I don’t like their stated policy). If there’s sufficient interest I’ll come back here with a link to anything that eventually gets published. I’m not trying to be coy–I’ve been working on a book on this topic but it’s still far from complete, and I now see the need to get something shorter out sooner without basically just dumping my research materials on the internet!

One thing you raise that I’ll comment on, though, is the issue of a political agenda among Wilson’s critics. That’s indisputable. What troubles me, though, is the insistence by Wilson and his defenders that he (and they) have no politics or ideology. That’s patently ridiculous, since everyone has a politics and it’s impossible to separate that from everything else we do.

In Wilson’s case (and Dawkins’, and Pinker’s, and Sam Harris’, so on) that politics seems to be the same kind of fairly straightforward neoliberalism that has driven centrist politics from the 1980s onward, and which–while sometimes socially progressive–emphasizes “individual responsibility” at the expense of certain kinds of progressive social welfare programs. I’m not interested in debating the merits of that neoliberalism (which you can find influences of in everyone from Thatcher and Reagan to the Clintons and even Obama), but rather in pointing out that this IS an ideology (or a politics), and it influences views of science just as much as Lewontin’s Marxism, etc.

And here, Wilson’s discussions of ants are totally germane, as the author of the Sci Am essay proposes (though perhaps again without enough specificity), since Wilson frequently interpreted ant behavior though analogy to human social organization, and then turned around and used that interpreted analogy as a basis for understanding human social evolution and organization. It is in the circularity of that argument that Wilson’s politics enter his science (among other places).

Yes. Exactly, although I disagree that SciAm needs to allow for back-and-forth with goddamned racists. I shouldn’t have been shy about saying so earlier.

No one will be coming to my funeral anyway.

Good news, everyone! Jordan Peterson has resigned from the University of Toronto.

I recently resigned from my position as full tenured professor at the University of Toronto. I am now professor emeritus, and before I turned sixty. Emeritus is generally a designation reserved for superannuated faculty, albeit those who had served their term with some distinction. I had envisioned teaching and researching at the U of T, full time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. I loved my job. And my students, undergraduates and graduates alike, were positively predisposed toward me. But that career path was not meant to be. There were many reasons, including the fact that I can now teach many more people and with less interference online.

Uh, that was the only reason. He’s got a huge and gullible audience, and he’s raking in the cash. Why stick with that honorable and difficult job of teaching, when grifting pays so much better? Most of his article is about making excuses, though, none plausible.

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked.

This is nonsense. Universities are still hiring a majority of heterosexual white people. Shall we look at the statistics from the NSF?

The share of academic doctoral positions held by women with SEH doctoral degrees increased from 26.4% in 1999 to 38.5% in 2019. Underrepresented minorities also hold a larger share of these positions than they did in 1999, although their share remains small (8.9%) and is considerably less than their share of the population, which is about a third of the U.S. population ages 18–64. The share of those in academic doctoral positions with one or more disabilities increased to 9.1%, slightly less than their share in the population (10.5%)

So a third of the minority population of the US belong to a minority, but less than 9% of the academic population are a minority. I don’t think you can argue that white students have a negligible chance of employment because black people or women are hired to the exclusion of white men. That’s obvious. Even an ignoramus like Peterson should be able to figure it out.

It’s really because they’re out to get him personally.

My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?

That’s a bit more plausible. Still, if a Peterson student applied for a position at my university, we’d first look at the work they have done, not the work of their mentor. That’s the first and most important criterion. If what they learned from Peterson was to swagger into the interview and bluster about how the trans and gay folks are prejudiced against him, then maybe that would affect their employment possibilities.

If you thought that excuse was bad, wait until you see #2.

Second reason: This is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture. Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke). This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades. This means we’re out to produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job.

Whoa. That’s kind of the same as #1 — his white male students can’t get employed — with the added poison of the assumption that the BIPOC hires are utterly unqualified for the job. And if you disagree with him, then you aren’t even remotely truthful! Peterson is a bigot, plain and simple.

