Hardly Wilson's peer either, and the article shows this quite clearly.
> Some of the most outspoken criticisms of his work came from Richard C. Lewontin (a population geneticist) and Stephen Jay Gould (a paleontologist).
Yes, criticisms of the substance and inferences like any good scientist would focus on, not thinly veiled accusations of racism.
Wilson's peers were people who studied ants and other insects, or maybe people who write popular science.
If he wants to jump into his views of the human brain, she is as much a peer as he is.
Whether you find her politically correct isn’t relevant to the topic at hand: she’s clearly qualified to participate in a scientific discussion.
No, her remarks about the normal distribution disqualified her from all scientific discussion.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.6757...
(and, for that matter, did you notice the clever way in which Razib said it was nonsense but didn't directly address or show any signs of understanding the argument? He was hoping that you'd have a good sense of righteous indignation and roll right past that without pausing to ask whether things like human cognition might not be as simple as the length of a cucumber.)
And she doesn't even use that confusion to make any sensible point. The rest of that paragraph is just a rehash of the paper's argument. I don't "understand" why McLemore inserted this guff about normal distributions, but if I had to guess, she might have done it to strengthen the link between what Wilson wrote about and what the paper is criticising – not by reasoning, but by wordplay.
The normal distribution does not entail there is any such concept as a "default human".
Furthermore, that paper shows the corrupt logic inherent to a lot of woke criticism. You're tarred as a racist if you claim there are biological differences between races, while these same people cry that existing science is racist because it's not accounting for the biological differences between races.
Yes, the one which was in a peer-reviewed journal. If it was so roundly condemned you should have no trouble doing more than drive-by accusations.
McLemore didn't see fit to do more than drive by accusations of Wilson, so I'm not sure why I should bother extending her more courtesy than she extended to the recently deceased.
Other scientists have already commented on this widely anyway, so you can find them if you're actually interested.
I suppose she referenced it because she hoped people would assume that an article on an important topic wouldn't just be thrown around by the same author as a citation in support of total nonsense. But people who assumed that would be wrong.
Questioning the idea of a "default human" is fine. Saying that the normal distribution implies the idea -- this is nonsense.
1. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.6757...
Whatever the merits of that argument, that's not what the SciAm article was claiming -- which was a either ignorance or a deliberate confusing of the popular and technical meanings of the word "normal". She might as well said that magnetic fields have to do with the plots of land farmers grow crops on because they are both "fields".
This false dichotomy is key to the false comparisons with Lysenkoism, etc. E. O. Wilson did not represent all scientists even during his working career and many of the people criticizing him are also scientists using their scientific expertise. The author of the Scientific American piece is “an associate professor in the Family Health Care Nursing Department and a clinician-scientist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco.” — hardly a political apparatchik. Some of the most outspoken criticisms of his work came from Richard C. Lewontin (a population geneticist) and Stephen Jay Gould (a paleontologist).
Similarly, Razib Khan is someone who is at least comfortable using his expertise in forums which do not shy away from race politics — for example, he lost a contract writing for The New York Times when his regular contributions to Taki's Magazine, a very conservative venue which was at least neo-Nazi-adjacent (Richard Spencer was the managing editor). That doesn't mean that we should dismiss Khan's writing entirely but we should recognize that he's a human rather than the objective voice of science and his work also needs to be read with an understanding of how his political positions influence it.