Website Kevin Bird
The ignominious Davide Piffer recently wrote a substack post claiming to identify a fatal flaw in my 2021 paper (freely accessible here ). A careful assessment of his arguments compared to the actual contents of my paper reveals a misunderstanding so severe that I can only conclude that Piffer cannot read and interpret plain text and certainly doesn’t understand population or evolutionary…
Bo Winegard recently published “The Case for Race Realism” , a defense of the belief that race is a biological category and that races differ behaviorally and cognitively for primarily genetic reasons, in online newsletter Aporia (where Winegard is executive editor). I made the unfortunate mistake of reading it. The article is a reposting of the same article Winegard wrote back in June this year,…
My review of The Genetic Lottery for Massive Science can be found here
The news of Richard Lewontin’s passing yesterday brought me even greater sadness than I expected, especially given I’ve had no direct contact with him. For years now, Lewontin has been someone who has had the biggest impact on my development as a scientist and as a person. To me, he represents the model of what an academic should be and I imagine I’ll forever aspire to be. It seems to me the best…
April Fools
It’s been a little over a week since my paper challenging hereditarianism was published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 1 Already some hereditarians have attempted a rebuttal. One in particular by John Fuerst 2 warrants a response at least partially because it is a component of a preprint that somehow found its way onto Biorxiv. 3 Fuerst makes a few key claims: There is no…
Read my article for Science for the People, “Still Not in Our Genes: Resisting the Narrative Around GWAS” here
Occasionally online I will get criticized for past statements I’ve made about my stance on truth in science. This criticism is usually from people who have a very simple view that to do science one must seek out truth in nature. There are, of course, many ways to do science and to be a scientist and it does not require a commitment to a particular picture of a mind-independent reality or to…
Against a backdrop of protests, uprisings against police brutality, and calls for real reform and racial justice, the Particles for Justice collective began an initiative to #ShutDownStem and #ShutDownAcademia to take a day to focus on issues of racial equity in the academy. https://www.particlesforjustice.org/ A group of faculty and graduate students began discussing what to do to make tangible…
In principle the application of evolutionary theory to psychological processes and behavior is not controversial; Darwin’s own writings contain speculation about the role of evolution in shaping “mental faculties.” However, the field of Evolutionary Psychology has been fiercely debated since its creation at the end of the 1980s, with criticisms ranging from methodological to ideological. It is my…