Monthly Archives: July 2023

John Boyega does a bang-up job in They Cloned Tyrone Juel Taylor's combination Blaxploitation throwback/conspiracy comedy-drama but he's also the on-screen avatar for its most indulgent flaws. The more Boyega's drug dealer character Fontaine pulls back the curtain, along with the delightful duo of Teyonah Parris's Yo-Yo and Jamie Foxx's Slick Charles, the more the film feels the need to explain itself. And, unfortunately, the answers to its questions aren't always satisfying.

That being said, They Cloned Tyrone makes for both a fitting dramatic showcase for all involved and a wildly fun time for anyone watching, so its shortcomings don't always matter in the moment. However, whether as a result of post-J.J. Abrams puzzle-box movie viewing, or because filmmakers like Jordan Peele have trained Hollywood audiences to spot deeper social metaphors, the movie always feels like it's charging towards some grand unifying vision that never fully emerges when you think back on it.

So, what is exactly They Cloned Tyrone hiding, and why does its big reveal falter? Let's dive in.

The film's fictitious neighborhood, once overrun by crime and drug dealing, turns out to be the site of mysterious government experiments involving cloning. This much is clear from the trailer. However, the film's earliest twist sees Boyega's protagonist being shot and killed within the first 15 minutes, only to wake up with no memory of the event. From there on out, it isn't hard to put two and two together for the audience anyway, since we know the movie's title. This recently awakened version of Fontaine is a clone, but the reasons why remain a mystery for now.

After the lead trio investigates a secret scientific bunker, they interrogate and accidentally kill a lab tech, who they note looks like a white man with a distinctly Black afro. Here, they also discover a white, powdery substance that makes them affable and docile. It's not unlike an actual recreational drug (sometimes it even acts like laughing gas), but they soon discover that this chemical is being pumped into several products heavily marketed and consumed throughout The Glen: fried chicken, grape soda, even hair straightener. This, coupled with specific music tracks that seem to put people under hypnosis, leads to the further discovery of Pavlovian mind-control experiments, in which residents are forcefully conditioned to respond to these various stimuli with near-total obedience. One of those obedient residents includes yet another Fontaine clone; this one appears as a silent, unquestioning security guard working for Kiefer Sutherland's ruthless government enforcer, Nixon.

After finding out the full extent of the experiment (or so it would seem), the trio goes back to their regular lives, now believing their roles in society to have been programmed and pre-ordained by mysterious suits for an unknown length of time. Fontaine in particular is troubled by this, since it means his purpose as a dope dealer is to drown his hometown in drugs and violence so that the rest of the country will ignore it, and so the men in black beneath it can keep conducting their obedience experiments undeterred. This would be a fine enough premise had the reveals ended there, but there's one more big twist to come, and it unfortunately sucks the air out of the room.

When the trio enlist the help of friends and enemies alike to mount a raid on the underground facility, they discover an untold number of clones of everyone they know (including themselves). Fontaine ends up face to face with the local mastermind of the operation, albeit one who claims to answer to other people himself. It turns out to be a much older version of Fontaine, and ignoring the cartoonish old-man makeup job, it's not an altogether terrible twist in concept.

However, while the "what" may be surprising, the "why" is rather convoluted, and works against the movie's own themes. This is partially because the film spends practically no time exploring what made the older Fontaine this way, or what pushed him to run these experiments on not just his own neighborhood but on clones of himself. He claims it's because no one should have had to suffer the pain he did when his younger brother was gunned down a backstory hinted at but seldom explored for the Fontaine we've been following but the jump from this origin story to mad scientist is a leap too far for the film to reconcile.

It turns out that, over several generations, the older Fontaine has been trying to breed out Blackness itself, slowly but surely isolating genes and creating a significantly white race of people (as evidenced by the aforementioned lab tech, and a handful of other white characters with Black hair). It's in part a realistic depiction of the way genocides have sometimes functioned the goal of the North Carolina Eugenics Board was to "breed out" African Americans through both sterilization and selective breeding but to make a Black man the ostensible face of this operation, as well as the scientist who apparently devised the entire scheme, touches on a deep, dark element of racial self-hatred the film isn't nearly ready to unpack.

