WHEN THE PRIESTS AND LEVITES FROM JERUSALEM CAME to John the Baptist, they asked him who he was. John replied in the words of the prophet Isaiah: “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’”1 The Gospels tell us that John stood in opposition to the powers of the Temple, as well as to the Roman Empire. For this opposition he would eventually be beheaded at the command of Herod Antipas. In January 2021 it was reported that the very dance floor where John the Baptist was condemned to death might have been discovered.2 In Western culture John’s ministry and martyrdom have taken on a significance wider than its association with the Christian Gospels. It has been a metaphor for any perspective of great importance and truth that has been silenced to maintain the status quo.
I am a voice in the wilderness. I wasn’t always that. This book is about how I came to be that, what my voice has to say, and why evolutionary science is of such great importance to the time we find ourselves in. Somehow, as I was growing up, the people closest to me knew I would become such a voice. My mother couldn’t understand why I spent so much time reading. She lamented the amount of time I spent with my “funny books” (mostly the Marvel Comics of Stan Lee). My father couldn’t understand why I spent so much time and money competing in chess tournaments. My high school friend Mark Pinto’s mother, who was definitely psychic, looked at me one day and out of the blue said, “Your life is going to be filled with struggle. People are going to always say that you are wrong, but in the end they will all know that you were right.” Proof of her prophetic abilities came a few days later, when she asked me whether I knew anyone who drove a yellow Volkswagen, adding, “For some reason I see you spending a lot of time in a yellow Volkswagen this summer.” I told her I didn’t. But the next day at a party I met a girl who became my first serious girlfriend. She drove a yellow Volkswagen. Mrs. Pinto’s words stuck with me my entire life.
They echoed in the back of my mind when I became the first African American to earn a PhD in evolutionary biology. It wasn’t that long ago; my dissertation was delivered in 1988. However, I do not think or act the way you might think a biologist should. I am a voice like John. I am still alive, but my path to become a scientist and my subsequent career have been tortuous. These experiences cost me a great deal, and I have no doubt that if I had opted for some other line of work, it would have been easier, and I would be healthier (mentally and physically) at this point of my life. Over the course of my life I have developed a serious critique of how we humans live and why that way of living is not sustainable. We live in societies hierarchically structured by class, gender, and race. We consume the nonrenewable raw materials of this planet and pollute the very environment that makes our lives possible. Ever-growing numbers of people are exposed to infectious disease as urban sprawl expands across the planet. Anthropogenic climate change is causing glaciers to calve; this results in rising sea levels and surface-water temperatures worldwide. These changes are threatening to disrupt the currents that control our weather. Some argue that all these changes, though not desirable, are good, because they are the inevitable result of raising economic prosperity across the globe. I disagree. I believe that we can and must devise a better way to live in harmony as people and as part of the biosphere. To achieve that, however, requires a better understanding of how biological systems (including we ourselves) work. Thus, in this work I argue that the discipline of evolutionary biology is a perspective we dare not ignore. We must apply its dictums to the way we are living. The cost of ignoring evolutionary science may be the extinction of the human species. In addition, evolutionary science will not only help us survive the existential crises facing us but can also help us improve the human condition.
We don’t have much time to make these changes. American society in the twenty-first century is experiencing a massive contradiction. Science and technology play crucial roles in virtually every aspect of people’s lives, yet at the same time there has been an alarming growth of widespread scientific illiteracy and anti-intellectualism—witness the success of the QAnon conspiracy and the ease with which millions of Americans were convinced that Joe Biden did not win the 2020 presidential election. Despite the wildfires raging all over the Northern Hemisphere, significant sectors of America doubt the reality of anthropogenic climate change. A large number of people deny the efficacy of vaccination, a process that has saved more lives than any public health innovation other than clean water. The scientific method and the fundamental facts it reveals are under assault.
