(upbeat music)
- Good afternoon, everyone,
and welcome to our Wednesday afternoon talk.
I'm a colleague of Dr. Scottgale's.
My name is Ryan Fisher and it gives me great pleasure
to introduce our afternoon speaker, Dr. Joseph Graves, Jr.
Dr. Graves is an evolutionary biologist and geneticist
in the biology department of North Carolina Agricultural
and Technical University in Greensboro, North Carolina.
He completed his BA in biology at Oberlin College
and his PhD in evolutionary, environmental,
and systematic biology at Wayne State University.
His research interests explore
the evolutionary theories behind aging,
and he uses the model organism, the fruit fly,
Drosophila melanogaster, in much of his work.
More recently, he has begun to investigate
the social construction of race
and has revealed that there is no evolutionary basis
for the notion of races in modern humans,
but that these remain because of social subordination.
On this topic, he has published widely,
including "The Race Myth:
Why We Pretend Race Exists in America"
and "The Emperor's New Clothes:
Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium."
We welcome Dr. Graves as he delivers his talk,
entitled "A Voice in the Wilderness:
A Pioneering Biologist Explains How Evolution
Can Help Us Solve Our Biggest Problems."
Welcome, Dr. Graves.
- Thank you, Dr. Fisher,
and I'm going to now share my screen
and start my presentation.
So you know the title and you know who I am.
So this talk is based upon my most recent book,
"A Voice in the Wilderness,"
published by Basic Books in 2022.
The purpose of this work was acquaint readers
with my pioneering journey as the world's
first African American evolutionary biologist.
It is divided in two parts.
Part one, The Unexpected Path, is heavily autobiographical.
It focuses on my early life, education,
and also my first significant scientific problems,
study of lakes and rivers, parasitology,
community ecology, chaos theory, evolution,
and the physiology of aging.
Part two covers
the latter stage of my career,
specifically the scientific problems that I think
are some of the biggest.
It focuses on my fight with scientific racism,
on the dialogue between science and religion,
on the genomics of adaptation, and the role that science
can and should play in social justice.
Now, to say that my entry into science
was an unexpected event is an understatement.
I was born four months before Emmett Till was lynched
in Money, Mississippi.
I entered a school system that had rigid racial tracking.
They assumed that children of African descent
were intellectually inferior.
I was placed in the so-called slow learning group
and I became a behavior issue because, quite frankly,
I finished my work very quickly.
A little boy, five years old, nothing to do,
and if you know anything about little boys that age,
it's very difficult to keep them sitting down.
So after an event where I decided
to fly around the room as an airplane,
I was sent to the principal's office
and they called my mother off of work.
Now, those of you who have any knowledge
of African American culture,
you know the worst thing that a child will ever endure
is waiting in the principal's office waiting for their mom
to come in off of work.
You certainly did not expect to survive that encounter.
But instead of her being mad at me,
she pitched a fit with the principal,
declaring that they weren't going to reassign me
to special education,
which in those days meant mental retarded instruction,
but that I was just as capable as any child in the school,
and she won her point,
and I continued on my educational journey.
Now, when I was in third grade,
I had a fateful encounter on the school steps.
I was walking in and I saw some older kids playing chess.
Now, I didn't know anything about the game,
so I asked them to teach me.
They taught me what little they knew
and I played my first game and was beaten
soundly in that game.
But later in the day, when we had our library period,
I went and looked up all the books in our library
on the game of chess.
I settled on Bobby Fisher's classic,
a book called "Bobby Fisher Teaches Chess."
I went home, I stayed up all night,
and read it from cover to cover with this flashlight
under my blankets because if Mom or Dad came in
and I was still awake, I was gonna be in big trouble.
So I went back to school the next day,
looking for those kids, and they were there,
and in the next encounter, I turned the tables on them.
So by the time I was in sixth grade, I was school champion,
junior high school champion.
When I went to high school,
I played third board for Westfield High,
which was New Jersey State Champions,
number five on the East Coast.
We went to the National High School Championship in Chicago
in my senior year.
In the last round, we were tied for fourth place
out of over 200 teams in the country.
The rest of my teammates lost very quickly
because we were all paired up against players
much stronger than we were.
But my game was the final game,
which determined the national championship.
