EO Wilson’s complicated legacy

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With the death of biologist EO Wilson on Sunday, I find myself reflecting on the complicated legacy of scientists whose work is built on racist ideas, and how those ideas have come to define our understanding of the world.

After a long clinical career as a registered nurse, I became a laboratory-trained scientist as researchers mapped the first draft of the human genome. It was during this time that I became intimately familiar with Wilson’s work and his dangerous ideas about the factors that influence human behavior.

His influential text Sociobiology: The New Synthesis contributed to the false dichotomy between nature and culture and spawned a whole field of behavioral psychology based on the idea that the differences between humans could be explained by genetics, heredity. and other biological mechanisms. Finding out that Wilson thought that way was a huge disappointment, as I had enjoyed his novel Anthill, which was published much later and written for the public.

Wilson was hardly alone in his problematic beliefs. His predecessors, mathematician Karl Pearson, anthropologist Francis Galton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and others, also published work and spoke of racist-laden theories about the distributions of health and disease in communities. populations without any attention to the context in which these distributions occur.

Even modern geneticists and genome scientists struggle with the racism inherent in the way they collect and analyze data. In his memoir A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life, geneticist J. Craig Venter writes: “The complex provenance of ideas means that their origin is often open to interpretation.

To put the legacy of their work in the right perspective, a more nuanced understanding of problematic scientists is needed. It is true that work can be both important and problematic, it can coexist. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate and criticize these scientists, taking into account, in particular, the value of their work and, at the same time, their contributions to scientific racism.

First, the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as a standard against which the rest of us can be accurately measured. Failure to take sufficient account of the differences between the determinants of risk and resilience of experimental and comparison groups, especially in the health sciences, has been a hallmark of inadequate scientific methods based on theoretical foundations. of a higher subject and a lower subject. Commenting on COVID and vaccine uptake in an interview with PBS NewsHour, recently retired National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins pointed out, “You know, maybe we’ve underinvested in behavioral research human.”

Second, applying the scientific method is important: what works for ants and other non-human species is not always relevant to human health and / or outcomes. For example, associations of blacks with poor health outcomes, economic disadvantage, and reduced life expectancy may be explained by structural racism, but black character or black culture is frequently cited as the driving force behind these. health disparities. Ant culture is hierarchical and matriarchal, based on human understanding of gender. And the descriptions and importance of ant societies existing as colonies is a component of Wilson’s work that should have been criticized. Context matters.

Finally, examining culture in relation to nature without any attention to externalities, such as opportunities and potential (financial structures, religiosity, community resources and other societal structures), which profoundly influence human existence and experiences is a lens. both rude and cruel. This impartial interrogation will lead to individualistic notions of the value and meaning of human life as, as a society, our collective destinies are inextricably linked.

As we are currently seeing in the COVID-19 pandemic, public health and prevention measures collide with health service delivery and individual accountability. The coexistence of approaches that take these two elements into account is interdependent and necessary.

So how do you approach the problematic work of scientists with complicated legacies? I would suggest three strategies for moving towards a more nuanced understanding of their work in context.

First, truth and reconciliation are needed in the scientific record, including attention to citation practices when using or communicating problematic work. This approach includes critical reflection on where and when to include historically problematic work and the context necessary for readers to understand the limits of the ideas embedded in it. This will require commitments from journal editors, peer reviewers and the scientific community to invest in modernizing existing publications with this expertise. They can do this by employing humanities researchers, journalists, and other science communicators with the appropriate expertise to review health and life science manuscripts submitted for publication.

Second, diversifying the scientific workforce is crucial not only for asking new kinds of research questions and unlocking new discoveries, but also for conducting better science. Other researchers have pointed out that feminist perspective theory is useful in understanding white empiricism and who is eligible to be a worthy observer of the human condition and our world. We can apply the same approach to scientific research. All of society loses when there are limited perspectives based on mistaken notions of the potential of one or another group of humans. As my work and that of others have shown, the people most affected by poor health conditions are most often those who try to tackle the underlying causes with innovative solutions and strategies that can be scientifically tested.

Finally, we need new methods. One of the many gifts of the Human Genome Project has been the creativity it spawned beyond revealing genome secrets, such as new rules regarding public availability and use of data. Several laboratories and interns were able to collaborate and share their work while establishing independent careers. New rules of engagement have emerged around the ethical, legal and social implications of work. Undoing scientific racism will require the engagement of the entire scientific community to determine which portions of historically problematic work are relevant and to let the scientific method work as it was designed – to help demystify and replace outdated ideas. .

The early work of Venter and Collins formed the basis of my thesis, which focused on tumor markers of ovarian cancer. I spent time during my training at NIH learning from these iconic clinicians and academics and had the opportunity to meet and question them both. As someone who uses science as one of the many tools to understand the world, it is important to stay curious in our work. Creative minds shouldn’t resist change when rigorous new data is presented. The way we engage with old racist ideas is no exception.

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