Brian Kilmeade is an idiot and an asshole, and there's no excuse for this sort of shit. In a right world, he'd be fired immediately -- his statements here are self-evidently signs of a delusional, racist mindset. This has been covered here, here, here and here. But instead of addressing this, I'd like to read Kilmeade's statements as endemic to the way political conservatives approach science in general.
Ben Goldacre's Bad Science is a terrific blog dedicated to understanding the way scientific knowledge is manipulated and misrepresented in the news media -- he recently got some play on a number of blogs due to his investigations on a Daily Telegraph piece that flat-out lied about a MSc candidate's psychological research regarding the likelyhood of men to try to coerce unwilling women sexually. Goldacre spoke directly to that researcher, Sophia Shaw, who disclosed that a number of flat-out lies were disseminated as her research, summarized in a press release entitled "Promiscuous Men More Likely to Rape" and translated by the Telegraph's Richard Alleyne into the victim-blaming "Women who dress provocatively more likely to be raped, claim scientists." (nb - the article has subsequently been removed from the Telegraph's website). Alleyne, a putative 'science writer,' is in fact a hack, and his articles - including one recent misinterpretation of microevolution - are partisan snipes in keeping with the Telegraph's conservative political project.
There's no doubt from reading Alleyne's work that he has at least some basic grasp on some of the notions of microevolution, but when you start off your article with a lead this idiotic, it's clear that you're engaged in hackery:
Survival of the fittest and natural selection usually means that species grow bigger as they evolve but milder weather on the uninhabited islands of the Scottish Outer Hebrides has pushed this process into reverse.
His willful dumbing-down of evolution is important; Alleyne is a science writer, and trained as such, but he disseminates lies and misinterpretations as a means of furthering a political cause. The above Kilmeade gaffe - in which he suggests, bizarrely, that ethnicities and races in America represent 'different species' - is a reflection of What Happens when the right's juggling act of willful misinterpretation of scientific knowledge falls apart.
Now, I don't understand what's going on in Brian Kilmeade's head. But I can hazard what I believe to be a rather likely hypothesis: Kilmeade understood that Sweden and Finland have rather ethnically homogenous populations, and may have meant to suggest that he'd be suspicious as to whether or not the Finnish and Swedish research would bear out in a population with a greater rate of genetic flow among ethnicities. He may have even been thinking back to a specific time in a high school biology class, and a Super 8 film about Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin that his parents told him to be suspicious of, because evolution is evil, communist, and anti-God. But you can see the wheels turning: he ends up displaying a basic misunderstanding of the science, as research suggests that an ethnically heterogenous population tends to be more resistant to disease. But he has some thought in his head at least vaguely resembling scientific skepticism.
And then, for whatever reason, he went off-script and started using words he would normally reserve for off-camera. Through some combination of misremembering high school biology, his own ideological craziness, the rhetorical trappings of the visual morning zoo-crew atmosphere of Fox and Friends, and pure-and-simple bullshit conjecture, he craps out this incredible bit of offensive bluster. And he doesn't even understand what he's saying as he says it. Kilmeade doesn't understand what words like 'species' and 'pure' mean in either a scientific or ideological context. And all this happens in a segment that should have been a relatively innocuous discussion of scientific findings. This is the same hole conservatives dig when they build things like creation museums and push for intelligent design education in public schools. In a way, it's the ultimate expression of pretentiousness: speaking about a subject on which you have no authority solely on the basis of an ideological or whimsical pretense.
Further Brian Kilmeade…
Brian Kilmeade is an idiot and an asshole, and there's no excuse for this sort of shit. In a right world, he'd be fired immediately -- his statements here are self-evidently signs of a delusional, racist mindset. This has been covered here, here, here and here. But instead of addressing this, I'd like to read Kilmeade's statements as endemic to the way political conservatives approach science in general.
Ben Goldacre's Bad Science is a terrific blog dedicated to understanding the way scientific knowledge is manipulated and misrepresented in the news media -- he recently got some play on a number of blogs due to his investigations on a Daily Telegraph piece that flat-out lied about a MSc candidate's psychological research regarding the likelyhood of men to try to coerce unwilling women sexually. Goldacre spoke directly to that researcher, Sophia Shaw, who disclosed that a number of flat-out lies were disseminated as her research, summarized in a press release entitled "Promiscuous Men More Likely to Rape" and translated by the Telegraph's Richard Alleyne into the victim-blaming "Women who dress provocatively more likely to be raped, claim scientists." (nb - the article has subsequently been removed from the Telegraph's website). Alleyne, a putative 'science writer,' is in fact a hack, and his articles - including one recent misinterpretation of microevolution - are partisan snipes in keeping with the Telegraph's conservative political project.
There's no doubt from reading Alleyne's work that he has at least some basic grasp on some of the notions of microevolution, but when you start off your article with a lead this idiotic, it's clear that you're engaged in hackery:
His willful dumbing-down of evolution is important; Alleyne is a science writer, and trained as such, but he disseminates lies and misinterpretations as a means of furthering a political cause. The above Kilmeade gaffe - in which he suggests, bizarrely, that ethnicities and races in America represent 'different species' - is a reflection of What Happens when the right's juggling act of willful misinterpretation of scientific knowledge falls apart.
Now, I don't understand what's going on in Brian Kilmeade's head. But I can hazard what I believe to be a rather likely hypothesis: Kilmeade understood that Sweden and Finland have rather ethnically homogenous populations, and may have meant to suggest that he'd be suspicious as to whether or not the Finnish and Swedish research would bear out in a population with a greater rate of genetic flow among ethnicities. He may have even been thinking back to a specific time in a high school biology class, and a Super 8 film about Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin that his parents told him to be suspicious of, because evolution is evil, communist, and anti-God. But you can see the wheels turning: he ends up displaying a basic misunderstanding of the science, as research suggests that an ethnically heterogenous population tends to be more resistant to disease. But he has some thought in his head at least vaguely resembling scientific skepticism.
And then, for whatever reason, he went off-script and started using words he would normally reserve for off-camera. Through some combination of misremembering high school biology, his own ideological craziness, the rhetorical trappings of the visual morning zoo-crew atmosphere of Fox and Friends, and pure-and-simple bullshit conjecture, he craps out this incredible bit of offensive bluster. And he doesn't even understand what he's saying as he says it. Kilmeade doesn't understand what words like 'species' and 'pure' mean in either a scientific or ideological context. And all this happens in a segment that should have been a relatively innocuous discussion of scientific findings. This is the same hole conservatives dig when they build things like creation museums and push for intelligent design education in public schools. In a way, it's the ultimate expression of pretentiousness: speaking about a subject on which you have no authority solely on the basis of an ideological or whimsical pretense.