It also doesn't help that while the action is unfolding elsewhere, thanks to some of Yo-Yo and Slick Charles' propulsive comedic shenanigans, the film keeps cutting to a sterile boardroom setting so the older Fontaine can explain this plan in a lengthy monologue to his younger self. It's an uninteresting reveal presented in an equally uninteresting manner, adding little to what was already a loaded-enough saga of self-worth and forced circumstance. Plus, its quickfire resolution never affords the younger Fontaine the opportunity to reflect on this brand-new dimension of his own potential. If the older version of some other character were revealed to be in charge or some other, unrelated person entirely little about the movie would change. However, despite dropping the ball in this regard, They Cloned Tyrone does wrap up in a fun way that potentially opens the door to a follow-up film.

Plans haven't yet been announced for any sequels or spin-offs, but the film's ultimate conclusion hints at the potential for all sorts of new iterations of this very story. After the trio frees the numerous clones being kept in hibernation, they decide to set off to Memphis (and elsewhere) to potentially free more clones wherever they might find them, since this operation appears to be nationwide. Reporters also flock to The Glen to report on the bizarre story of naked doppelgngers suddenly roaming the streets, and the film briefly cuts to its closing titles, before cutting suddenly back to a scene resembling Fontaine's repetitive mornings. This time, however, the specifics are slightly different.

Far away, in a crumbling Los Angeles neighborhood, yet another clone played by Boyega goes about his familiar routine, which mirrors that of Fontaine. He ends up watching the news with several of his friends, who note that one of the clones roaming The Glen resembles him, and they refer to him as Tyrone. The film cuts to credits again, playing a version of Erykah Badu's live performance of "Tyrone," only with the lyrics like "You need to call Tyrone" cheekily changed to "Somebody cloned Tyrone" an uncanny clone of the song itself.

With Fontaine, Yo-Yo, and Slick Charles setting out on a mission of sorts, and with other potential clones like Tyrone discovering the conspiracy for themselves, the movie's final scenes offer up all sorts of possibilities for future installments. However, even as a self-contained story, these mere hints at how widespread the experiments may be are a fine enough exclamation point on a story that weaves numerous metaphors about oppression and poverty in modern America, albeit to mixed results. Either way, it's great to see Boyega getting to flex his dramatic muscles while playing numerous characters, and we certainly wouldn't say no to more of that.

They Cloned Tyrone is currently in theaters, and it premieres on Netflix July 21.

Read the original here:

'They Cloned Tyrone' ending explained - Mashable

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Two very different gatherings this month have got me thinking.

The first was this years Byline Festival, which hosted a series of wide-ranging debates about the huge challenges facing the country today: above all, the future of the NHS, the reality of climate change, and Britains troubled relationship with the European Union.

The festival took place at Dartington Hall in Devon, where the 1945 Labour Party manifesto was written. Who, the festival asked, was prepared to face up to todays challenges? In other words, is this a 1945 moment?

The election of Attlees Government saw the creation of the NHS and the welfare state. It is, by any standards, an historic achievement, and deserves our thanks and admiration.

History, however, is contradictory.

For the truth is that, for all the talk of comprehensive support from cradle to grave, the 1945 reforms left behind a group of particularly vulnerable people those whom we would today describe as learning disabled.

We take pride in the defeat of fascism and despise the lies and cruelty on which it was built. But the pseudo-science of eugenics, used to justify many of the worst atrocities, remained alive and well in post-war Britain.

Indeed, William Beveridge, the revered architect of the welfare state, slipped out of the gallery of the House of Commons the day it debated his report to reassure the ladies and gentlemen of the Eugenics Society that his report was eugenic in intent and would prove so in effect.

Then, in 1946, John Maynard Keynes director of the Eugenics Society through much of the war described eugenics as the most important and significant branch of sociology, and the renowned evolutionist Julian Huxley insisted on its value in his manifesto for UNESCO.

Meanwhile, the senior psychiatrist and neurologist Dr Alfred Tredgold updated his influential Textbook of Mental Deficiency to recommend euthanasia for the 80,000 or so more idiots and imbeciles whose care and support, whether in their own homes or in institutions, absorb a large amount of time, energy and money of the normal population which could be utilised to better purpose.

The families of profoundly learning-disabled people are involved in a continuous struggle for their most fundamental rights and dignities, writes Stephen Unwin

Stephen Unwin

Dr Tredgolds conclusions were as monstrous as anything uttered by the Nazis:Many of the defectives are utterly helpless, repulsive in appearance and revolting in their manners. Their existence is a perpetual source of sorrow and unhappiness to their parents. In my opinion it would be an economical and humane procedure were their very existence to be painlessly terminated.

Tragically, something of this contempt was hard-wired into the 1946 National Health Service Act, which took more than 100 mental defect asylums into public ownership and turned them into long-stay hospitals.

