2020/07/10/Cultivating a British flavor of narrow-mindedness
- when: 2020/07/10
- author: PZ Myers
- source: Pharyngula
- topics: 2018/11/05/Why is British media so transphobic TERF topic:transnegation/UK
- keywords
- link: https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/07/10/cultivating-a-british-flavor-of-narrow-mindedness/
- title: Cultivating a British flavor of narrow-mindedness
- summary: "I saw the same thing in US skeptics, of course. But there was something fundamental going on that is also reflected in the British school of evolutionary biology, represented by Maynard Smith and Dawkins, that totally embraced reductive explanations and adaptationism, vs. the American subset led by Lewontin and Gould, who fiercely opposed eugenics and detested the arrogance of thinking biology could be reduced to a catalog of alleles." .. "Then there's the outcome of all this activity by bigots claiming the mantle of science – some people actually believed."
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I saw the same thing in US skeptics, of course. But there was something fundamental going on that is also reflected in the British school of evolutionary biology, represented by Maynard Smith and Dawkins, that totally embraced reductive explanations and adaptationism, vs. the American subset led by Lewontin and Gould, who fiercely opposed eugenics and detested the arrogance of thinking biology could be reduced to a catalog of alleles. My experience may also be colored by the fact that there were several prominent UK skeptics (at least, I was told over and over that they were big names) who I had to ban here because they were persistently obnoxious and insistent that there are only two sexes/genders because “biology”.
Then there's the outcome of all this activity by bigots claiming the mantle of science – some people actually believed them.