"Universities are turning our youths into Marxists!"
Meanwhile my ecology professor is literally teaching that survival of the fittest is about genetic superiority and that evolution is about working towards that 'goal'. This is incorrect and bad science that is rooted in right-wing ideology that was disproven decades ago.
This is not what survival of the fittest means by the way. There is no such thing as a genetically superior being, as 'fitness' is totally subjective, as well as dependent on your environment. A lifeform that reproduces well in the ocean will still die if you put in the vacuum of space, no matter how 'fit' it was for ocean life. Not to mention the idea that nature has some sort of conscious goal is anthropomorthising a concept and again, bad science.
I really want to do something about this, but I feel like complaining will get me failed or known as a shit stirrer.
I fucking hate capitalist education.
On the plus side, our next lecture is on mutualism
What fucking kind of ecologist says that? Anyone I know who knows ecology beyond an undergrad level is extremely critical of malthusian/darwinist forms of thought.
Depending on what part of Burgerland, quite a few technically qualified people may very well teach college courses while bringing their special blends of with them, especially if such are pleasing to their bosses anyway.
Malthusian and Darwinist thought are very popular in biology departments, generally speaking.
A popular Malthusia idea is carrying capaciry, which describes an equilibrium of the environment relative to a species. It doesn't apply well to humans because we can modify our carrying capacity massively via technology and social change (e.g. overthrow capitalism). Modern Malthusian political reasoning is based on the false idea that capitalism is natural and permanent and all the problems we see are a result of an environmental incapacity, ignoring how much is based on social relations.
Re: Darwinism, this is an essential school of thought for understanding evolution in general, particularly adaptation. Is it possible you're thinking of Social Darwinism?
Yeah my bad. In my hurry to post I wasn't clear about what I meant. I meant that most Ecologists I know don't apply these ideas to social matters, and furthermore, don't fall prey to the oversimplification of ecological networks that is needed to apply Darwin or Malthus to human realities.
To be fair, your university sounds like shit. I mean, the professor in my mandatory humanities class (in a stem college), smack dab in the middle of neoliblandia, was basically just teaching us marxist historical materialism. I literally passed the exam of that course by studying "the origin of private property, family and the state".
The degree to which people become Marxist in or as a result of academia is almost entirely siloed off from any levers of power. If anything the mechanism is capturing people that might otherwise have led worker strikes, instead spending their lives applying Derrida to this or Foucault to that. Don't exile Lenin, give him a somewhat comfortable job where he feels like he's contributing to theory (but poses no threat to capital).
I was an art major in a very "progressive" place. One of my painting professors got reported for criticizing Bush in class. We all looked around and were like "Who the fuck picks painting for a major in a town with more gay bars than churches and supports Bush? And why didnt the department head just laugh them out of the room?"
Completely dispelled the notion that universities were Marxist indoctrination camps.
that's funny.. i'm fairly certain in the 5 years i was in college there wasn't a single goddamned professor on campus that knew anything about Marx, including my sociology professor who constantly railed on the state of the US and had then had us read Weber as if protestantism explained it all.
college was the most disillusioning thing ever. i truly thought it was where you go to learn real true things that you just won't find outside of that setting, but it was just more horseshit shoveled by clueless gluttons who just want tenure.
I had one bold teacher that dared to teach Marxist analysis of literature as part of the coursework. Even saying the fucking name got some very brave trust fund kids clicking their tongues and other catty reactions, but she assured the class that it's just about finding the class relations (and almost inevitably, struggles) in any given piece of literature. Still made them pissy and petulant, especially the petite bourgeoisie faildaughters that just wanted to re-read Pride and Prejudice, again, and submit the same paper about it to a new teacher. Again.
