biologist, professor, public intellectual
(born 21 February 1969) is an American evolutionary biologist and podcaster who came to national attention during the 2017 Evergreen State College protests. He is among the people referred to collectively as the "," a term coined by Weinstein's brother .
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
From Wikidata (CC0)
The thing that allowed me to endure the challenge of the phony equity and inclusion forces was that they were unable to keep the story in-house. ...Sam Harris, my brother , and Joe Rogan ...took the video that the protestors themselves had posted and amplified it, and broadcast it. ...[T]here is a principle that applies to institutions like colleges and universities... It is <math>PV = nRT</math>... the ... they turned up the heat and they added pressure, and that caused the vessel to explode, and when it did, my story became public, and survival became a possibility, because outside eyes... in reviewing it, the answer became obvious. I was not a racist. Something else was going on.
We have to ask ourselves, what fraction of the economic activity that surrounds us is profitable only by virtue of the fact that those who make the money are externalizing the cost to somebody else. If we were to eliminate such behaviors, we would... reduce the amount of activity by a lot... but we would reduce it by exactly the fraction of activities that shouldn't have existed in the first place.
As far as the academy is concerned, these ideas are a direct threat to the ability of the academy to continue to teach. Because what we saw here, at Evergreen, was the descendants of critical theory challenged the right of students and faculty to engage in science. They actually confronted us as if science was just another mechanism of wielding power. And if they do that, if that happens across the country, collages and universities will not be the place where science happens. And science will continue, it will have to reformulate itself outside the collage and university system. And when it does that the justification for a collage and university system vanishes. Who's gonna send their kid to a collage that doesn't have science at its core? So anyway, I think this is actually a threat to the academy as a whole.
[My] work... looked at the fact that shortening was being looked at by two different groups... by people interested in counteracting the aging process, and... in exactly the opposite fashion, by people who were interested in tumorigenesis in cancer. ...Tumors ...always had active, that's the enzyme that lengthens our telomeres. So those folks were interested in bringing about a halt in the lengthening of telomeres... to counteract cancer, and the folks that were studying the process were interested in lengthening telomeres... to generate greater repair capacity. ...[M]y point was evolutionarily speaking this looks like a pleiotropic effect, that the genes which create the tendency of the cells to be limited in their capacity to replace themselves, are providing a benefit in youth... that we are largely free of tumors and cancer at the inevitable late life cost that we grow feeble and inefficient, and eventually die. ...[T]hat matches a very old hypothesis in evolutionary theory by somebody I was fortunate enough to know, George Williams...
Unlimited Quote Collections
Organize your favorite quotes without limits. Create themed collections for every occasion with Premium.
Antagonistic pleiotropy, the evolutionary theory of senescence, posits that age related somatic decline is the inevitable late-life by-product of adaptations that increase fitness in early life. That... provides the foundation for an integrative theory of vertebrate that reconciles aspects of the 'accumulated damage' 'metabolic rate', and 'oxidative stress' models.
I stood up for three reasons. One... I felt an obligation to do it... it was the right thing to do. Two... manipulative bullies... Three, I thought that I was positioned to endure and repel the accusation that I absolutely knew was going to come back. Why did I think I was well positioned? ...I had tenure. I was well liked by students of every description, who knew me very well... and knew that I was not a bigot. I thought that would protect me. My own personal history was also completely inconsistent with the claim that I am a racist. ...I was wrong.
I believe we have a very broken relationship, at least in the US but probably across the West, where we ask candidates for office about policies that they are going to enact. And it's like a reflex where we want them to tell us 'I'm going to do this this that you want' so they promise us stuff, it doesn't work, they don't have the power to enact it when they get in office or they never meant it in the first place. And we would be much better off, counterintuitive as this sounds, if we assessed their character and their patriotism instead of their policy proposals. My feelin is: I actually don't care what you think of policy. If you impress me, that you're a patriot, that you love the country that I'm a part of, that you want to see it improved, and that your values align with mine so that improved to you also means improved to me, then all I want to know is that you're good at evaluating what policies might get us there.
Unlimited Quote Collections
Organize your favorite quotes without limits. Create themed collections for every occasion with Premium.
Weaponized "equity" is a means to an unacceptable and dangerous end, and it is already spreading from college campuses to other institutions... The emergence of this mentality, and this style of argument, at the highest levels of the tech sector and the press should alarm us greatly. The courts will not be far behind.