Stacy Farina: I read the paper, and I was shocked to see that there was no discussion of the role that bio essentialism has played in shaping the field and the direct academic lineage from scientific racism to behavioral ecology. You can do all of the things proposed in the article (and more) w/out behav eco.

“…behavioural ecology offers us the opportunity to correct the implicit or explicit ‘biologization’ of social categories while remaining grounded in biology.”👏🏾 This morning’s excellent & thought-provoking read☕️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Behavioural sciences need behavioural ecology - Nature Human Behaviourwww.nature.com Behavioural scientists want to see more consideration of context — so why are they not using tools derived from ecology, the science of all life in context? We invite behavioural scientists to align t...

No way. The history of behavioral ecology is steeped in scientific racism, and many behavioral ecologists lack understanding of how NOT to do biological essentialism. You can easily correct 'biologization' (weird to try to rename/rebrand bio essentialism) without invoking behavioral ecology.

Feel free to read the paper & engage with the perspectives presented. I feel like you and the authors are on the same page.

I read the paper, and I was shocked to see that there was no discussion of the role that bio essentialism has played in shaping the field and the direct academic lineage from scientific racism to behavioral ecology. You can do all of the things proposed in the article (and more) w/out behav eco.

Until behavioral ecology as a field has a reckoning with their past, I do not trust them to handle this topic at all.

Understandable, Stacy. Thanks for sharing your perspective.

Thanks for engaging! Sorry I'm a little too passionate about this topic. It's extremely important, but I have the opposite view from the people in the article (historically and perhaps presently, behav eco has brought more biological essentialism into behavioral science, bot less)

The paper didn't engage with this?

This discussion distances behavioral ecology from its history by failing to discuss how scientific racism directly gave rise to the field of behavioral ecology. A novice reader could be lead to believe that behavioral ecology is separate from (or a solution to) this history, but it is steeped in it.

Yes, I read the whole paper as an engagement with the history of behavioral ecology and eugenics and "supremacist applications of natural selection".

It's a superficial engagement. I know it's a short comment, but the article "engages" by making it sound like all of this happened in the distance past, when it is the present reality of behavioral ecology. There are still a large number of behav ecologists who subscribe to biological essentialism.

Fair enough. I think it is legit argument to say there is nothing worth rescuing in BE, but then you do run into other issues eg cognitive universalism that present their own issues.

I agree. But I also think we are a long off from being able to responsibly apply behavioral ecology to behavioral science. Maybe one day. But from what I've seen, the field is not ready to even acknowledge the outsized role that behavioral ecology as a field has played in propping up racist ideology

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