What is Reddit's opinion of Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA?

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If you haven't already, you may want to read Lewontin's Biology as Ideology, which directly tackles the myth of a purely egalitarian scientific community. One of its primary examples is the Human Genome Project.

> He was completely ideologically motivated

Even if true, this is an appeal to motive/bias, which is a logical fallacy. Clearly, whether someone's scientific work is somehow motivated by personal factors (which, to be sure, applies to every single researcher) has nothing to do with its veracity.

By any chance, are you an anti-Marxist, or do you buy into biological determinist ideology? If so, then your complaints about ideological motives here would be transparently and deeply ironic and hypocritical.

> it made his work very dishonest.

Please provide some examples of "dishonesty" in his work.

It is unclear why you believe his ideological motivations amount to dishonesty, particularly when he was never inconspicuous about his leanings in works like Not in Our Genes and <em>Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA</em>.

> the man has fallacies named after him.

Which fallacies are those? Do they actually faithfully reflect his work? What are the political leanings of the people who coined them?

Given that you yourself rely on fallacious thinking, this is more irony from you.

Hormone patterns are more or less the same between "sexes." In fact there is more variation in hormone patterns in each individual person within a sex classification than there is between the two "sexes." Hormones vary widely and can be manipulated fairly easily

The Huffington Post is a liberal publication, I linked it as an introduction to get people thinking about the social construction of sex, in retrospect I should've linked something better. oh well

For further reading, both on how science is shaped by society and on the social construction of sex:

<em>Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA</em> by Richard Lewontin (couldn't find a pdf of this one, sorry)

<em>Sex is Not a Biological Reality</em> by Samantha Allen

<em>On The Social Construction of Sex</em> by Freya B.

<em>Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality</em> by Anne Fausto-Sterling (cited in the above article)

<em>Delusions of Gender</em> by Cordelia Fine

<em>Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud</em> by Thomas Laqueur (no pdf of this one either)

Psychology major here. This is absolutely false. There is no reliable scientific evidence that specific psychological traits in humans have particular, consistent genetic underpinnings. On the other hand, the available evidence shows that virtually all such traits (including self-concept, emotions, motivation, memory, sexuality, and even color perception) derive their specific features from particular sociocultural and political-economic (environmental) factors. Genes merely provide for a general potentiating substratum for psychology without determining or even "influencing" specific outcomes.

Regarding beauty standards, refer to my post over in r/leftyincel where I debunk the scientifically baseless myth that these standards are biologically determined or sociohistorically universal: Are Beauty Standards Universal? What Cultural Anthropologists and Psychologists Have to Say on the Matter

As for intelligence, keep in mind that, like all behavior genetics research, studies assessing the possible genetic basis of intelligence suffer from a host of methodological errors that render any conclusions unwarranted. These include the reliance on the concept of "heritability," which, despite what many laypeople believe, is not actually a measure of the genetic influence of traits in individual organisms but rather of group trait variation attributable to genetic variation. Additionally, the missing heritability problem, which refers to the decades-long failure of researchers to reliably pin particular genes to specific traits using replicated studies, is indicative of the scientific inefficacy of this field.

Indeed, just like the pseudoscientific eugenics of Nazi Germany, behavior genetics relies on similarly shoddy methods and dubious constructs. Rather than reliable science, as critical psychologists acknowledge these both amount to mere conservative ideology whose purpose is to rationalize, legitimate, and bolster social inequality.

For further reading on the topic, refer to Harvard geneticist and evolutionary biologist RC Lewontin's <em>Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA</em> and UCLA sociologist Aaron Panofsky's <em>Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics</em>.

I see. I understand what you mean, but the fact that science has been appropriated by non-scientists & politicized is not an indictment of the work itself, but rather how politics and ideological institutionalized into science (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Biology-as-Ideology-Doctrine-DNA/dp/0060975199)

Perhaps the MMT people on reddit, but like they have entire journals, models & numerous papers. They do empirical research. I found this entire point of "MTT is bad because they don't have models" so vacuous because it's just blatantly untrue.