I was playing someone from Rochester, New York,
and if that person beat me, Rochester would win the title,
and if I won or drew,
Evanston, Illinois would win the title.
Now, to make a long story short,
at the end of the game,
with all other games in the tournament hall completed,
there was a huge crowd of Rochester
and Northwestern supporters around the board.
Deep in the game, I decided to sacrifice a rook,
which caused a great stir in the Rochester crowd,
'cause they were absolutely certain they were about to win
the national championship.
But about 10 moves later,
the tone in the room shifted to Evanston beginning to cheer,
even though you're not supposed to cheer
at chess tournaments,
because they realized that my rook sacrifice was sound
and that Rochester was going to lose.
And so the only way he could prevent that
was to sacrifice his rook back,
ending in a draw which gave Evanston the title.
So chess played a major role
in building the kind of mind
that allowed me to think very deeply
about scientific problems, to question assumptions,
which was probably the greatest skill that I developed
over the course of my scientific career.
Now, I knew nothing about college.
I was a first-generation student.
I only applied to three schools
because I didn't know you were supposed to apply
to more than three schools.
I was lucky to earn a scholarship to Oberlin College,
which paid for my tuition.
I had to take out student loans and I had work study
'cause my folks couldn't have afforded
to send me to college, was just not capable
given how little money my family made.
Went to graduate school, first at the University of Lowell,
now known as UMass Lowell,
and there I studied parasitism,
particularly schistosomiasis in Africa.
That earned me a National Science Foundation
graduate research fellowship,
which took me to the University of Michigan
where I began to study problems in community ecology,
particularly mathematics of complex systems
and dynamical complexity,
which in combination with my newfound student activism
was enough to drive me out of higher education
because I realized that solving problems in ecology
was just too hard, not because I couldn't do it,
but because the underlying theoretical structure
of these systems was such
that you really weren't gonna get good answers anyway.
But the other thing is that I had become aware
and attuned to the racial injustice that I was experiencing
in higher education in a new way.
A combination of those things led me into the wilderness.
I was pretty much partially employed for two or three years.
My wife and I were basically starving.
You know, what I didn't know at the time
was that for me to have food at night,
she would go all day without it.
She never told me that.
I'd come home and we'd have something.
And it was those conditions that made me decide
to go back to complete my PhD,
because I thought that we can and should do better.
So I went to Wayne State University,
met with the graduate officer, Bill Moore.
Moore directed me to Professor Leo Luckinbill
based upon the skillset he saw on my CV,
and that is where I got involved in probably
one of the biggest scientific problems of the 20th century,
certainly within evolutionary biology,
and that was the question of the evolution of aging.
Now, at that time, there was no clear consensus
that aging was directed by genes or that it evolved.
Theoretical work, beginning with people like Peter Medawar
in the 1940s, suggested that it must.
George C. Williams,
another one of the great evolutionary biologists
of the mid-20th century,
proposed genetic mechanisms by which it could occur,
but no one had successfully demonstrated
in an experimental system that you could alter lifespan
using the predictions of the Medawar/Williams theory.
And so in 1984, my PhD advisor, Leo Luckinbill,
had successfully demonstrated that you could alter
the lifespan of fruit flies
using the predictions of Medawar/Williams.
At the same time, Michael Rose,
then at the University of California, Irvine,
had also demonstrated
that you could produce postponed senescence,
and both papers were published
in the journal "Evolution" back-to-back,
the Rose paper followed by the Luckinbill paper.
So my question was
what were the physiological consequences
of this postponed senescence
and whether those physiological consequences
matched the predictions of Medawar/Williams.
Now, Phil Service had first examined this
and he was a Rhodes student,
but Service had come upon this accidentally,
and I'll quickly tell the story.
So one day Dr. Rose walked into his laboratory
and he saw his laboratory technician in tears at her desk.
And so Michael went over to her and asked, you know,
"What is wrong? Why are you crying?"
And she finally got up the strength to tell him
that she had killed the flies.
Now, you have to understand the terror
that was running through this young woman's mind,
because it had taken, you know,
Michael years to generate these flies
through experimental evolution.
And so Michael panics and runs over to the incubator,
opens the incubator,
and sees that the flies are still alive.
Now, what had occurred?
The research technician had forgotten to put the food
in the cages over the weekend.
When she came in, she opened the control group
who had all died from starvation and desiccation.