All my craven colleagues must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant. They all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same. And they do it constantly, with various rationalizations and justifications, further corrupting what is already a stunningly corrupt enterprise. Some of my colleagues even allow themselves to undergo so-called anti-bias training, conducted by supremely unqualified Human Resources personnel, lecturing inanely and blithely and in an accusatory manner about theoretically all-pervasive racist/sexist/heterosexist attitudes. Such training is now often a precondition to occupy a faculty position on a hiring committee.

It’s true: I can and have crafted such statements, where I promise that I won’t discriminate against women or minority students. It’s easy to do. I can honestly and accurately say that I will give equal opportunity to all of my students. I guess Jordan Peterson is unable to do that.

I have also taken anti-bias training, and it is required by my university before I can be on a hiring committee! However, these Human Resources personnel are supremely qualified to do that, and have an expertise that I lack. It is amazingly arrogant that Peterson would so ignorantly dismiss them.

Need I point out that implicit attitudes cannot — by the definitions generated by those who have made them a central point of our culture — be transformed by short-term explicit training? Assuming that those biases exist in the manner claimed, and that is a very weak claim, and I’m speaking scientifically here.

Yes? So? The purpose of the training is to remove roadblocks to hiring minority faculty. We’re not trying to abruptly change the prejudices of existing faculty, we want to make everyone aware of bias for the benefit of potential employees. Once again, Peterson is an uncomprehending buffoon.

Furthermore, the accrediting boards for graduate clinical psychology training programs in Canada are now planning to refuse to accredit university clinical programs unless they have a “social justice” orientation.

Oh, gosh. Other than Peterson’s knee-jerk reaction to the phrase “social justice”, what’s wrong with expecting an accredited psychology program to pay attention to social justice? So as a non-psychologist, I had to look up what that means.

According to Goodman et al. (2004), a social justice approach can be defined as “scholarship and professional action designed to change societal values, structures, politics and practices such that disadvantaged groups gain increased access to these tools of self-determination.”

Jordan wouldn’t want to give disadvantaged groups self-determination. He’s a bigot, after all!

Then we get his real bete noir. We can’t have those non-heterosexual people running around!

That, combined with some recent legislative changes in Canada, claiming to outlaw so-called “conversion therapy” (but really making it exceedingly risky for clinicians to do anything ever but agree always and about everything with their clients) have likely doomed the practice of clinical psychology, which always depended entirely on trust and privacy.

Conversion therapy doesn’t work. Not allowing clinicians to commit conversion therapy on patients is no more a violation of trust and privacy than is banning lobotomies.

Then he goes charging off to indict Hollywood.

And for those of you who think that I am overstating the case, or that this is something limited in some trivial sense to the universities, consider some other examples: This report from Hollywood, cliched hotbed of “liberal” sentiment, for example, indicates just how far this has gone. In 2020, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscar people) embarked on a five-year plan (does that ring any historical bells?) “to diversify our organization and expand our definition of the best,” They did so in an attempt which included developing “new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars,” to, hypothetically, “better reflect the diversity of the movie-going audience.” What fruit has this initiative, offspring of the DIE ideology, borne? According to a recent article, penned by Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik, but posted on former [emphasis on former] NY Times’ journalist Bari Weiss’s [fuck Bari Weiss] Common Sense website (and Weiss left the Times, because of the intrusion of radical left ideology into that newspaper, just as Tara Henley did recently, vis a vis the CBC): “We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers — all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. … How to survive the revolution? By becoming its most ardent supporter. … Suddenly, every conversation with every agent or head of content started with: Is anyone BIPOC attached to this?”

Right. That’s why there are no movies with white actors in them.

This guy is so patently ludicrous that it’s astounding he gets published. He closes his screed by telling us that Vladimir Putin agrees with him.

Congratulations, University of Toronto! You got rid of that asshole.