I had one closeted marxist professor in 1990's but she mostly did not tell anything because being openly marxist in Polish university after 1989 might easily led to abrupt end of being university employee. A lot of her colleagues were also professional opportunists former "marxists" that turned to be most insufferable christoliberals the moment the eagle got a crown.
that's the first time I've ever heard of a reactionary biological-supremacist ecologist. usually they are shit libs politically with like weird desperation turning into fatalism, a surrendering to political expediency and a narrowing of concern. it has been called the "subversive science" for longer than I've been alive, because it does not lend itself easily to reductionist paradigms like many disciplines do.
usually they are, at least in the discipline, pretty averse towards maximalist suprrmacism, because it gets drilled in constantly that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, the system is supreme and it's emergent properties of many networks of species working in concert are what produce benefits. it is webs and cycles, not competitors and victors. competition has costly consequences, while cooperation has elegant rewards.
anyway, so that guy sounds an idiot deluxe. ecologically speaking. at least he's making turds for bacteria to enjoy.
I came here to say something very similar. Ecologists are at least anticapitalist in my experience, and are (understandably) suspicious of any kind of central authority, however misguided that can be.
my ecology professor is literally teaching that survival of the fittest is about genetic superiority and that evolution is about working towards that 'goal'.
That demonstrates a deep misunderstanding of how evolution works. It is a common misconception in the general public (partly because it is beneficial to right-wing ideology for it to be perpetuated, as you mentioned), but a misconception that even a kinda competent biology layman would know better than to believe. It's nothing short of shameful that an ecology professor is repeating such a thing. To do that as a supposed authority on the subject is actively misleading students, it's worse to teach a falsehood than it is just to leave them ignorant.
I obviously don't know your situation specifically or how things like this work in Australia, but if I were still a student and my prof was saying those things, I would definitely complain about it to the department chair or someone who has the power to intervene. I don't know if your professor is just woefully uninformed/misinformed on the subject they're teaching, or if they're repeating this misconception because they have a reactionary political agenda. But either way it's horrible and shouldn't be allowed to stand imo.
One of my Spanish professors called Cuba a communist dictatorship ran by authoritarians in a class about Cinema in Spain.
I went to her office hours and ranted for half and hour about AES and China and she told me she had a lot to think about (it helped that she liked me as a student). I do this with all my professors lmao. I have a professor whose an anarcho-communist (he specializes in Latin American indigenous activism and culture) whose sus about China so I hope to convince him not to be.
Comrade, when I was in college I didn't have the self awareness not to publicly argue with professors either being dicks or straight up saying factually incorrect things. Arguing got me the respect of classmates and professors. Also some enmity but I say go for it, arguing with power is a useful skill and there will never be a better time to hone that skill than now
Meanwhile my ecology professor is literally teaching that survival of the fittest is about genetic superiority and that evolution is about working towards that 'goal'. This is incorrect and bad science that is rooted in right-wing ideology that was disproven decades ago.
Even Richard Dawkins, who started this whole shit, opposed this. Send your ecology professor his documentary.
Dawkins is a fuck now but it's useful to have the person who literally wrote the book your ecology professor is mis-teaching (The Selfish Gene) call him out on it.
I'm not a biologist so I don't know how well it holds up as actual science, but I found the concept of "the selfish gene" fascinating. The idea that individual genes are "trying" to reproduce as another form of selection in addition to entire strands of DNA "trying" to reproduce is pretty fucking wild.
And then they went even further and invented some shit about evolution of consciousness that just 4000 years ago our ancestors were collectivist like animals and now we are properly egoist humans. Even then i was like "wait a sec sis, that's some calipers levels of pseudoscience".
I literally went through a poli sci program and there were no actual leftists, mostly liberals. Granted, my professors knew their stuff and I genuinely respect them as people, but we talked about really only the basics of what Marx believed but only to further contextualize the Soviet Union.
Granted, my professors did tolerate some of my pushback on defending some of the achievements of the Soviet Union, and how even far-right capitalists like Putin still invoke Lenin as a folk hero despite Dugin’s explicitly fascist intentions.
Biology disciplines that focus on evolutionary study really do have rightoid enclaves, it feels very much like a microcosm of the ideological side of being right wing since studying evolution is ultimately systemic study and these people instead boil down the rich and fascinating narrative of evolutionary history into a series of great man narratives except it's Great Gene Theory instead.