When Michael came in, he opened a different incubator.
These were the postponed senescent flies,
and because of their superior physiological performance,
even though they didn't have food,
they had survived over the weekend.
And so he then reasoned that the selection
had resulted in a different physiology,
specifically related to stress resistance,
in the postponed senescent or long-lived flies.
Now, I came to the same conclusion,
but I did it on the basis of theory.
So in other words, I thought to myself,
if these organisms are living longer,
it probably results from some sort of trade-off
with regard to how energy is being allocated.
Flies living shorter had higher reproductive output,
so I thought they must be directing
that energy towards reproduction
and therefore not towards somatic maintenance,
and flies that lived longer had lower reproduction,
and therefore I suggested that they must be devoting
that energy to somatic maintenance and not to reproduction.
And so I thought the best way to study this,
given that these things are called flies,
is to study their flight mechanism.
And so the first thing I did
was design a way
to get the flies to fly uninterrupted.
Now, it turns out, you know, biology helped me in this.
Fruit flies have what's called the tarsal reflex.
If you pick them up,
if you tether them in place and pick them up,
they will think that they have to fly
and they will fly until their flight fuel is exhausted.
And so I set up banks of flies
connected to light-test fishing line and Duco cement,
and measured their flight duration.
For the short-lived flies, it was really easy,
because they could only fly 20 to 30 minutes.
But we found the postponed senescent flies
were flying for three to four hours.
And so there was a huge difference.
And so the next question I needed to address was,
well, maybe these longer-life flies are flying so long
because they're not flying as fast.
And so to test that,
I designed an infrared detector system
to measure the instantaneous wing beat frequency of the fly.
Now, this was done with a colleague
in the physics department,
and we measured the flies' speed,
and it turned out that the long-lived flies
were actually flying slightly faster
than the short-lived flies.
So we demonstrated
that they had prolonged physiological capacity
and they did it even faster than the short-lived flies did.
This led to my first paper.
Now, I will tell you that this wasn't as easy
as I made it sound, because for some of time
I had been floundering in the lab,
suffering through what we call today imposter syndrome.
Now, they didn't have a name for it back then,
but that's certainly, looking back in hindsight,
what was wrong with me.
I was afraid to try anything
because I assumed that I would fail
and that everyone would base my failure
upon my socially-defined race,
not on any individual attribute I might have.
So that moment when my advisor
literally called me into his office and he said,
"You know, Joe, if you don't get to work
on your thesis tomorrow, I'm cutting you loose,"
I designed the experiment
that I just described to you literally overnight,
and I came in the next day and started it,
and the rest, they say, is history.
So I just explained all that,
so I'm not going to go through those slides.
Here's the better picture
of the emitter detector array,
and it led to my first paper, which was published
in the "Journal of Insect Physiology" in 1988.
Now, this work caught the attention
of popular science
because what we had essentially demonstrated
was that if we postponed senescence,
it would lead to an extended period of healthspan.
So we weren't interested in just expanding lifespan
and having a prolonged period of senescence.
What we really were interested in is figuring out
how we could increase the organism's healthspan,
and that's exactly what we did using experimental evolution
in this Drosophila system.
So it was so popular that it ended up
on the cover of "LIFE" magazine,
along with some other researchers in the area of aging.
We were covered in popular science magazines,
such as "Discover,"
and even made it onto a snippet of "The Tonight Show"
when the host, Jay Leno, mentioned our research and said,
"Did you hear about these scientists in Irvine
who have figured out how to make fruit flies live longer?
Aren't we trying to get rid of these things?"
Now, so quickly,
how does aging happen?
So to understand that, we need to recognize
that there are two population genetic mechanisms
which are consistent
with the evolutionary theory of senescence.
The first is called mutation accumulation.
This is when an allele
has a neutral impact on fitness early in life,
meaning that it doesn't improve reproduction,
it doesn't improve survivorship,
neither does it decrease those things.
Now, something under those conditions
will essentially be acted on
by the genetic mechanism called genetic drift.
It will be randomly distributed in populations
across the globe since it doesn't increase
or decrease an individual's fitness.
Now, this is entirely independent of what it may do
to an individual late in life.
So if that gene, which is neutral early in life,
has a deleterious effect late in life,
then that will contribute to senescence.
