On Science, Identity Politics, and Group-Speak

Abstract

Some insidious things are happening in American society today in the name of tolerance, compassion, and fairness to disadvantaged groups of various kinds. The Symposium on Evolutionary Biology and Feminism, openly devoted to the development of “feminist” perspectives on biological evolution was, in its own small way, one of them. This was not a symposium, however, whose primary purpose was to feature science by women, or by feminists, including several speakers who were men. It was a symposium devoted to bringing a feminist point of view to evolutionary storytelling—by which I mean the use of anthropomorphism and teleology in natural history accounts of what are at base purely biological (and even physical) phenomena. In the course of introducing feminist perspectives into such accounts, femaleness was portrayed as enhanced in its biological, hence, social, significance, and that is really what this symposium was about. It was science in the service of a group agenda; that is, it was “identity politics”—women storming the barricades, with “group-speak.”