Is Everything and Everyone Racist?

On December 26, 2021, E. O. Wilson, described as “one of the towering intellects of our time,” passed away at the age of 92. He was a research professor emeritus in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, specializing in myrmecology, the study of ants. In 1990, he was awarded the prestigious Crafoord Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy, to honor achievements in fields not eligible for a Nobel Prize. During his lifetime, he authored more than 430 scientific papers and provided detailed descriptions of hundreds of species.

In groundbreaking research, Wilson discovered that ants communicate through pheromones, and described the sophisticated social organization of these insects and the chemical determinants of their actions:

Ants organize their colonies with many chemical systems like those used to transmit alarm. Their bodies, we discovered, are walking batteries of glands filled with semiotic compound. When ants dispense their pheromones, singly or in combination and in varying amounts, they say to other ants, in effect: “danger come quickly; or danger, disperse; or food, follow me; or there is a better nest site, follow me; or I am a nestmate, not an alien; or I am a larva;” and on through a repertoire of ten to twenty messages, with the number differing according to caste (such as soldier, or minor worker) and species. So pervasive and powerful are these codes that they bind the colonies into a single operational unit.

In 1975, Wilson founded the field of sociobiology, hypothesizing that much of human ethics might be rooted in our chemistry, forged by evolution into group loyalty, protective behaviors, and altruistic tendencies. At that time, his theories were ignored or outright rejected by most of the social science community. At a symposium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in February 1978, a group of protestors chanting, “Racist Wilson you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” stormed the stage of illustrious speakers and poured a pitcher of ice water over Wilson’s head. No charges were laid. 

Undaunted, Wilson continued to link human behavior to genetics. About a quarter-century later, he asserted in his seminal book Consilience:

Each kind of animal is furthermore guided through its life cycle by unique and often elaborate sets of instinctual algorithms, many of which are beginning to yield to genetic and neurobiological analyses. With all these examples before us, it is not unreasonable to conclude that human behavior originated the same way.

Indeed, there is mounting evidence to support the idea that our tribal instincts and the behaviors that accompany them are rooted in our DNA. Yet, linking behavior to genetics is perceived by some as “racist.” In an opinion article in Scientific American, published on December 29, 2021, Monica R. McLemore, associate professor in the Family Health Care Nursing Department at the University of California, San Francisco, asserted:

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 about distributions of health and illness in populations without any attention to the context in which these distributions occur.

Unfortunately, Ms. McLemore may not be aware that Gregor Mendel, known as the “father of genetics,” was a monk who conducted experiments with pea plants and honeybees. In one of his rare explorations with mammals, he explored inheritance in mice, but his boss, the bishop at St. Thomas’s Abbey terminated these experiments because he wished to discourage any of his friars from studying animal sex. But we shouldn’t be too harsh in judging Ms. McLemore’s charges of racism against the intellectual giants in biology, because there are those who take this assertion to even more ridiculous levels in their assertions that mathematics itself is racist. You might enjoy this nugget at: https://www.intelligence-and-iq.com/is-mathematics-racist/