And so we know a number of age-related diseases,
such as Alzheimer's, Huntington's Chorea,
and also now a UK Biobank study coming up, you know,
21st-century standards has examined genomic variation
in humans and found thousands of SNPs
which fall into this mutation accumulation category.
Now, the other mechanism is far more insidious,
and this is called antagonistic pleiotropy.
In this example, this allele
is actually beneficial early in life,
and if it's beneficial,
then positive natural selection will increase its frequency
in the population until all members of that population
and all members of that species,
depending upon what it is, have it,
and that is despite what it does in late life.
So it can cause all sorts of age-related pathologies
at late life, but natural selection is really only concerned
about what you do during your reproductive period.
So if it's deleterious after
net future expected reproduction is zero,
okay, it still will completely (indistinct)
within that population.
Now, an example of this are cancers.
Now, you're probably aware that cancers occur
because of the evolution of stem cells,
which repair tissues,
which undergo a tremendous amount of stress,
such as, you know, white blood cells
and bone marrow tissue,
as well as the epithelial of the gut,
the lung, and the skin.
Well, these are beneficial to bring you to reproductive age,
but they also require fewer mutational changes
to flip to being a neoplasm,
and so they result in producing cancer at late age.
And hence, everyone in the world,
all humans on this planet are predisposed to cancer
and would die of cancer if they lived long enough.
Now, the reason why not everyone dies from cancer
is the fact that we have many other things that kill us
before we would be old enough
to automatically die from cancer.
Now, the work that I described before, in the '80s,
we didn't have the means
to study the genomic foundations of aging.
We did use the genetic tools
that were available at the time,
and we found that there were contributions
from all over the chromosomes in Drosophila.
But in the beginning of the 21st century,
when we had next-generation sequencing available to us,
we were able to sequence the genomes of these flies
and compare them based upon their life history profiles
and show, sure enough, that the effects
on this complex phenotype occur across the genome
when we make these comparisons.
Now, it turns out that we use extremely stringent criteria
compared to what's used in medicine.
So some of you will recognize these plots
as Manhattan plots.
Generally, when you're looking at populations
whose conditions you can't control,
you determine the significance value
at 10 to the minus-1/8,
which in -log p-value would be 8 on the scale.
But in our case,
we rigorously control the environmental conditions
under which our flies live,
so we use a much higher criterion.
As you note, we used a -log p-value of 150, not 8,
and yet we still found highly significant signatures
of selection across the entire Drosophila genome.
Now, if we used the one that's typically used
in these studies, we would've found even more contributions,
which of course we think would've been false positives.
So recently I wrote a short piece
for the blog "Culturico,"
explaining how our early experiments teach us something
about how we could possibly develop tools
in the 21st century.
Particularly, the new omics technologies
have placed on the agenda serious interventions
and possible treatments for various symptoms of aging.
So the link to that is in the slide, or you can just simply,
you know, search for it on Google and find it.
Now, as the introduction stated,
also a great deal of my work
has been directed towards systems of social injustice.
So in "Voice," I say,
"There's a great danger to the future of our species
if we allow systems of social injustice
to govern the world."
I've often been asked whether we should teach about this
in biology classes, and my response is, "Absolutely."
We should be teaching about this in biology classes
for two reasons.
First, evolutionary biology
has a deeply problematic history
with regard to the support of things like racism,
social Darwinism, and eugenics,
and it not do students good
not to be made aware of this deeply problematic history.
The second reason is that by examining the claims
of these scientists and their ideas,
we literally provide students with a gold mine
of logical fallacies that can be utilized to teach them
about how the enterprise of science actually works
and thus making them stronger science.
And it's also a story that's full of drama,
full of villains,
and also the heroes of evolutionary science
who have addressed the significance and meaning
of human biological diversity.
Now, I first was pulled into this question in 1994
with the publication of the book, "The Bell Curve:
Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life."
Now, at the time I was a Drosophila geneticist,
working on fruit fly experiments.
I really didn't spend a whole lot of time
on issues related to humans,
but I got a call from a sociologist colleague,
Dr. Ben Bowser, who had read the book
and implored me to write a reply
to the genetic and statistical claims of this book.
Now, at the beginning of this talk,
I was introduced as the first African American
who'd earned a PhD
in evolutionary biology and evolutionary genetics,
so that put me in a unique place to be able to examine
the genetics and statistics of "The Bell Curve"
without using the trope, "Well, it's just racist,"
which a lot of people were saying at the time.
