People horrifically fucking up facts about evolution and genetics too support their stupid beliefs or to seem smart and “rational” is probably one of my big pet peeves
Yeah. An enormous number of racists, misogynists, homophobes and transphobes I’ve met eventually whip out something about evolutionary biology and they never, ever, ever, ever have the slightest shadow of even a half-right idea what any of it means or ever cite a claim ever actually made by a scientific study.
Here’s a quick handy reference list or anyone who isn’t sure:
Homosexuality does exist in almost all social species.
“Alpha males” are not a real phenomenon and in fact the most aggressive males tend to be the least reproductively successful.
“Survival of the fittest” simply means that the success of a species hinges on how well it “fits” its environment. It does not mean that stronger or smarter individuals are supposed to succeed. Those things can even be a detriment in nature by wasting too many resources.
“Race” is not a biological concept. Someone who looks different from you has the same human genes, just a different grab-bag of dominant traits.
Evolution is not a march towards higher complexity, more intelligence or even more adaptability. It’s just a fluctuation of characteristics dictated by environmental pressures and mutation. A slime mold isn’t “less evolved” than a hawk, just adapted for success under different parameters.
People didn’t evolve “from apes.” It’s more complicated than that. We are a category of ape, sharing a common ancestor with the other apes.
No human on Earth is “closer” to an evolutionary ancestor than any other. We all descended from the same one.
Neanderthals were also a “sibling” species of ours. We didn’t evolve from them.
Some of us did, however, cross-breed with Neandethal man. It is exclusively non-African races, such as white people, who still carry hybrid human/Neanderthal genes. Whoops, sorry “white purity” skinheads, you’re actually mixed with a whole other species.
Just had to reblog this because I am honestly so tired of people claiming that Africans are “less evolved” than everyone else
My addition to the above list:
Epigenetics does not have anything at all to do with genetic memories. It is a thing that affects characteristics like health risks, and this speculation floating around about how phobias could be related to some ancestral trauma is complete and utter nonsense.
It’s only a matter of time before such a claim is used as another pseudoscientific tool in the arsenal of people claiming that bloodlines have anything to do with the validity of one’s worship of European pantheons. “My ancestors were Swedish, and because of epigenetics I have genetic memories passed down from those ancestors, so therefore my connection with the gods is better than yours!”
Just, no. Stop. STOP.
gonna also chime in here:
saying the “male brain” works one way and the “female brain” works another way is ludicrous. for so many reasons, even beyond the obvious of imposing that tired old either/or mentality with regards to maleness and femaleness
occasionally you will read about how a study suggests that “men are naturally better at spacial reasoning” or “women are naturally better at cooperation”, but for one thing, given how early the brain wires itself and how easy it is to influence the wiring (like, disturbingly easy), and given the tremendous social expectations we face from pretty much the moment we leave the freaking womb, it’s impossible to study gender differences in a vacuum.
like, do your findings prove that “women are better at reading faces”, or do they prove that, when you are part of a group that has been socialized since birth to be “nice”, to take care of other people, and to above all avoid making folks angry, you damn well have to learn how to read the room, and read it fast.
also, the “left brain, right brain” thing is bunk. there are not, like emotion-driven people and logic-driven people. everybody is primarily emotional. that circuitry is older and reacts much faster, and this is why nobody is immune from sometimes making wildly irrational decisions.
I have had to deal with people in the past who almost religiously subscribed to the male brain/female brain thing and would constantly point out any little thing that confirmed their bias. It was fucking insufferable. It was patently clear they were ignoring the exceptions outnumbering their rules to go on insisting their traditionalist view has never been wrong.
This deserves reblogging every time
The misinterpretation of epigenetics really pisses me off because the fact that environmental stressors can have a long-term impact on gene expression should motivate us to eliminate poverty, especially childhood poverty, but instead we’re using it to revive tired white supremacist myths.
