Public Lecture: Darwin’s ventriloquists

7pm Monday February 9

Melbourne Convention Centre
(Corner of Spencer and Flinders Streets)
View Map | Download Map (PDF)

The biggest challenge to contemporary evolutionary theory comes not from creationists, but from biologists themselves.  Evolutionary theory has, in different eras, been recruited into a diverse group of anti-egalitarian scientific discourses, such as social Darwinism, eugenics, and evolutionary psychology.  What we learn from the social study of evolutionary theory in different eras is that the “natural” and the “cultural” invariably co-produce the scientific. Scientific claims, however, are made with a unique voice of cultural authority; and such claims about human diversity are especially sensitive to subtle (and not-so-subtle) cultural influences.

Today people invoke Darwin for medicine, within literature, in defense of carnivory, to evangelize for atheism, to promote rights for apes, and in other cultural and political interests.  One particularly odious example is contemporary scientific racism (that is, the act of justifying social inequalities between presumptively natural groups of people by recourse to science.)  The training of modern scientists, which commonly deliberately shields them from the history and politics of their work, serves to ensure that every generation of evolutionary geneticists will have to rediscover the intimate connection between science and culture for themselves.

Jonnathan Marks argues that evolutionary biology cannot afford to provide a safe intellectual haven for scientific racism today, and that the best interests of science are served by identifying the cultural meanings associated with different evolutionary theories, and by consistently dissociating normative evolutionary biology from its diverse and idiosyncratic expressions.

Jon Marks is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.