[Despite the significant societal changes that have occurred in
the last 150 years, sexist and racist narratives are still common in
science, medicine and education.]
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SCIENCE SUNDAY: RACIST AND SEXIST DEPICTIONS OF HUMAN EVOLUTION STILL
PERMEATE SCIENCE, EDUCATION AND POPULAR CULTURE TODAY  
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Rui Diogo
April 5, 2023
The Conversation
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_ Despite the significant societal changes that have occurred in the
last 150 years, sexist and racist narratives are still common in
science, medicine and education. _

Human evolution is typically depicted with a progressive whitening of
the skin, despite a lack of evidence to support it., Viktor
Mikhailovich Vasnetsov/Wikimedia Commons

 

Systemic racism and sexism have permeated civilization
[[link removed]] since the rise of
agriculture, when people started living in one place for a long time.
Early Western scientists, such as Aristotle in ancient Greece, were
indoctrinated with the ethnocentric
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that permeated their society. More than 2,000 years after
Aristotle’s writings, English naturalist Charles Darwin
[[link removed]] also extrapolated the
sexist and racist narratives he heard and read in his youth to the
natural world.

Darwin presented his biased views as scientific facts, such as in his
1871 book “The Descent of Man
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belief that men are evolutionarily superior to women, Europeans
superior to non-Europeans and hierarchical civilizations superior to
small egalitarian societies. In that book, which continues to be
studied
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in schools and natural history museums, he considered “the hideous
ornaments and the equally hideous music admired by most savages” to
be “not so highly developed as in certain animals, for instance, in
birds,” and compared the appearance of Africans to the New World
monkey _Pithecia satanas_.

Science isn’t immune to sexism and racism.

“The Descent of Man” was published during a moment of societal
turmoil in continental Europe. In France, the working class Paris
Commune [[link removed]] took
to the streets asking for radical social change, including the
overturning of societal hierarchies. Darwin’s claims that the
subjugation of the poor, non-Europeans and women was the natural
result of evolutionary progress were music to the ears of the elites
and those in power within academia. Science historian Janet Browne
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that Darwin’s meteoric rise within Victorian society
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did not occur despite his racist and sexist writings but in great part
because of them.

It is not coincidence that Darwin had a state funeral in Westminster
Abbey, an honor emblematic of English power, and was publicly
commemorated [[link removed]] as
a symbol of “English success in conquering nature and civilizing the
globe during Victoria’s long reign.”

Despite the significant societal changes that have occurred in the
last 150 years, sexist and racist narratives are still common in
science, medicine and education [[link removed]].
As a teacher and researcher
[[link removed]] at
Howard University, I am interested in combining my main fields of
study, biology and anthropology [[link removed]], to
discuss broader societal issues. In research I recently published with
my colleague Fatimah Jackson
[[link removed]] and three medical
students at Howard University, we show how racist and sexist
narratives are not a thing of the past: They are still present in
scientific papers, textbooks, museums and educational materials.

From museums to scientific papers

One example of how biased narratives are still present in science
today is the numerous depictions of human evolution as a linear trend
from darker and more “primitive” human beings to more
“evolved” ones with a lighter skin tone. Natural history museums
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websites
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and UNESCO heritage sites
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have all shown this trend.

The fact that such depictions are not scientifically accurate does not
discourage their continued circulation. Roughly 11%
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of people living today are “white,” or European descendants.
Images showing a linear progression to whiteness do not accurately
represent either human evolution or what living humans look like
today, as a whole. Furthermore, there is no scientific evidence
supporting a progressive skin whitening. Lighter skin pigmentation
[[link removed]] chiefly evolved within just a few
groups that migrated to non-African regions with high or low
latitudes, such as the northern regions of America, Europe and Asia.

Illustrations of human evolution tend to depict progressive skin
whitening.

Sexist narratives also still permeate academia. For example, in a 2021
paper on a famous early human fossil found in the Sierra de Atapuerca
[[link removed]] archaeological site in Spain,
researchers examined the canine teeth of the remains and found that it
was actually that of a girl between 9 and 11 years old. It was
previously believed that the fossil was a boy due to a popular 2002
book by one of the authors of that paper, paleoanthropologist José
María Bermúdez de Castro
[[link removed]]. What is
particularly telling is that the study authors recognized that there
was no scientific reason for the fossil remains to have been
designated as a male in the first place. The decision, they wrote,
“arose randomly
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But these choices are not truly “random.” Depictions of human
evolution frequently only show men
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In the few cases where women are depicted, they tend to be shown as
passive mothers, not as active inventors, cave painters or food
gatherers, despite available anthropological data showing that
pre-historical women were all those things
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Another example of sexist narratives in science is how researchers
continue to discuss the “puzzling” evolution of the female orgasm
[[link removed]]. Darwin constructed narratives
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evolutionarily “coy” and sexually passive, even though he
acknowledged that females actively select their sexual partners in
most mammalian species. As a Victorian, it was difficult for him to
accept that women could play an active part in choosing a partner, so
he argued that such roles only applied to women in early human
evolution. According to Darwin, men later began to sexually select
women.

Sexist narratives about women being more “coy” and “less
sexual,” including the idea of the female orgasm as an evolutionary
puzzle, are contradicted
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by a wide range of evidence. For instance, women are the ones who
actually more frequently experience multiple orgasms
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complex, elaborate and intense orgasms
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men. Women are not biologically less sexual, but sexist stereotypes
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were accepted as scientific fact.

The vicious cycle of systemic racism and sexism

Educational materials, including textbooks and anatomical atlases used
by science and medical students, play a crucial role in perpetuating
biased narratives. For example, the 2017 edition of “Netter Atlas of
Human Anatomy
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commonly used by medical students and clinical professionals, includes
about 180 figures that show skin color. Of those, the vast majority
show male individuals with white skin, and only two show individuals
with “darker” skin. This perpetuates the depiction of white men as
the anatomical prototype of the human species and fails to display the
full anatomical diversity of people.

Textbooks and educational materials can perpetuate the biases of their
creators in science and society.

Authors of teaching materials for children also replicate the biases
in scientific publications, museums and textbooks. For example, the
cover of a 2016 coloring book entitled “The Evolution of Living
Things”
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shows human evolution as a linear trend from darker "primitive”
creatures to a “civilized” Western man. Indoctrination comes full
circle when the children using such books become scientists,
journalists, museum curators, politicians, authors or illustrators.

One of the key characteristics of systemic racism and sexism is that
it is unconsciously perpetuated by people who often don’t realize
that the narratives and choices they make are biased. Academics can
address long-standing racist, sexist and Western-centric biases by
being both more alert and proactive in detecting and correcting these
influences in their work. Allowing inaccurate narratives to continue
to circulate in science, medicine, education and the media perpetuates
not only these narratives in future generations, but also the
discrimination, oppression and atrocities that have been justified by
them in the past
[[link removed]].[The
Conversation]

Rui Diogo [[link removed]],
Associate Professor of Anatomy, _Howard University
[[link removed]]_

This article is republished from The Conversation
[[link removed]] under a Creative Commons license. Read
the original article
[[link removed]].

* Science
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* Evolution
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* anthropology
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* Racism
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* Archaeology
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* colonialism
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* sexism
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