Astonishingly, the new NHS defined a hospital as an institution for the reception and treatment of persons suffering from illness or mental defectiveness. By 1957, 125,000 people lived in such dreadful places, deprived of dignity, freedom and the most rudimentary human rights. These institutions were soon starved of funds, resulting in the neglect, abuse and cruelty that followed.

Meanwhile, learning disabled children were written off as educationally subnormal and placed in segregated schools, dismissed as being ineducable with the popular belief that it was a waste of public money to give them anything beyond the bare minimum.

Hardly comprehensive.

The evening before the Byline Festival, I attended a very different event hosted by the Learning Disability Network London at the Canal Museum behind Kings Cross. This aimed to shine a spotlight on the abuse of people in NHS-run assessment and treatment units (ATUs).

ATUs are supposed to offer short-term residential help to learning disabled and autistic people when, for whatever reason, their support package breaks down. Tragically, they tend to provide neither assessment nor treatment and have become the worst kinds of long-stay prisons. Inmates and their families fight bitterly to get their loved ones released. They very rarely succeed.

The event started with the autistic activist Alexis Quinn speaking harrowingly of how she had been treated in several ATUs, and gave graphic descriptions of the manhandling, neglect and abuse that she experienced (and her eventual escape).

The journalist and activist George Julian then told us that thousands of learning disabled and/or autistic people are still incarcerated under the Mental Health Act in unsafe, inappropriate and punitive ATUs across the country, while many others live in substandard residential homes and supported living units.

She explained that, when the decision was taken to close the ATUs, they held 2,600 people; five years later there are 2,580. She also said that, of the remaining inpatients, 215 have been detained for between five and 10 years, and a staggering 135 for more than 10 years. And this for no crime other than being autistic or having learning disabilities.

For all the reports and talk of lessons learned, however, little progress has been made in resolving this ongoing scandal.

But it was Sara Ryans quietly spoken account of the death of her gorgeous son, Connor Sparrowhawk, who drowned in a bath while having a seizure in an ATU in Oxford 10 years ago, that reduced the assembly to tears of grief, tears of rage. She described unimaginable levels of neglect leading up to Connors death, and a desperate process of passing the buck and avoiding responsibility in the long fight for justice that followed.

She concluded with words that should shake us all: All our lives are impoverished by the exclusion of a proportion of the population, and the way in which we, as a society, are failing people is something we should all take responsibility for.None of what we are talking about this evening is fine. None of it. Stop pretending it apparently is.

These, however, are just the worst aspects of an entire system which consistently fails the 1.5 million learning disabled people in Britain.

Coronavirus mortality rates for learning disabled young people with no significant comorbidities were six times worse than the average, according to Public Health England in 2020.

The provision of annual health checks is sporadic and life expectancy for learning disabled males is 22 years shorter than for the rest of the population, while for females the figure is a staggering 26 years less. Every month brings another premature, preventable death. Its as if such lives were disposable.

The fact is that no one ever died of a learning disability and this dreadful discrepancy is a direct consequence of how our society and, Im afraid, the NHS and social care fails them so abysmally.

After a decade of disinvestment, special education is creaking badly, and learning-disabled people and their families face continuous battles simply to secure their basic human rights. Every family is different, just as every learning disabled person is different. But theyre united in their frustration and fury at a system which is not fit for purpose.

The struggles never end.

Even problems that could be easily resolved are left unattended. Thus, almost 60 million of state and private investments are locked up in child trust funds which cannot be accessed by their beneficiaries because they lack capacity. A simple adjustment in the process could sort this out. But nothing ever happens.

The dreadful fact is that, for far too long, a group of our fellow humans has been abandoned in a wasteland of our own making. Of course, we should celebrate the birth of the NHS and the welfare state, but we should also acknowledge that it has too often let learning disabled people down in the worst way imaginable.

Is it too much to hope that we are finally learning our lesson and are prepared to hear their voices, and that of their champions, and bring about dramatic and serious change?

Sadly, many of us are unconvinced. And we are left grateful to people like Sara Ryan for reminding us of what she, and by extension all of us, have lost and continue to lose.

Stephen Unwin is a theatre and opera director, writer and teacher

Read the rest here:

Failing Learning Disabled People: The Contradictions of 1945 ... - Byline Times

Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced his resignation as president of Stanford University on July 19. Hired in 2016, he presided over major challenges at Stanford University, not the least of which was the COVID-19 pandemic.