Yet of all the facts of science, organic evolution remains the most misunderstood and despised. The assaults against it are being initiated by people on both the right and left sides of the political spectrum. The Right despises evolution because it lays bare the falseness and hypocrisy of most of their core beliefs: the special creation of all organisms, including human beings; the equivalence of biological sex and gender; the innate genetic superiority of persons of European descent; innate racial differences in intelligence and personality; the necessity of private ownership of industry; and individual initiative as the sole source of success in society. Some on the Left despise evolution because they don’t accept the scientific method. They claim that science has no special place in the discussion of knowledge. They also claim that science, and particularly evolution, is Eurocentric and sexist and has been used to justify the oppression of the racially subordinated, women, and gay/transgender people.
The Left’s last objection is historically true of evolutionary science as a whole. While Charles Darwin himself was raised in an abolitionist family and was politically progressive for his time, many of his ideas were co-opted to support the status quo of empire and racial subordination. Not the least of these appropriations of Darwin’s ideas was Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism. This perversion of evolutionary thinking led to Ernst Haeckel’s ontogeny and phylogeny and thence to Alfred Ploetz’s racial hygiene, to Charles Davenport’s eugenics, and to Carleton Coon’s multiregional evolution, directed at explaining the inferiority of some human races.3 For this reason, much of the exposure that racially subordinated people, women, and gay/transgender people have had to evolutionary thinking has been its use as a tool to justify claims of their inferiority and support their ongoing oppression.
In addition, because of the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, the education of African Americans did not include extensive opportunities for careers in science, let alone in evolutionary biology. This is why, when I received a degree in evolutionary biology in 1988, I was the first person of African descent to do so.4 I found that I had to spend an inordinate amount of my time both justifying to whites my presence in the field and explaining to racially subordinated communities the significance and importance of evolutionary science. Specifically, I was called upon to replace misconceptions concerning what evolution actually says about nature (and our place within it), misconceptions put forward by a variety of racialist/racist pundits who had claimed they were seizing the “scientific high ground” in support of their ideas of innate Black inferiority.5 This is a unique aspect of my career, something that other biologists in my cohort never had to face.
The contradiction between the ever-growing application of science and scientific illiteracy remains a huge issue. America is in the midst of crisis. On October 31, 2020, the United States recorded 99,321 new COVID cases in one day, a record for the entire world!6 When I began writing this book, in the spring of 2021, there were over 27 million confirmed cases and 462,272 deaths from the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the United States. As of August 17, 2021, the number of confirmed cases had grown to almost 37 million, with 622,983 deaths. Yet despite these stark numbers, only 51 percent of eligible Americans had been vaccinated by that date, and the country was experiencing yet another spike in cases due to the Delta variant. The Delta variant was soon followed by the Omicron variant, which by February 7, 2022, had increased the US death count to greater than 900,000 individuals and was infecting approximately 292,000 new individuals a day. Early on in the pandemic the cases and deaths were disproportionately observed in racially subordinated communities.7 At that time, I warned in every public venue I could that if the spread of COVID-19 was not rapidly checked, we would soon see the emergence of more transmissible and virulent strains of the virus.8 On August 18, 2021, I was asked to comment again on Roland Martin Unfiltered (a daily YouTube broadcast from Washington, DC) concerning the uncanny accuracy of my predictions about the spread of SARS-CoV-2. My ability to do this resulted directly from my grasp of evolutionary theory.
Prior to the pandemic, an ongoing epidemic of vigilante and police violence claiming the lives of unarmed African Americans (Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd) was occurring against a background of decades of mass incarceration, unemployment, health disparity, and active voter suppression against racially subordinated communities.9 And if all of this wasn’t bad enough, the nation had one of its most contentious elections in its history. It is not too much to compare the last election to that of 1860. The gap between the beliefs and desires of the supporters of President Donald Trump and of those who opposed him could be likened to an undeclared civil war. Despite the fact that Joe Biden won the election, the underlying conflict between those who continue to fight for Trump—which is in reality fighting for ongoing white supremacy in our society—and those who envision a future where the voices of all Americans are heard will determine not just our future in the United States but possibly even the existence of our entire species.