The problem with that as a starting point
is that people who don't know any better
simply aren't going to listen to you,
because they're gonna throw up roadblocks
against actually learning what is racist about this work
when it seems and appears to be based upon sound evidence.
So I spent a great deal of time reading the book
from cover to cover.
I made no public statements about it
until I had completed my analysis of the work.
Now, Herrnstein and Murray,
you know, presented this as solid evidence.
As you can see from the slide,
they presented data from the Armed Forces Qualifying Test,
showing that the white distribution of IQ
was one standard deviation higher
than the Black distribution of IQ,
and that they further claimed that this relationship
had been pretty much static over the 20th century,
and while they didn't come down saying
that this was definitely due to genetics,
they cited the work of psychometricians
such as J. Philippe Rushton
who definitely felt that the difference was genetic.
And so this set me along the path of examining
why people would even believe this to begin with.
So the first paper I wrote was entitled
"Race and IQ Revisited: Figures Never Lie,
But Often Liars Figure," in which, you know,
I championed the method of statistical reasoning
as something we should be doing,
and then I showed what was wrong
with their statistical analysis
and how they couldn't possibly come to those conclusions.
And I also pointed out that their use
of the term Black and white had no meaning
with regard to the biological variation within our species,
and in fact, what they were representing
were socially-defined groups
who existed in the United States
in manifestly different social environments,
and then therefore, you could make no claim about genetics
from this data because the environments
in which these two groups lived were never the same.
So I then did make a number of public pronouncements
against this book.
It was covered by "The Arizona Republic."
At this time I was a professor at Arizona State,
and I, you know, responded to claims made by these folks
in "TIME," "Newsweek," on national news,
such as Fox Television,
and that stimulated me to writing
my first book on the subject,
"The Emperor's New Clothes:
Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium."
And this explained the history of racial thinking
in the Western world,
how people had come to believe these falsehoods,
and why, you know, we needed to undo them.
Shortly afterward, I followed that up with a sequel,
"The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America,"
which address the ongoing social pathologies
that resulted from racial thinking.
Now, when "The Race Myth" came out,
I thought I had pretty much solved that issue,
that I would never have to write about race again,
and boy was I wrong.
And so with the latter portion of the 2010s
and the social changes that occurred in America,
it was clear that people were being led down the rabbit hole
of racial misconception once again.
So my colleague, Dr. Alan Goodman,
who's at Hampshire College in Massachusetts
and former president
of the American Anthropological Association,
called me up and said,
"Joe, you know, we really need to do a book
where we address these racial misconceptions
in a question/answer format to provide people
with quick and easily understandable ways
of recognizing these misconceptions and the damage they do."
So "Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions"
was available in December of 2021.
"Kirkus Reviews" ranked it
as one of the best non-fiction books of 2021
and one of the best books
about being Black in America in 2021.
I found the last one sort of strange
since the book really isn't about being Black in America,
but hey, we'll take the award.
Now, same time, I was now a nationally-recognized figure
on this issue of biological and social conceptions of race,
so I was asked to be in a documentary
about the life of James Watson, which was shown on PBS.
I wrote some opinion pieces about his views,
as you can see here.
So now I'm gonna end my talk today
focusing on something that I think
is probably the most important contribution of my career,
and that is changing the face
of research in evolutionary science,
most recently in microbial evolution.
So here you see a picture of my research group
at the 2018 Congress
of Bio/computational Evolution in Action.
That was a National Science Foundation-funded
science and technology center
of which our university was a part
and I was the leader of our group.
And quite frankly, any of you who have spent any time
at evolution science conferences should quickly recognize
that you will almost never see
a group of this demographic composition
at an evolution conference.
Now, to show you what we've been able to do,
many of the individuals in that picture,
in fact, the two young ladies standing in front of me
are now PhDs in evolutionary computational science.
Okay, so if anyone wants to ask me about, you know,
the microbial work, I'm happy to talk about it.
We're not gonna spend time on it here.
We've published a lot on how bacteria
evolved resistance to nanomaterials and ionic metals
in top-tier journals.
But what I wanted to show you was this.
In December of 2021,
we graduated one PhD in microbial evolution,
Dr. Sada Boyd-Versah,
who's now a post-doctoral researcher at UCLA.