Numerous controversies erupted during his tenure, from an investigation into the handling of sexual assault complaints, to the school's involvement in the national college-admissions scandal known as Operation Varsity Blues, to the removal of the name of the university's first president, David Starr Jordan, from campus buildings and streets owing to his promotion of eugenics.

On the flip side, Tessier-Lavigne in 2017 hired the university's second female provost, Persis Drell, who announced in May that she'd be stepping down this fall. And the university in 2021 launched its first new school in seven decades, to be dedicated to environmental sciences and examining climate and sustainability issues.

Here's a look at the university's milestones under Tessier-Lavigne. (To advance slides on desktop or laptop, hover your cursor at the far right and click.)

Originally posted here:

What happened during Marc Tessier-Lavigne's tenure as Stanford ... - Palo Alto Online

Abortion giant Planned Parenthood has been accused of promoting promiscuity in order to boost its business.

The organisation tweeted an image of a sign claiming: Virginity is a social construct, adding: The idea of virginity comes from outdated lets be real, patriarchal ways of thinking that hurts everyone.

But multiple Twitter users criticised the post. One claimed: We know you need promiscuity to make money. Its gross, while another blasted it for implying: Morality costs us business.

In June, a Planned Parenthood group was banned from schools in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, after promoting an A to Z of explicit sex acts.

Planned Parenthood Regina had delivered a sex education lesson to 14 and 15-year-olds in Lumsden High School where a pupil picked up Sex: From A-Z, which was available for free on a side table.

The deck of 26 cards, which includes explicit language, pushed children to be sex positive about each sexual term. The letter C referred to cathodillia, which it described as being attracted to ones television set.

Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger, best remembered as a leading advocate of the eugenics movement and for promoting sterilisation of people she deemed to have undesirable traits or economic circumstances.

But from inception, the abortion giant has also promoted sex education which informed children and young people of their sexual rights and increasingly encouraged pre-marital sexual activity.

Planned Parenthood handing out sex-swap drugs like candy

Planned Parenthood tells US Congress: Men can get pregnant

Planned Parenthood distances itself from eugenicist and racist founder

Read the original:

Planned Parenthood: 'Virginity is a social construct' - The Christian Institute

The first article below is from a creationist website, Creation Evolution Headlines, and its author is a young-earth creationist. Oddly, though, its own headline and its discussion isnt too far from what some progressive evolutionists maintain: evolutionary biology is racist, which explains the paucity of minorities in the field. The first paper, then, is not that different in its theses from the second and third papers below, although both were published in academic journa, Social Psychology in Education and in Evolution: Education and Outreach; and both papers include at least one evolutionary biologist as an author. Click headlines to read any of them.

(The pdf for the article below can be found here.

In both papers religion is mentioned: African Americans are more religious than whites, and that makes them resistant to studying evolution. This may well be true, but I dont know what to do about it. Heres one anecdote Ive told before. I was invited to lecture on evolution to a black magnet school (a high school) on Chicagos South Side. At the end of my talk, a girl stood up and asked me if I was saying that Noahs Flood and (as I recall) the Garden of Eden didnt really exist. I had to tell the truth and say, Yes, thats what I think. It caused a ruckus, and I could clearly see that the students became resistant to my message. (After the talk, the principal took me aside and said I really should have mentioned all the innovations that Africans had made, like inventing the airplane.)

But heres from the paper:

In contrast to scientists, African Americans are significantly more religious than most every other American ethnic group. They also overwhelmingly self-identify as Protestant Christians.Thus, African Americans may be more likely than Whites to experience a major dissatisfaction with their pro-evolution courses and faculty. This perception could well affect their feelings about evolution classes and professors. In effect, African-American undergraduates appear to be more aware than Whites of the foundation of evolutionary theory which is

methodological (and de facto metaphysical) naturalism. Their religious inclinations will therefore be in conflict with the culture within the [evolutionary] community and it will be difficult for them to feel a sense of belonging in that community. The same with their moral objections to evolution, moral objections that are well founded in the African-American experience. The demands of methodological naturalism thus become an impediment to the greater participation of people of color in ecology and evolutionary biology.

Evidence exists that religiosity functions as a challenge to inclusion within evolutionary biology. Religiosity is negatively associated with exposure to evolutionary theory, knowledge about evolution, and acceptance of evolution. In a sample of African-American college students, Bailey found that themorereligious the students were, theless knowledge they had about evolution. Moreover, religiosity is also associated with having moral objections to the theory of evolution. Thus, a cultural mismatch exists between the religious beliefs of students, and those of evolutionary faculty who are unable to properly deal with religious differences and moral objections to evolution. This may create a challenge that leads to a lower sense of belonging in fields of study that are entrenched in evolutionary thinking.