A Voice in the Wilderness has two purposes: First, it is a wake-up call to the moment we are in. It has often been said, “History is like the life of a soldier; long periods of boredom, interspersed with brief periods of terror.” We are now in one of those periods of terror. The soldier’s periods of terror can culminate with the end of the soldier’s life; so too can this period of terror end with the loss of democracy in the Western world, possibly even with the end of human existence on this planet. Second, the book intends to propose a way forward, a way for us to preserve and expand democracy and also ultimately to prolong the life of our species on this planet. I suggest that this way forward is for society to close the gap between the everyday applications of science and the populace’s understanding of science. In this book I contribute to this enterprise in the context of evolutionary science. However, the lessons of this discussion can be applied to a variety of disciplines. Furthermore, I argue that it is imperative that we close the gap in scientific understanding between persons of European descent and racially subordinated communities, particularly those of African descent. I believe that doing so will benefit everyone, but I also argue that closing this gap will be more beneficial to those who are racially subordinated because science literacy can be one of the key tools in the struggle for liberty and justice. Even now, much of the hesitancy that African Americans have concerning getting the COVID vaccines results from their deep distrust of the scientific method and enterprise.
This work has an autobiographical flavor, but it is not an autobiography. The topics discussed include both key elements from my own scientific career and concepts I have given a great deal of thought to because of their overwhelming importance for human welfare and survival.
Part I begins with a discussion of my early life and follows my early education and career. These experiences helped me conclude that evolutionary biology could play a crucial role in social justice movements. Others have discussed how evolutionary biology might help people become more prosocial, but no one else has explored this possibility with the idea of empowering social justice movements to end particular ramparts of oppression, such as racism. My birth into a poor, working-class African American family meant that my pathway to becoming an evolutionary biologist was unexpected and fraught with difficulty. This is a story of an individual struggling to overcome his many disadvantages in life (racial subordination, poverty, imposter syndrome) as he began to understand why these things were disadvantages.
In Chapter 2, I discuss how my initial work in graduate school got me interested in the subject of parasitism, and I show how parasites have shaped and continue to shape the life chances of millions of people across the world. Chapter 3 describes the beginning of my PhD work at the University of Michigan in the area of community ecology. There is probably no experience in my education that more shaped the scientist I would become than my interactions with Beverly Rathcke and John Vandermeer. Bev taught me how to more effectively critique received scientific knowledge, and John showed me how biology was a social weapon. My work with them revolved around my interest in the mathematics of complex systems and the way understanding their dynamics was crucial to developing testable theories of how the world (including its societies) worked. Up to that point in my life, I had been a witless victim of what we today call imposter syndrome: I internalized all my failures and believed they were due to my own inadequacy. My time at Michigan ended with my giving up on a career in science. In Chapter 4 I discuss what brought me back to the academy and how I chose the scientific problem that would define the first portion of my career, the evolutionary, genetic, and physiological mechanisms of aging. I did not yet realize that the training that allowed me to solve this problem would prepare me to take on one of the biggest fallacies at the core of American social life, the existence of biological races in our species and the racism that follows from accepting this belief. Chapter 5 focuses on my transition from student to graduate to assistant professor, particularly from the perspective of learning how to be an effective mentor for underserved minority students interested in pursuing careers in science and medicine. In Chapter 6, the final chapter of Part I, I discuss the ideas and the scientists who most influenced my understanding of evolution, particularly as a means to take on the world’s most difficult challenges.