Epigenetics is how you can clone an animal and have them come out with different markings and fur patterns. Nurture affects nature. It’s actually a fascinating field of study and something we really do not understand yet.
And then the skinheads try to steal it. Like they try to steal so much…
Bogleech’s bullet points are like, a checklist of things I have tried repeatedly to explain to so many infuriating people, thanks bogle’.
Some of those things, like homosexuality in other species, and the alpha male thing, are because North Western science had (until still, tho improving) a barrier to entry to anyone who wasn’t a straight white cis man, and many of them had an agenda, whether they realized it or not, of proving that they were deserving of their privilege – in other words, they were giving special attention to anything that seemed to prove that the attributes they had (whiteness, straightness, etc) were somewhere on the range of default-normal to absolute-best.
So for example, scientists recording chimp behavior would publish a study like “hundreds of hours of observation yielded no instances of homosexual behavior, guess it’s not natural for primates” until, I think it was actually Goodall or one of her protégés, came along and said “I’ve been reading your notes and you’ve got a lot of tallies by this behavior called ‘male bonding’; what exactly IS male bonding behavior?” and they were like “oh, that’s just where two male chimps ‘practice’ courtship behaviors with each other and then play with each other’s genitals - you know, just guys being guys” And their study was already being used to write articles and text books.
And the thing about science is, we find out every year that we were wrong or didn’t have all the facts, but the thing about people is, we hate looking up something we think we already learned. So there’s a lot of this kind of half-baked shit out there in the public sphere of “knowledge”
Like, the alpha wolf thing was from a german scientist in the 1940′s – a time when some other scientists were trying to cross breed chimps and humans to create super soldiers. A lot of the science was pretty mediocre, is what I’m saying. And that 1940′s study got referenced in a popular book about wolf social behavior in the 70′s. And it’s been disproved since then, by the same guy who wrote the 1970′s book, but the publishing companies still make money off the book that takes the alpha wolf theory as fact because it appeals to a certain portion of the population. So they keep publishing and selling it. As if it’s fact. Despite being petitioned for decades to stop publishing it by the author of that book.
Gorilla males do not lead the troupe, and the main bull does not lead the herd.
Gorilla “alpha” males just protect the group from outside threats and keep the peace by beating up anyone who fights. Because they provide protection, if they decide to go off somewhere, the rest of the troupe does tend to go with them, for safety, but females control the troupe’s politics. And if the “alpha” male isn’t to their liking, they’ll mate with another “subordinate” male to make sure they don’t wind up with that bully’s son as their next Big Man.
And herd animals like deer and water buffalo and wildebeest, they vote. They’ll all be lying down, and then some of them will want to go and they’ll stand up, and if noticeably less than half of them stand up they’ll lay back down, and if noticeably more than half of them stand up, the rest will get up too and they’ll move off. The bull just, does bull stuff, no leading.
https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/center/articles/2012/mother-nature-network-11-04-2012.html
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bison-vote-on-the-direction-they-d-like-the-herd-to-move/
https://www.pnas.org/content/102/26/9418
But then here is an example of the incorrect information being passed off as fact, from a website called gorillas-world where the article makes claims like “(the highest ranking silverback) has the exclusive right to mate with females” when a study has shown nearly a fifth of the offspring in a given troupe were fathered by another male from within the group, and other observations have shown gorilla females showing preferences for ‘non-dominant’ silverbacks within their group. The article in question also uses language that points to a weird power-fantasy bias such as “It is the oldest … and the strongest, the one that becomes the master” . Like. THE MASTER. really.
So people buy “well respected” books on wolf behavior, or go to websites like ‘gorillas-world’ and read an ‘article’ and think they’ve learned something true. But they haven’t really.
This might be by now a myth discredited enough in popculture, but just in case: there is also no such thing as “humans only use 10% of the brain”, we use all of it, just relegates various tasks to different areas.
For years I was wondering if my understanding that “alphas” are often just useful jerks everyone tolerates was me misunderstanding something.
But no, middle school me had it down.
