Not just in the past: Racist and sexist biases still permeate biology, anthropology, medicine, and education

Diogo, Rui; Adesomo, Adeyemi; Farmer, Kimberly S; Kim, Rachel J; Jackson, Fatimah

doi:10.1002/evan.21978

Evolutionary Anthropology

2023

DOI: 10.1002/evan.21978

|View full text |Cite

Not just in the past: Racist and sexist biases still permeate biology, anthropology, medicine, and education

Rui Diogo

Adeyemi Adesomo

Kimberly S Farmer

et al.

Abstract: In the past decades, it has been increasingly recognized that some areas of science, such as anthropology, have been plagued by racist, Western-centric, and/or sexist biases. Unfortunately, an acculturation process to racism and sexism has been occurring for generations leading to systemic inequities that will take a long time to disappear. Here, we highlight the existence of current examples of racism, Western-centrism and sexism within: (1) the most popular anatomical atlases used in biological, anthropologi… Show more

Help me understand this report

Search citation statements

Order By: Relevance

Paper Sections

Select...

Citation Types

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Year Published

2024

Publication Types

Select...

Article2

Relationship

Self Cite0

Independent2

Authors

Journals

Cited by 2 publications

References 40 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

Between social cognition and material engagement: the cooperative body hypothesis

Kee

2024

Phenom Cogn Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In recent years, social cognition approaches to human evolution and Material Engagement Theory have offered new theoretical resources to advance our understanding of the prehistoric hominin mind. To date, however, these two approaches have developed largely in isolation from one another. I argue that there is a gap between social- and material-centred approaches, and that this is precisely the sociomateriality of the appearance of ancestral hominin bodies, which evolved under selective pressure to develop increasingly complex, cooperative sociality. To get this sociomaterial body in focus, I develop an esthesiological framework, appropriated from Merleau-Ponty (2003), for interpreting the expressive body in an evolutionary and comparative context. The guiding hypothesis of esthesiology is that before being rationality (social or material), “humanity is another corporeity” (Merleau-Ponty, 2003, p. 208). Esthesiology studies the appearance of the body and its sense organs as an intertwining locus of a sensing power (the ability to see, to touch, etc.) and a sensible character (the visible, touchable body). It is this dual-aspect character of the body that facilitates the most basic affective and sensorimotor modes of sociality. Examining these features from a comparative perspective, we find that the human body is distinctively suited to prosocial communication and cooperation: a more cooperative eye, an exposed and communicative skin. I thus propose a cooperative body hypothesis, by analogy with the cooperative eye hypothesis (Tomasello et al., 2007). Esthesiology provides a framework for integrating and interpreting a wide range of otherwise disconnected facts concerning human and nonhuman animal bodies, forms of life, cognition, and evolution, thereby bridging the gap between social cognition and material engagement perspectives. In doing so, however, it not only solves problems and proposes new directions of investigation, but also demands theoretical revisions from each.

show abstract

Between social cognition and material engagement: the cooperative body hypothesis

Kee

2024

Phenom Cogn Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

How can we assess whether to trust collectives of scientists?

Clark

2024

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A great many important decisions we make in life depend on scientific information that we are not in a position to assess. So it seems we must defer to experts. By now there are a variety of criteria on offer by which non-experts can judge the trustworthiness of a scientist responsible for producing or promulgating this information. But science is, for the most part, a collective not an individual enterprise. This article explores which of the criteria for judging the trustworthiness of individual scientists can be amended for use in assessing the trustworthiness of scientific collectives. It also offers some new proposals specifically geared to assessing collective trustworthiness in science, notably, an analysis of where to apply the criteria (for example, at the group or individual level) and additional criteria to assess group infrastructure and design. The article ends with some practical suggestions for how to assist the non-expert in this task. ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5355-2963 seems a prime case here: the novice is unable to understand the detailed, theory-heavy scientific research needed to assess if a statement is true, but the results matter to their lives, making it important to assess these claims (consider examples from vaccines (Goldenberg [2021]) to climate change (Almassi [2012]), as well as recent work on the challenges and importance of maintaining trust in experts in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (Baker [2020]; Adhikari et al. [2022])).But picking the right experts is crucial, with trust only valuable if it is directed at trustworthy agents, entities and institutions (O'Neill [2018]). So how can novices accurately identify these experts, particularly in a climate of misinformation and pseudo-experts?

show abstract

scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.

Contact Info

hi@scite.ai

10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614

Henderson, NV 89052, USA

Blog Terms and Conditions API Terms Privacy Policy Contact Cookie Preferences Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information

Made with 💙 for researchers

Part of the Research Solutions Family.

Not just in the past: Racist and sexist biases still permeate biology, anthropology, medicine, and education

Cited by 2 publications

References 40 publications

Between social cognition and material engagement: the cooperative body hypothesis

Between social cognition and material engagement: the cooperative body hypothesis

How can we assess whether to trust collectives of scientists?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About