In the second part of the book, the narrative shifts away from an emphasis on my experiences to a discussion of my ideas on critical questions informed by evolutionary reasoning. At the beginning of Part II, I am not yet a fully formed scientist, but some of the pieces are falling into place. Most important, I and others were beginning to grasp my uniqueness as someone who had an organically lived experience of racism combined with the disciplinary knowledge required to begin to attack this ideology at its roots, roots that were tangled up in concepts derived from evolutionary biology, notions of the origin and maintenance of biological variation, and concepts related to the evolutionary fitness of specific traits. In addition, my position as an African American allowed me access to communities who had legitimate reasons to distrust and reject the propositions of evolutionary science. Chapter 7 begins with the problem that would most define my target, race and racism, in the context of the nature/nurture debate around intelligence. In Chapter 8 I focus on how I came to recognize that the problem was the race concept itself and on my contribution to a modern understanding of biological fallacies that result from racial thinking. Chapter 9 addresses one of the largest impediments associated with people (particularly racially subordinated communities) accepting the evolution—that is, the idea that evolutionary science and religious belief are irreconcilably opposed. In Chapter 10 I discuss one of the most important contributions evolution has made to our understanding of nature, the origin and maintenance of sex, and what this has to say about how sexual orientation and gender operate in our species.
The final chapters of the book are dedicated to topics that have dominated the current phase of my career. Chapter 11 is dedicated to one of our most important existential problems, existing and emerging pandemics, and why evolutionary science is essential to the future survival of our species. Chapter 12 addresses the resurgence of racial biological determinism as it has played out since the mid-2010s. Chapter 13 discusses evolutionary methods that are used in computational science to solve once-intractable problems in engineering and big data analysis. Chapter 14 provides a full-on discussion of how evolutionary science is a crucial tool that can move us toward social justice. In the conclusion I look back on and synthesize the core themes of my career in science, particularly how structural racism operated against the very possibility of my achieving an advanced degree and how we must dismantle it if we expect to see a better future. The goal of this analysis is to utilize my life experiences to demonstrate for others how they might succeed in their academic aspirations despite the considerable obstacles that may be placed in their path.10
Throughout the work I underscore the conjectural nature of science. This means that what we think we know about nature changes over time. Through the scientific method, some things rise to the level of scientific fact. Thus, it is a scientific fact that life on this planet evolved, but exactly how the forces of natural selection and genetic drift, which is the random change in gene frequencies that results from fluctuation in population size, make that happen in any given set of circumstances is an active investigation. I also argue throughout that having a conjectural understanding of nature is not incompatible with a belief in the divine.
This book assumes that the reader has some general knowledge of biology (of a level that could be expected of a college-educated layperson). I have supplemented the text with interspersed figures, tables, and photographs that help the reader to better visualize concepts.
Finally, some readers may find that this book is engaging in “cancel culture.” To this charge I happily plead guilty. I have no problem with helping cancel ignorance, pseudoscience, bigotry, hatred, and injustice. What I propose in the place of these things is a culture that in making decisions values scientific reasoning and the evidence it produces. In the biological sciences, the key organizing principle is evolution, and—paraphrasing the words of my great predecessor Theodosius Dobzhansky—nothing in biology makes sense without it. Evolution explains both the unity and the diversity of life. It explains why all living things have nucleic acids as their genetic codes and at the same time how minute variations within the code can often produce dramatically different outcomes. It explains practical issues such as the natural history of the HIV epidemic and why new and more dangerous variants of SARS-CoV-2 are just around the corner. It explains why it is so difficult to keep ahead of these dangerous viruses with antiviral drugs. It explains how long we live, why we live together, and ultimately why some ways of living are simply not sustainable. In this book, I provide people with tools to better make sense of issues that affect their lives so that they will have the power to make them better. In addition, from my position as an African American scientist, I hope to speak to Black and Brown people. I know that these groups have had good reason to be distrustful of science (and of evolutionary theory in particular), as its proscriptions have so often been used to hold them down and prevent them from living to their full potential. Indeed, I will show how evolutionary science refutes the pseudoscience that supports ideas of white supremacy, racism, misogyny, antigay bigotry, and anti-Semitism. I will also use my experiences as a scientist to call to potential future scientists concerning the most important issue of our time: social justice. In the pages that follow I will present the idea that no program to redress what’s wrong with modern societies can succeed if social justice is not an integral part of the plan. Furthermore, I will explain how our evolutionary mismatched minds may overcome their programming to envision and enact a better world.