“Dark Laboratory: groundbreaking book argues climate crisis was sparked by colonisation” was the headline of the review of Tao Leigh Goffe’s magnum opus in the Guardian, but the headline is wrong. I have read the whole article, even the captions to the pictures (“The reggae artist Chronixx, whose lyrics form part of the implements Goffe uses to dismantle the superstructure of western science”) so I know all about it. Colonisation was only a symptom. The real villain was Carl Linnaeus. Now you probably thought of Linnaeus as the “biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature” and as something of a hero to ecologists. Not any more!
Central to Goffeâs critique is the notion that European colonialism turned the islands of the Caribbean into a âdark laboratory of colonial desires and experiments ⊠the epicentre of the modern globalised worldâ.
It was there that enslaving farmers first formulated the structures of modern capitalism, alongside a scientific method rooted in eugenics and racism that privileged the status of white men while denigrating Black and Indigenous forms of science.
Such experiments included the creation of monocrop agriculture, the clearing of terrestrial and marine ecosystems making territories vulnerable to extreme weather, the categorisation of wildlife along lines of superficial characteristics
Told ya Linnaeus was the real baddie. How much better off we would all be if his father had followed his first instincts and apprenticed him to a cobbler. Then we would have respected Black and Indigenous forms of science.
and the now equally discredited categorisation of different races along similar lines.
Um, how discredited is that? Richard Dawkins put an entertaining account of the vicious feud between the geneticists and the cladists in The Blind Watchmaker (a feud in which an announcement that some colleague had “gone over to the Cladists” was received with scarcely less horror than an announcement that said colleague had taken Holy Orders), but I thought the whole point was that it all washes up on the same shore in the end. And is it not one of the main conclusions of Linnaean classification that the test of whether Organism X and Organism Y are of the same species is whether they can interbreed? All humans can interbreed, making us one species, QE-categorically-D.
âIn opposition to the land, the colonial approach has been one of razing and dynamite, eroding Indigenous relationships to the soil,â writes Goffe. We must, she argues, âconnect the dots between the brutal system of chattel slavery and the degradation of the natural environment ⊠The worlds Europeans built depended on making the lives of some disposable.â
The worlds everyone else built are so much nicer.
Related posts:
and, just for the nostalgia value, here is one from back when when Greens liked science:
One last thought… having one’s superstructure dismantled by the use of reggae lyrics sounds a distinctly unsettling process. But that is what has been done to western science, we now learn. Therefore The Science no longer is Settled.
UPDATE: OK, so it wasn’t one last thought. More thoughts came overnight, and I want to get them down before I forget. I might expand what follows into another post later.
1) Tao Leigh Goffe is “dismantling the superstructure” of the branch upon which she sits. She says that racist western science caused capitalism, which caused the climate crisis. But the justification we are given for believing that there is a climate crisis comes from that same western science. And if some of us are less convinced than she thinks we ought to be about the scale and imminence of peril, that is not because we have lost faith in science but because we have lost faith in many of the people with “scientist” in their job title.
2) Science does not make men good. It does make them powerful. The article speaks of “a scientific method rooted in eugenics and racism that privileged the status of white men while denigrating Black and Indigenous forms of science”, but one reason that the white men were in a position to enslave and oppress others was that their science was the one that worked.
3) Modern science arose in Western Europe. There was a period of a few centuries where the resulting superiority of European technology – ships and guns at the sharp end, with the power of the ironworks and the printing press behind them – meant that scruffy bands of white “adventurers” could conquer whole continents. That period is over. The scientific method is now available to anyone who wants it. Which mostly seems to be the Chinese at the moment.
I and I ben downpressed by Babylon police man, need one fireburn Babylon a part to overstand and livestrong.
So the science is settled, mon.
⊠is it not one of the main conclusions of Linnaean classification that the test of whether Organism X and Organism Y are of the same species is whether they can interbreed? All humans can interbreed, making us one species, QE-categorically-D.
I didnât realise that horses and donkeys were the same species.