But if its methodological naturalism that religious people object to, they should object not just to evolutionary biology, but to ALL science. For methodological naturalism is simply the proposition that the laws of the universe are all that occurs in the sciences: there is no divine intervention. (This, by the way, is not ana prioridecision of scientists to exclude God, its a method used because invoking God to explain natural phenomena never gets us anywhere. You all know the story of Laplace and Napoleon: I had no need of that hypothesis. Nor do we need The God Hypothesis now; its only an impediment to understanding.)

Its not just evolutionary theory thats founded on methodological naturalism, but all of science.If metaphysical naturalism makes you uncomfortable, then you have no business doing science at all.

More problematic is religiosity, since for some believers evolution poses no problem for their faith, but for others its an insuperable problem. Yet most Americans reject the naturalistic view of evolution: in fact, a 2019 Gallup poll (data below), a poll taken every few years, shows, that 40% Americans are young-earth creationists, another 33% are theistic evolutions (who believe that God helped evolution along, especially creating humans), while a mere 22%a bit more than 1 in 5 of us, accept the naturalistic view of evolution as we teach it in college.

73% of Americans, then, think that God had some hand in evolution. Thats nearly 4 out of 5, and those objections are obviously religious ones. The biggest impediment to accepting evolution, as I wrote about in my Presidential paper in the journal Evolution, is religion. (As you can imagine, I had trouble getting this palpably true thesis published.) I know of no anti-evolution organization that is, at bottom, not based on religion, and theres a negative correlation among U.S. statesand among countries in the world between religiosity and acceptance of evolution.

With respect to minorities in particular, the solution that Bergman offers to the inequities in evolutionary biology is for us to learn to talk about religion and evolution:

OBrien et al. [JAC: the paper below] concluded that

cultural differences in religiosity as well as the moral objections to evolution cannot be ignored in efforts to increase URMs sense of belonging in EEB educational contexts (or other science fields that are rooted in evolution). A large proportion of the U.S. population is religious and disbelieves in evolution. African Americans and Latinos/as are more religious than the U.S. population as a whole and scientists in particular (Pew Research 2009a, b). One method to improve religious students feelings of belonging in EEB contexts might be teach EEB faculty to navigate conversations around religion.

Based on the studies below, and experiences of my colleagues, yes, black students or URMs (underrepresented minorities) are more wary of taking evolution classes because of their greater faith. What do do about that? Well, I have talked to students who had religious objections to evolution, but only in my office, not in class. And really, one has to be a therapist to deal with this issue. I can tell the students that many people find evolution compatible with their faith but, as you see from the figure above, most dont. And if they ask me my own opinion, I will tell them that I dont think religion is compatible with evolution, but, fortunately, I rarely got asked that by students.

Finally, the issue of eugenics comes up, as it does even in scientific societies. The mantra goes that evolutionary biology was founded on eugenics (no, it wasnt), and that the discipline is still deeply imbued with eugenics (no, it isnt). True, there was a period about ninety years ago when some evolutionists proposed eugenic schemes, but these schemes were not adopted wholesale by governments (and not at all in the UK), and those countries who did adopt them werent hugely influenced by evolutionary biology (if you want to blame any field for eugenics, blame genetics, but thats hyperbole as well).

The quote below, reproduced in the paper above3 comes from the paper of Joseph Graves, Jr. (below):

During the same period in which African Americans were fighting for a legal end to Jim Crow, evolutionary biology became a coherent disciple. This occurred between 1936 and 1947 (Mayr1982), with the founding of the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) occurring in 1946 (Smocovitis1994). This was right after the end of WWII in which racial theories had been utilized to justify the slaughter of millions of people in both the European and Pacific theaters of the war. What is not as well realized is that these theories had their origin in the West and prominent evolutionary biologists and geneticists contributed to their rise (Graves2005a).

First of all, evolutionary biology is not the sole source of bigotry (although in the past it has buttressed it), and the claim that evolution had something to do with the mass slaughters of WWII is either gross hyperbole or wrong. In every war, each side dehumanizes the enemy, and that began well before 1859. The slaughter of Americans by the Japanese and vice versa had nothing to do with evolutionary biology. Nor did the mass slaughters of Russians by Germans and vice versa, as well as Hitlers Holocaust. And if you think evolutionary biology led to the Holocaust, read my colleague Robert Richards paper, Was Hitler a Darwinian?, free online. The answer is a firm No!