AFAIK evolutionary psychology has been completely taken over by "race realists," instead of trying to understand how mental illness evolved in humans or what mental illness looks like in other species.
To the extent that evolution is even adaptive (most of it is drift), greater fitness is just something heritable becoming more common in the population because it was conferred some advantage relative to the environment (with "environment" very widely defined).
The advantage itself could be all kinds of things, many of which have little to do with any common understanding of a "superior" trait. For example, female birds seem to (usually) have something wired pretty deep, genetically, that makes them hot to go for flashy feathers on a mate. Therefore, a gene variant that makes male feathers more appealing to a potential mate will tend to increase in frequency. Sometimes birds get kind of weighed down by their flashy feathers, so a gene variant that made their flashy feathers less costly (e.g., lighter) might often be advantaged. But over time this "give me a shiny mate" thing could, of course, change. In many animals, a seemingly common kind of "advantage conferring" gene variant is neotany, i.e. retaining some juvenile traits into adulthood. Like being able to drink milk into adulthood or when humans artificially select canines for puppy-like friendliness (like dogs) they tend to get the package deal and also acquire floppy ears (like dogs). Things like this aren't what come to mind when someone talks about "genetic superiority", though.
Re: Working towards a goal, this is exactly the opposite of how evolution works. It is a stochastic process where fitness is relative to an "environment " that is constantly in flux (though much more in flux at certain times than others). Vestigial traits are an obvious example for how there was no original plan or goal, just adaptation and drift over huge periods of time and in different environments.
This also applies to us, of course, but over almost unfathomable periods of time and relative to our environment that changes very rapidly due to our ability to consciously change it. Nobody can really tell you what is adaptive for humans at this point in time.
I recently suffered through the literal DEI staff having kids proclaim how it's okay to have open fascists talk on campus so long as they have trigger warnings
I had a mandatory class for my masters called “biomedical research ethics” and most of the class was to convince us it’s okay that research done by public universities gets given to private companies to make money off of
The other notable part of the class was just promoting class infighting between PhDs and not PhD staff and saying that just doing large amounts of labor for a paper doesn’t mean you should get authorship
Serious social science departments are ok tho, you must be idiotic and a failed academic to learn about history and support the status quo for “objectivity”
i remember reading here about an alternative theory of evolution that was pretty compelling, where they state that organisms evolve rapidly over a very short time inbetween incredibly long periods of stagnation, and how thats contrary too the bourgeois narrative of slow gradual change (ie reformism). if someone could link that author I'd appreciate it
I sorta remember something like that but it may have been in anthropology where I heard it. Technology emerges and spreads rapidly and dramatically alters the previous equilibrium and then settles down into the "new normal" instead of some slow plodding advancement.
The theory is between punctuated equilibrium v.s. gradual evolution. Sometimes it is refered to as 'step v.s. slope' depending on the professor.
Ultimately both of them are scientifically correct, as most ecosystems exist within a punctuated equilibrium, not having large changes within them overtime, but usually evolving rapidly if there is a catastrophic change that completely alters the ecosystem within 100-500 years. If it is faster than that then it can lead to mass extinction events, which are the true punctuations. However, species also undergo gradual mutations that lead to speciation overtime as well, humans being a prime example of that. However, the emergence of homo sapian led to a catastrophic collapse of all other hominids, for reasons that are still not known, but possibly environmental or social, and humans have essentially been in punctuated equilibrium since then, with only minor genetic variations. One of the big things we are taught in anthro is that it is unlikely we are statistically smarter than humans even as long as 200000 years ago. There just hasn't been enough provable anatomical changes to support that 'humans are smarter now'. Our cultures and technologies are more complex, but the ape is basically still the same.
it's been a while since I graduated college but the wokest it ever got was an into linguistics class that was like "different native american nations have different languages, they're not a monolith" and an english class where we read Fun Home. everything else was non-political like math or programming (and usually taught by people who would sneak in conservative politics in their lectures) or espoused conventional "moderate" ideals.
oh yeah and I remembered companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin had offices in the main engineering building for some reaspn