You almost made me do a spit-take, Bobby B.
Mildly related is the fact that the reason Chinese Traditional Medicine was revived is that the Great Leap Forward had almost annihilated most western-trained doctors on mainland China.
I do miss Glorious Red Tractor Beef.
They aren’t. Their offspring are sterile. They can’t interbreed for more than one generation.
Philip: They don’t produce fertile offspring, which is also part of the question. On the other hand, it appears that our ancestors and Neanderthals were the same species by that test.
I’d question that test. My ex and I have a bunch of offspring, all fertile, but I”m pretty sure she and I are of different species.
It always strikes me as ironic that people rail against the terrible woes of capitalism, and, in this case, the subjugation of native ideas by white scientific ideas. And yet their complaints are typed on their cell phones, transmitted across the internet using a complex network of tech to transmit the message. All built by the nasty west. All colonizing technologies. All these native technologies? In the Americas they hadn’t even invented metal work, aside from occasional finds of meteoric rock. There were regular waves of famine and disease because their technology was so ineffective. What did the Pre Columbian Americas give us for all tech we gave them? Syphilis. People’s lives were short and brutish under that paradigm, so, what? Do they want to go back to that?
I mean they are welcome to, right? Grow your own food, leave all the tech at the door, don’t call your doctor… and see how great your life is when you embrace all these native technologies. Why I chose modern tech can be summed up in two words: “dental anesthetics.”
I recently saw an award winning photo of a leopard carrying a baboon it had killed for food. The baboon’s baby was still alive, clinging to its mother’s dead body. Apparently, the leopard brought the animal back and gave the baby to its children so that they could torture it to practice their hunting techniques, before killing and eating it. Next time someone waxes lyrical about how great the natural world is, think of this photo. It perfectly captures the reality of nature, red in tooth and claw. Merciless. Amoral. Vicious and dangerous. Kill or be killed. We have built civilization to escape nature because it is so horrible. It is nice to visit, especially if you are carrying a gun. But really, going back to nature is not what I’d recommend.
Do weaves and hoop earrings count as science?
They aren’t. They can inbreed to a limited extent but he offspring are sterile. The subject of speciation is complex and messy so the question of whether two creatures are different species or just two strains of the same species is sometimes difficult to answer.
One of our problems is that quite a lot of Guardian readers will take this stuff seriously.
It’s a negative definition, not a positive one. If they *can’t* interbreed, they are *not* the same species.
Grateful thanks, Natalie, for reading and reporting that dreck so that I don’t need to.
Colour me surprised if the desire to ‘decolonise’ and promote indigenous science some how manages not to undermine the demands for reparations from the hated West.
This site Macroevolution.net is iconoclastic on the hybrid issue.
William H. Stoddard –
I know. I was really just messing around a bit. There was supposed to be a smiley face at the end, but found I couldn’t figure out how to do that manually.
The Wikipedia article on Neanderthals is rather interesting. It deals a bit with the problem of classifying them: “Neanderthals can be classified as a unique species as H. neanderthalensis, though some authors argue expanding the definition of H. sapiens to include other ancient humans, with combinations such as H. sapiens neanderthalensis“.
Fraser Orr.
They tried using smoke signals, but the autocorrect feature was crap.
Off-topic (?), but one of the oldest genetic paradoxes (paradoxi? – paradoxae? – what is the correct pluralism of ‘paradox’?) has only recently been solved, right here in backwoods Great White North! That is, the famous question of What came first, the chicken or the egg?
And most amazingly perhaps, it was conclusively solved by none other than McDonald’s! Pulling-into the drive-through one recent morning, I spied a new offering: Chicken McMuffin! Now it’s unchallenged that McDonald’s has been selling Egg McMuffins for decades – therefore, be it recognised by all that The Egg Came First!
