In 2021,ย U.S. Sen. Ted Cruzย comparedย critical race theoryย โ an academic subfield that examines the role of racism in American institutions, laws, and policies โ to the Ku Klux Klan, the most notorious homegrown terrorist organization in U.S. history. In doing so, he opened a playbook that resembles one put into practice by Florida Gov.ย Ron DeSantisย and others: Attack ideas that are unfriendly to a narrow view of the world, and do so by eliminating them from our school curricula and public conversation. The movement against critical race theory has now swallowed up high school Advanced Placementย African American Studiesย in several states and threatens the teaching of basic facts about U.S. history. And this movement has devolved from pundit tough talk into authoritarian policies to banย books, modifyย curricula, and threaten intellectual freedom across the country (and world).
By now, many realize that these policies are a harbinger of things to come โ even for fields ostensibly unrelated to African American studies, like biology. Modern breakthroughs in biology are producing a picture of life that is increasingly incompatible with authoritarian preferences for neat boxes that dictate what people are and how they should behave. Consequently, biologists must shed the naive belief that our work is apolitical and recognize that the recent attacks on how to teach U.S. history are a battle in a larger war on ideas that includes the natural sciences.
Evolutionary biology in particular is not new to political controversies. Over the past century, it has been at the center of several high-profile legal battles. Most famous are the debates about the teaching of evolution in schools (documented in Brenda Wineappleโs new book on the Scopes trial, and many others). The political tension is generated by the world view that Darwinism presents. The reasoning from evolution deniers: If public education can challenge religious explanations for how life began, then tomorrow it might question the religious basis of good and evil, man and woman, and explanations for how we all got here. And they arenโt wrong. Biologyโs increasingly complicated picture of human behavior isnโt so friendly to political stances peddling the myth that one group is essentially inferior to another; and that a deity decides the boundaries around sex, sexual preference, and other dimensions.
Modern breakthroughs in biology are producing a picture of life that is increasingly incompatible with authoritarian preferences for neat boxes that dictate what people are and how they should behave.
While biological sex is a meaningful dimension for millions of species, modern biology has frustrated many classical models for what sex is and how it manifests in nature. In recent decades, evolutionary theorists have offered improvements on models that implied that females were passive actors, driven by interest and competition between males. At our most charitable, weโd call these interpretations naive and imprecise, and they highlight a long tradition of confused thinking on sex and gender that is increasingly subject to scrutiny. And when we consider the added layer of culture in the world of Homo sapiens, then hard rules and expectations regarding sex are on even shakier ground.
Considerations of the biology of sexual orientation follow. Evolutionary theory wonโt help one argue that, for example, same-sex unions are unnatural and, by extension, immoral. The absence of evidence for a โgay geneโ โ a discrete genetic signature that could be used to reliably predict sexuality โ is compatible with a complex model of human sexual behavior, one without a singular source that can be identified and pathologized.
Biologyโs fact-driven dissolution of boxes does not stop there. They even include ones basic to the genetic structure of our species, ones we have long (erroneously) attributed to biological race. The concept of biological race has long been operating, as evolutionary biologist Joseph Thornton once highlighted, like a zombie โ deceased, yet magically still ambulating. And new findings quadruple down on how undead it is. We are a species with a complicated genetic history, which includes contributions from Neanderthal, Denisovan, possibly other extinct nonhuman primates, and profound admixture resulting from our very recent history. Our patchwork genomes are a signature of historical wanderlust and widespread interbreeding, rather than simple stories of adaptation to explain why, say, Brazilians excel at soccer and the Japanese at baseball. Biology has a hard time telling us how to categorize people into nested anythings, let alone justify mistreatment based on group characteristics.
Whereas modern science isnโt so good for the racist imagination, a bevy of other forces empower the bigots. Fear, insecurity, and xenophobia are rather easy to provoke in people, and โus vs. themโ is one of the oldest rallying cries in human history. This has been front and center in modern politics. The most widely shared moment in the September 2024 presidential debate between candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump might have been the latterโs racist account of an Ohio town supposedly overrun by immigrants, mixed in with inflammatory rhetoric about immigration in the United States.
The authoritarian’s world runs on a script resembling that of a poorly written childrenโs book: It insists that innate differences between groups are real and inflexible; that ideas and behaviors are essentially good or bad; and that there is a purely righteous way to live, love, govern, work, pray, and build a household. Authoritarianism requires straightforward narratives, something biology is lousy at generating. And this inability to kowtow to fairy tales is a trait it shares with the responsible study of U.S. history.
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Nearly two and a half centuries ago in America, educated White men held a series of meetings to develop a set of documents that would shape everything about the world we live in. An understanding of racismโs imprint on these foundational documents and the policies that followed โ such as the ones that built Americaโs education system, voting laws, housing laws, and many other facets of life โ requires that we disabuse ourselves of a deep-cleaned version of American history. The messier narrative โ one that centers stories of the poor, of women, of Indigenous people, and of enslaved Americans โ is necessary for a technically sound picture of our past and present. And this is precisely why African American history was among the first targets in this modern war on thinking. The authors of this regressive movement recognize that an accurate teaching of what America is, one that requires fields like African American studies, constitutes a threat to their binary story of who belongs and who doesnโt.
Biology has a hard time telling us how to categorize people into nested anythings, let alone justify mistreatment based on group characteristics.
I propose that modern biology functions in a manner similar to U.S. history, in that the more complex story is the one we should learn to accept. Biology can reveal profound truths about what life is, and aspects of who we are as a species. But this science tells us nothing about which immigrant groups we should welcome, what biological sex has to do with household chores, or why two adults of the same sex canโt raise children together as a happy and healthy family. The modern science of biology isnโt so good at bins and boundaries, and it threatens to rain on the simple-minded parade of authoritarian politics.
Today, many are attempting to ban an understanding of how the legacy of Jim Crow segregation and associated attitudes lurk in our laws. In the near future, we should not be surprised if the same cast of characters castigates biology for the similar crime of accurately describing the world we live in.
C. Brandon Ogbunu is an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University and is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Find C. Brandon on X @big_data_kane
A version of this article was originally posted at Undark and is reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit both the GLP and the original article. Find Undark on X @UndarkMag