To blame past eugenics, or to bring up the Tuskegee experiment (a horrible and unethical study, though not an outgrowth of evolutionary biology) for racial inequities in evolution doesnt comport with with any data I know of, nor with my own experimence. Has a single student ever said that if evolution had been involved with eugenics in the past, theyd be busy studying evolution now, sometimes with the goal of becoming an evolutionary biologist?

Click below to read the OBrien et al. paper, and you can find the pdf here;

One of the factors these authors invoke as inhibiting minority participation in evolution is religiosity, and Ill quote from this paper again:

Thus, challenges to inclusion that are likely the results of access to resources (e.g., knowledge, feeling comfortable outdoors) and challenges that are likely the result of real or perceived cultural mismatches between students and EEB faculty (e.g., religion) were both related to feelings of belonging. Moreover, the relationship between challenges to inclusion and sense of belonging remained after statistically controlling for ethnicity.

In addition, cultural differences in religiosity as well as the moral objections to evolution cannot be ignored in efforts to increase URMs sense of belonging in EEB educational contexts (or other science fields that are rooted in evolution). A large proportion of the U.S. population is religious and disbelieves in evolution. African-Americans and Latinos/as are more religious than the U.S. population as a whole and scientists in particular (Pew Research 2009a, b). One method to improve religious students feelings of belonging in EEB contexts might be teach EEB faculty to navigate conversations around religion (e.g., Graves 2019).

Feelings of belonging are a hard one, for one has to figure out how to rectify that. Mentors would help, though, as Graves points out below, there are very few black evolutionary biologists. If you need a mentor of your own race to succeed, there are two ways to fix that. First, departments could practice affirmative action in hiring faculty (were doing that as hard as we can given the restrictions on the practice, though its now become illegal). The reason it hasnt worked that well is that there arent many minority evolutionary biologists looking for jobs. (One reason, I think, it that its not a very lucrative field, but thats just my take). The underqualification in STEM that leads to this inequity has only one fix thats permanent: provide people with equal opportunity from birth. (There are other fixes that arent as good, like expanding outreach, and Im in favor of them, but in the end the problem we need to solve is one that starts at birth, and there is precious little money or will to fix that.) The ultimate goal to me is equal opportunity, not equal outcomes, but the former is a lot harder to ensure. And of course given cultural differences and preferences, equal opportunity need not lead to equal outcomes.

Finally, Joseph Graves, an African American evolutionist, weighs in with this paper (click to read, pdf here).

His thesis is thatcurrent racism(i.e., ongoing structural racism) is what keeps minorities out of evolution.

The central premise of this commentary is that racism in America as it is manifested in higher education (specifically evolutionary biology) creates a culturally non-inclusive environment that systematically disadvantages persons of non-European descent. The form of this disadvantage differs by the sociocultural positioning of individuals. Thus to change the patterns of underrepresentation within the discipline requires that the dominant social group (persons of European descent socially-defined as white) to address and act on how their position of privilege is subordinating others.

Id agree with him insofar as the qualifications of minority scientists were eroded by the history of slavery and racism, but I cant agree that racism is pervasive in evolutionary biology right now. There are simply too many efforts to find and recruit minority and faculty students to support the view that the field is riddled with systemic racism.

And then theres religion, with Graves indicting my own views:

Darwins agnosticism on the existence of God is a well-known feature of his life (Desmond and Moore1991). Jerry Coynes position on the incompatibility of evolution and religion is one that I shared earlier in my career (Coyne2012). However I have since recanted. Such views certainly stand as an impediment to the successful recruitment of greater numbers of African American students to careers in evolutionary biology.

I question whether my position or views like mine have kept students out of evolutionary biology. Can you find one student who says, I would have become an evolutionary biologist, but Jerry Coyne convinced me that science and religion are incompatible, so I didnt major in science or take an evolution course? I doubt there are more than a handful of students in America who have even read Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible.The recruitment of minority students into evolution may be because of religious belief thats hard to overcome, but I doubt its because of the argument I made. That argument was not that religious people couldnt accept evolution, or that scientists couldnt be religious. Rather, it was that if you practice both science and religion, you are engaged in contradictory exercises: both fields are based on factual claims (religion, of course, is based on more than that), but only science has a way of determining whether those factual claims are true. This is a more sophisticated argument than simply saying, Evolution makes a hash out of Christianity.