I thank you… đ
On the question of whether horses and donkeys are separate species, I acknowledge that the answer is not as obvious as I made out in the post, but the consensus is that they are not the same species. See this explanation:
The same webpage also says this:
It is not even proper Marxism – as, for example, Dr Marx would have described a system of production based on slavery as “the slave mode of production” – not as capitalism, because it is not capitalism. As for denying basic science – in favour of tribal mumbo-jumbo (I would if writing those words will land me in prison), that is NOT what Karl Marx and Fred Engels were about – their theories were wrong, but they were real theories, not this mess.
The ignorant ravings of “Critical Theory” (what used to be called Frankfurt School or Cultural Marxism) are not a real theory of economics or history – they are just a mist of words to “justify” attacks on civilisation.
It would be funny if (if) these vicious frauds had not taken over almost every institution, public and private, the Western world.
PST,
If using Windows then: [Win] + [;] gets the emoji menu. Select the smiley (or whatever) andâșïž.
Paul,
It all started with Freud… He based an entire “theory” of human behaviour on the sexual hang-ups of a handful of upper middle-class Edwardian era Viennese housewives. A “theory” which is still taken seriously by quite a few folks today but it’s hybrid offspring have been, alas, far from infertile…
Why is “critical theory” a “theory”? I mean why use the “t” word? Because it gives an air of intellectual rigour to what is just bloviation. It steals that air from the genuine sciences such as, say, chemistry. To paraphrase Freud, I call it, “physics envy”.
In reality didn’t we de-colonize years ago? You know all those times the Union flag was lowered for the last time and a new one went-up? What precisely is the current size of the British Empire? I mean there’s the Falkland Islands and… er… Have I been lied to all my life and I could’ve made a fortune running some plantation for the East India company all these years? It’d be a nice change of pace and climate to be able to sit on the veranda somewhere tropical with a gin and tonic and watch coloured people do all the work…
Oh, and didn’t Britain abolish the slave trade in 1807 and totally forbid slavery within the Empire from 1833? Or is that just another myth and I can actually still buy a house-boy on Amazon?
At the risk of veering slightly off topic, though still broadly on the subject of Western science.
I would like to strongly recommend the following podcast and book.
Joe Rogan Experience #2294 – Dr. Suzanne Humphries
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=207W1A_bJqI
Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History
https://www.amazon.com/Dissolving-Illusions-Disease-Vaccines-Forgotten/dp/1480216895
Actually it’s best to get the 10 year Anniversary edition of the book at dissolvingillusionsDOTcom because the 10 year Anniversary edition contains hundreds of additional pages expanding on the original
Anyway, phenomenal podcast and book
Natalie,
As to your adenda:
1. Yes. It’s a bit of a “gotcha”. Especially considering the enormous role computer models* play in all this and you need industry and mining to even build computers…
2.True – up to a point. But also industry and capitalism and all that has freed people from slavery as well. Slavery is incompatible with the sort of society in which innovation and industry thrive. See, for example, the difference in the economies of the USA vs. the CSA. Furthermore look at the countries and cultures that still have slavery. The Islamic world springs to mind which is, largely, backward as Hell and hasn’t invented anything for about 800 years. Yeah, I know, Dubai and all that but that is due to us evil Westerners doing the tricky stuff and their slaves from Bangladesh etc. doing the grunt work… No point working the techie stuff yourself – “Math is hard!!!” – when you can buy that in because you’re knee-deep in 4-Star. No point creating labour saving devices when labour is essentially free.
3. The scientific method has “always”** been available to any society that wants it. See the final two sentences of my response, above. Yes, China is a good example here but I wouldn’t leave out India either. Certainly India has a “brain-drain” problem right now – seen the number of Indians working for big IT comanies in the US? That could change. I’d love to see that for a number of reasons and not just because it would truly piss off the PRC’s Politburo. Though that would warm the cockles…
*I have heard several “climatologists” refer to model results as empirical data. Now that is post-truth! It is also something I’m not going to get into right here, right now.
**For a certain value of “always” – again another topic to big to go into right at the mo.
NickM
Thanks for the tip. As Johnny Carson used to say, I did not know that.