This last December our group graduated
two African American women PhDs in microbial evolution,
Dr. Janelle Robinson,
who now works for a sequencing firm in New Jersey,
and Dr. Mizpha Fernander, who is working with us now
in our Precision Microbiome Engineering Research Center.
We currently have at least three more in the pipeline
who will finish their PhDs from 2024, 2025.
Now, the reason I say this is because for years
I worked uphill against a constant mantra that, you know,
Black students aren't interested in evolutionary science,
that's why there are no Blacks in evolution.
And nothing could be further from the truth,
because here at North Carolina A&T,
we teach evolutionary biology as a required course
to our biology majors.
We have numerous evolution-focused research laboratories
that have African American or African PhD students in them
who are completing their PhD degrees
in evolutionary science.
We as one institution are doing more
than hundreds of institutions have done for decades.
So it's not about the fact or the idea
that African Americans aren't interested
in evolutionary science.
It's a question of how you teach that science
and whether you have the cultural fluency
to be able to present these ideas to students
who start with a negative view of the science
based upon that tragic history
that I have explained earlier in my talk.
Now, we're also engaged in teacher support initiatives.
For those of you who are not in the Southeast,
you may not be aware of the assault
that has been going on against the public schools
with regard to defunding them and making it difficult
for teachers to teach science, period,
let alone evolutionary science.
So we are now part
of the Amgen Biotechnology Experience,
so we now are ABE North Carolina.
This is a picture of our website.
We are working with teachers
from both the Durham and Guilford County school districts,
doing professional development
in cutting-edge biotechnology techniques
that they can introduce into their curriculum.
We, through Amgen, have all of the equipment,
all the supplies needed,
which they then go out and teach these lessons.
We're just getting started,
but we are on a path to become a major force
in how biology is taught in Central North Carolina.
So we also have landed
the Precision Microbiome Engineering, PreMiEr,
NSF Gen-4 Engineering Research Center of Excellence.
It is a partnership between Duke University,
UNC Chapel Hill, North Carolina State, UNC Charlotte,
and my institution, North Carolina A&T.
So finally, I think the most important work
that I have been doing lately is directly addressing
ongoing racial misconceptions in medicine.
Now, it might not surprise folks in this audience
that medical practitioners
are treating human biological variation
using 19th-century typological concepts.
So for them, biological races are real.
People who are members of the socially-defined races
of the United States, for them, for the most part
are thought to be legitimate biological entities.
This is present in the curriculum.
For example, I was asked by Elsevier to help do the revision
of "Robbins & Kumar Basic Pathology,"
which was steeped in racial medicine.
So now the new 11th edition
has been improved.
We weren't able to get it all
because we argued with the other editors,
but my colleague, Dr. Andrea Deyrup,
who is one of the editors, and I
have written and included for the first time
in a major pathology textbook
a section on health disparities that isn't typological.
We have also worked in inclusive images,
so showing diseases of the skin in more than one skin tone.
You might again be surprised that medical texts
have routinely shown skin diseases
with only the complexion of Northern Europeans
and not the rest of the world.
So please take a look at the 11th edition,
which we're really proud of.
We've also published papers in major medical journals
on this question.
So in the "New England Journal of Medicine,"
"Ongoing Racial Misconceptions in Medical Education"
came out in 2022.
Also, shortly after that,
"The Myth of the Genetically Sick African" for "Genealogy,"
and finally, probably the most significant of these papers
was published in "Academic Medicine."
As a result of the publication of this paper,
the American Academy of Pediatrics came out with a statement
opposing racial medicine.
Now, they didn't do that until we showed
that their pediatrics textbook
had all sorts of racial misconceptions throughout it.
Now, we have given talks on race in medicine
across the nation and internationally.
This is a list of our grand round talks
at medical departments, beginning in 2021.
Most of these were virtual because of the pandemic,
but we've also found that virtual format
allows us to give far more talks than we could
if we were traveling to give these talks.
Now finally, "We are all born into various systems
of social injustice.
Some simply refuse to see this fact,
others resign themselves to accepting this
and surviving the best they can,
and then still fewer try changing this."
And this is what my career has been about,
changing these systems of social injustice.
So why does this work matter?