Im not denying, though, that religion is an impediment for black students to enter evolutionary biology; I have had colleagues teaching at various schools who told me they were explicitly told this by minority students. Graves, however, thinks it can be overcome with complex discussion:

However, this [religious belief] need not stand as impediment to the recruitment and retention of African Americans (or other highly religious) individuals into science. I have found that most of my highly religious Christian students have never really discussed the foundation of their theological views. As a confirmed Episcopalian, these are conversations I have learned how to conduct in ways that do not automatically shut down critical reasoning. Indeed, there is variation within Christian denominations with regards to their willingness to accept evolution as compatible with their faith. In general, doctrinally conservative Christians reject evolution (Berkman and Plutzer 2010). For example, the Southern Baptist Convention (formed as the Pro-segregation Baptist Church in the 1920s) and the National Baptist Convention (predominately African American membership) both reject evolution as compatible with their faith; on the other hand, the Catholic Church accepts evolution as compatible with their faith (Martin2010). Notably there is variation within the individuals who subscribe to major denominations concerning their acceptance of evolution. For example, for Doctrinally Conservative Protestants, surveyed from 1994 to 2004, those who felt that: humans developed from earlier species of animals 76% felt that this statement was definitely false or probably false, while 24% felt it was probably true or true. Similar values were recorded for Black Protestants, 66% and 35% respectively, for mainline Protestant denominations, the values were 45% and 55%; while for Roman Catholics, the values were 42% and 58% (Berkman and Plutzer2010). Thus while a given churchs official position is to accept or reject evolutionary science, individuals within denominations tend to make up their own minds concerning evolution. I have found that exposing my highly religious students to the fact that that there is variation within Christian thought concerning evolution helps them be able to engage it critically while not feeling that they are abandoning their faith.

Yes, thats one way to do it, and its a lot easier if, like Graves, youre religious. Another, which a colleague mentioned to me yesterday, is to say, You dont have to change your religious beliefs to take an evolution course. All you need to do is study the contents of the course and answer the questions. (This works for required evolution courses.) Although this may seem callous, to me it involves less dissimulation, for, to be truthful, most Christians do believe something thats incompatible with the theory of evolution, even if that belief is just that God helped the evolution of only one species along H. sapiens.

All of these authors (save Bergman) are well meaning, and Im with their goal: everyone deserves a chance to study evolution. But the solutions involving religion, eugenics, affirmative action, and the like seem like Band-Aids on the wound.

There is only one workable solution, and thats ensuring equal opportunity for all Americans. I wont go into the problems with that solution, which may be insuperable, but should we be discussing that solution before we get to eugenics and religion?

More here:

Is evolutionary biology racist? Why Evolution Is True - Why Evolution Is True

IF YOU have read the seemingly endless work of US dissident Noam Chomsky youll know he regularly cites 20th century US intellectuals to highlight the elitist, anti-democratic thinking of the so-called liberal centre.

The public are ignorant and meddlesome outsiders who should be spectators, not participants in action, while the responsible men govern. Therefore, the bewildered herd must be put in their place by necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications.

These quotes, Chomsky notes in the 2021 book The Precipice, are from influential progressive US thinkers like Walter Lippmann, Harold Laswell and Reinhold Niebuhr.

John Carey, then professor of English at the University of Oxford, mapped out similar levels of contempt for the general population in his 1992 study The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939.

In the book he names and shames canonised British and Irish writers like Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and DH Lawrence for their often visceral revulsion of the public and popular culture. WB Yeats joined the Eugenics Society, while Aldous Huxley and Shaw were sympathetic, Carey notes.

He notes a dehumanising diary entry written by Woolf in Brighton in 1941 about people she had observed in Fullers (presumably the same pub which still serves punters today): They ate and ate. Something parasitic about them. Where does the money come from to feed these fat white slugs?

Are similar hateful attitudes common among the liberal centre today? The discourse around Jeremy Corbyns tenure as leader of the Labour Party, which created the largest political party in Europe, demonstrates fear of popular participation in politics is very much alive and kicking.

Heres what Financial Times political columnist Janan Ganesh sneeringly tweeted (and then deleted) in 2016: You can do analysis of Corbyn and his movement (I have done it) but the essence of the whole thing is that they are just thick as pigshit.

The late novelist Martin Amis was similarly disdainful about Corbyn when he was interviewed in the Guardian Weekend magazine in 2017: Two E grades at A-level. Thats it. He certainly has no autodidact streak. I mean, is he a reader?

