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There are some days you wake up and think, ok, we’ve reached peak idiocy—this endless assault on language and the nation’s obsession over gender identity has plummeted to its low point, and people will soon come to their senses and we can stop the insanity.
Unfortunately, that day is not today.
A group of U.S. and Canadian “researchers” from the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) Language Project has decided that the words “male” and “female” should instead be referred to as “sperm-producing” and “egg-producing,” while “father” and “mother” should be labeled “parent,” “egg donor” and “sperm donor” in the scientific field.
I thought one of the main points of progressivism was to uplift women and ensure their equality in society—but now these brilliant intellectuals want to refer to them as merely “egg donors.” Is that really progress, folks?
Out now in @Trends_Ecol_Evo, we discuss the power of terminology and outline a path forward for identifying and revising harmful terms in ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB) to foster inclusion in the field. (1/5)https://t.co/EjjLZOuH1f pic.twitter.com/JxRBmqp7Ji
— EEB Language Project (@EEBLanguageProj) February 6, 2023
The University of British Columbia describes their project as a grassroots effort launched by like-minded scientists who started a conversation on Twitter regarding “potentially harmful terminology.”
What it really sounds like is that a bunch of elitist woke professors decided over Starbucks oat milk lattes that they wanted to degrade our language even more, and started what can only be described as the exact opposite of a grassroots (or bottom-up) effort.
Ignore the dangers of possible war with Russia or China, forget the crushing inflation we’ve endured, move on from the devastation wrought on our children by the country’s peripatetic COVID response; no, here’s the real critical alert:
Amid a growing disciplinary commitment to inclusion in ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB), it is critical to consider how the use of scientific language can harm members of our research community. [emphasis mine]
Yet another casualty in the language wars is the word “harmed.” Harmed used to mean things like, you got punched in the face, or hit by a car. Now, harmed means you didn’t like the pronoun somebody used to refer to you while you weren’t in the room.
They go on to describe the horrible effects of current scientific terms. “Fitness,” for instance, is an absolutely terrible, dangerous word, and I’m sure the species they’re studying in evolutionary biology would be extremely upset by its use:
Terms like “fitness” are not only harmful to some people—in an ableist context—but also vague.
“The definition is about reproductive output, which doesn’t take into account individuals that don’t produce offspring,” says [Haley] Branch [a PhD candidate with UBC Botany]. “Often researchers aren’t even measuring the number of offspring. They’re looking at proxies of fitness instead, which becomes very convoluted.”
Talk about convoluted; I’ve read that sentence 10 times and still have no idea what it means. It reminds me of a story I covered in January where the British Museum wants to change the word “mummies” to “mummified remains” because somehow those dead for thousands of years would be less offended by the term.
Or the story of University of Southern California and the Michigan Health Department both trying to ban the word “field” because of its racist overtones.
When reflecting on scientific terminology, we recommend that individuals consider things such as the history and additional contexts of the term and ask if there is an alternative term that conveys the same scientific concept without producing harm. (4/5) pic.twitter.com/SaHEIybjdb
— EEB Language Project (@EEBLanguageProj) February 6, 2023
Some of the researchers involved in the EEB wrote in the journal “Trends in Ecology and Evolution” and tried to explain their frivolous and insane ideas:
“Much of western science is rooted in colonialism, white supremacy and patriarchy, and these power structures continue to permeate our scientific culture.”
Oh, now we see what’s going on here. More white supremacy—but of course; that seems to be the only thing these six-figure income academics care about anymore. They helpfully list 24 terms that we should avoid:
For example, “primitive” and “advanced” are problematic because they are used “derogatorily towards humans or human practices, and also scientifically inaccurate as implies an evolutionary hierarchy.” EEB suggests “ancestral” or “derived” instead.
“Survival of the fittest” could be linked to “eugenics, ableism and social Darwinism,” researchers said, so they advise using “natural selection” and “survival differences” instead.
They actually want to cancel Darwin’s seminal tenet from his 1869 masterpiece “On the Origin of Species”—the biological theory of survival of the fittest—because long-extinct animals might be “harmed” by being portrayed as not the fittest. Doesn’t it feel like we’re moving back into the 18th Century when people got the vapors?
All of this seems like nonsense, and just annoying lunacy spewed out by overfunded, underthinking professors who would rather chase grants from woke foundations than actually study, you know, evolutionary biology.
Unfortunately, this continuous assault on our language and the movement to change the meaning of thousands of everyday words is dangerous, and it’s infected life in the West from our universities to our governments.
The point is not to make language more concise, as they claim, or to prevent anyone from being “harmed”—it’s to inject leftist progressive philosophy into almost everything we say. If necessity is the egg donor of invention, we need a way to ditch these ninnies.
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