(RightWing.org) – Woke scientists have launched a new attempt to change the way people speak. A liberal pressure group claims words like man and woman are “harmful,” and says evolutionary biologists should stop saying “survival of the fittest.” Unsurprisingly, the activists mostly seem to come from liberal US colleges — and real scientists aren’t impressed.
“Alternatives to terms like “male” and “female” and “mother” and “father” should be sought in science. Male and female should instead be referred to as “sperm-producing” and “egg-producing.”
🤡🌎https://t.co/j1eax6aDt5— James Melville (@JamesMelville) February 15, 2023
Readers of the scientific journal “Trends in Ecology & Evolution” got a surprise last week when they opened the latest issue. Among articles about speciation and the role of whales in the carbon cycle was a woke outburst from something called the EEB (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) Language Project, made up of academics from US and Canadian universities, including Harvard, Princeton and the Universities of California and British Columbia.
According to the woke professors, biologists should look for alternatives to words like male and female because these assume sex is binary. They suggest scientists use terms like “sperm donor” and “egg donor” instead — although they don’t seem to have noticed there are still only two terms because sex is binary. They also say these terms would “avoid reproducing heteronormative views,” although so far, two sperm donors have never produced offspring together, and no biologist expects this to ever happen.
The EEB Language Project’s website makes clear that it’s a political, not scientific, project. It claims using the wrong words can “reinforce oppressive systems.” It slams “Western science” for being “rooted in colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.” It has a Team Statement of Positionality stuffed with woke jargon that somehow manages to be even more meaningless than its title.
The site also has a Repository of Terminology that includes the 24 terms it thinks are most harmful. For example, it wants the gypsy moth renamed the “spongy moth” to avoid inciting violence against gypsies and claims the term citizen science is “harmful to non-citizens.” Survival of the fittest, the core concept of evolutionary biology, has to go because it’s “ableist.”
The Project’s members are all students, postdoctoral researchers, assistant professors and diversity managers. Real biologists are furious. Professor Frank Furedi of the University of Kent said anyone who calls terms like father and mother “harmful” is “abandoning science for ideological advocacy.” Famous biologist Richard Dawkins, a former professor at Oxford University, vowed to “use every one of the harmful words,” said no “teenage version of Mrs. Grundy” is going to tell him what words he can use and added, “The only possible response is contemptuous ridicule.” It seems biology isn’t ready to evolve in the direction the EEB Language Project is suggesting.
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