Lip service is usually given to supporting democracy, but its worth attending to deeds, not words. Remember, for example, that the vast majority of Labour Party MPs either cheered on or stayed silent when thousands of people were purged from the party, or barred from becoming members, in an attempt to rig the 2016 leadership contest between Corbyn and his establishment-friendly challenger, Owen Smith.

Chomsky understands what happened: As in the case of [Bernie] Sanders, I suspect the prime reason for the bitter hatred of Corbyn on the part of a very wide spectrum of the British establishment is his effort to turn the Labour Party into a participatory organisation that would not leave electoral politics in the hands of the Labour bureaucracy and would proceed beyond the narrow realm of electoral politics to a broader and constant activism and engagement in public affairs.

This goes way beyond the Labour Party, of course. Heres Ganesh again, echoing Lippmann and Laswell in his weekly Financial Times column last year: Key to the smooth running of democracy is the indifference of much of the population, much of the time. Voters are crucial as an eye on things, as a righter of the ship of state when it lists. That requires a measure of knowledge. Round-the-clock absorption is something else. It causes politics to take place in too loud a setting, laws to be made in too hot a smithy.

The monarchy provides a useful litmus test for peoples views on democracy. And unsurprisingly, many liberals prefer the hierarchical, imperialist, racist, hereditary institution over an elected head of state.

Remainiac Ian Dunt, writing in the i newspaper last year, maintained the monarchy works fine, before arguing: It doesnt really matter how we decide the head of state role all that matters is that it is arbitrary. It must not, under any circumstances, be democratic.

Similarly, national treasure Stephen Fry, commenting on the coronation of King Charles, told the BBC the beauty of a King is that it is for everyone, before warning imagine the alternative that is what other countries and republics have you vote for your head of state. The horror!

Writing in 2017, Abi Wilkinson noted a few of the core beliefs of this type of elite liberalism: Politics is about nothing more than the effective administration of the current system, which means the best politicians are those with the most experience wielding power and that nobody could possibly do a better job than the professionals.

Labour Party leader Keir Starmers repeated refusal to commit to increased funding of public services, and his reversal on poverty-increasing policies like the two-child benefit cap, is the embodiment of this technocratic, managerial style of politics.

Wilkinson doesnt mention it but this is very much the politics of The West Wing, the influential US television series that ran from 1999 to 2006.

Written by Aaron Sorkin, the show followed the working lives of serious, Ivy League-educated White House staffers under liberal President Bartlett. Politics is presented less as clashing values and interests and more about simply getting smart people in the room together. Social movements, when they do appear on screen, are often depicted as an uninformed irritant to the adults Trying To Get Things Done.

And when I say influential, I mean influential among youve guessed it the liberal political elite. Many members of the Obama administration were fans, as were the Blair, Brown and Cameron camps in Britain, according to Mark Lawson writing in the Guardian.

All this broadly fits with research conducted by the political economist David Adler, who concluded in the New York Times in 2018 that across Europe and North America, centrists [compared to those on the far left and far right] are the least supportive of democracy, the least committed to its institutions and the most supportive of authoritarianism.

The deliberate exclusion of the general public from policymaking is particularly palpable when it comes to foreign affairs.

The [British] governments preference is to see both [military] strategy and defence policy as areas to be settled between it and the armed forces, and so far as possible within the corridors of power, top British military historian Hew Strachan and Ruth Harris concluded in a 2020 RAND report.

This elite stitch-up is not new, of course. British government has long been fearful of public opinion, and even public engagement, in matters to do with defence of the realm, they explain.

Why? Because the government believes the public is reluctant to support the cost of defence and is unpersuaded of the utility of military force. This hesitancy is a consequence, in part, of the large-scale opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, something the elite became enormously concerned about when Parliament voted against military action on Syria in 2013.

Mark Curtis, arguably the most incisive critic of British foreign policy, agrees, arguing in his 2004 book Unpeople: Britains Secret Human Rights Abuses that the public is feared by the government: A perennial truth that emerges from the declassified files is the publics ability to mount protests and demonstrations that divert the government from its course.

The key problem, as Chomsky, Curtis and other wise people have noted, is that addressing the many political, social and economic crises we face today in particular the escalating climate crisis will require huge social movements to lead an unprecedented mobilisation of the general public to apply overwhelming pressure on our rulers and divert them from their dangerous course.

Rather than being reliable allies in this ongoing struggle, liberals fear of popular participation in the political sphere is a key barrier to the radical change we so desperately need.

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

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Beware the anti-democratic liberal centre - Morning Star Online