Knowledge is power and scientific knowledge
in the 21st century may be the most significant
for the survival of the human species.
We cannot survive going forward
with the systems of social injustice
that currently govern the world.
They will guarantee the extinction of the species,
as I point out at the end of "Voice in the Wilderness."
We have been involved, I and other colleagues,
in presenting a new perspective
for what science should be doing
instead of supporting the status quo,
and you can read about that in our piece,
"Inequality in Science and the Case for a New Agenda,"
which was published
in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,"
also in March of 2022.
Now finally, this brings me
to a growing concern,
and this was outlined by a paper,
an article that came out in "Scientific American"
in October of 2022,
and this opinion piece argued why scientists
should stand for affirmative action
and against scientific racism.
Now, it's highly likely that the Supreme Court
is going to overturn affirmative action soon.
So I was asked to comment in this article
and my statement was,
"Should the Supreme Court overturn Grutter v. Bollinger,
thus essentially ending affirmative action
at historically white institutions of higher education,
they must simultaneously order that all states
who violated the 1879 Plessy v. Ferguson decision
by siphoning funds away from Black education
to support white education
must immediately pay those pilfered funds
into Black public-school districts and HBCUs."
Now, to give you an example
of how significant these funds are,
we've calculated that the state North Carolina
owes my institution, North Carolina A&T,
$1.3 billion as I speak,
and that's just one of the HBCUs in North Carolina.
"Furthermore, they must order that going forward,
a moon-shot level investment in the infrastructure
of HBCU/HSI/MSI and Tribal Colleges must be put in place
to meet the need for equitable education for non-whites
in the United States."
Now, I think I've already demonstrated that we,
at my institution, are capable of producing
high-quality PhDs in science.
The only thing that's limiting us in doing so
is the fact that we don't have the infrastructure
of the other research institutions in our state.
We at North Carolina A&T are on track
to become the first R1 HBCU in America.
It is my hope that if we can land that infrastructure,
that we can redress many of these ongoing issues
with regard to under-representation in science.
So I'm gonna end my comments there
and open it up for question and answer.
- Dr. Graves, this is Nelson Scottgale.
Thank you very much for that wonderful talk,
and the first question we have
in the question and answers, Wonderful talk.
Any thoughts on Stephen Jay Gould's 'The Mismeasure of Man'?
This was my first experience with exposing
of the faulty science involved
in many supposedly scientific conclusions about race."
- Yeah, I've lots of thoughts
on Gould's "Mismeasure of Man."
So first met Stephen when I was a graduate student
at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole.
So he came to give a talk.
You know, I was privileged
to get to go out to lunch with him
and he actually suggested that I apply to go to Harvard,
and the reason I didn't end up in Harvard is in the book,
so those of you who wanna know, read the book.
But "Mismeasure of Man" is a classic.
Gould was not an evolutionary geneticist.
He was a paleontologist.
But he still did a really good job of explaining
why so many of these racial ideas
simply didn't follow legitimate scientific method
and he provided readers with the history and the context
of why people were supporting these racist ideas
in the guise of science.
So I, you know, routinely cite his work.
He was a great contributor to how we understand,
you know, modern ideas in evolution.
You know, since he's not here to defend himself,
I can't really talk about all the times, you know,
because he wasn't an evolutionary geneticist,
I helped to contribute pulling his fat out of the fire
because he said things that weren't really supportable
by what we knew in evolutionary genetics,
but even though the things he said were right, so.
- Thank you.
- Dr. Graves, great talk. It's Ryan Fisher here.
I have the next online question for you,
and it reads as follows,
"What is some advice you would give to students
going into the same or similar fields as yourself?"
- Well, it depends on which students they are,
because, you know, in the academy one's identity
plays a great role in the experience that you receive.
So I went to school with evolutionary biologists,
names you know really well.
For example, Richard Lenski and I
were both undergraduate students at Oberlin College.
We took evolution together.
But Richard would tell you that his experience
in evolutionary biology was very different from mine.
So it depends on who the students are,
and I have written pieces particularly to help students
from racially subordinated groups to do well in science.
But you must be prepared for the fact
that structural racism is real.
It's real in every avenue of this society,
so you're not gonna escape it.
Say, for example, you say,
"Ah, I'm not gonna go into science
'cause I'll have to face structural racism."
That would be a mistake 'cause if you go to medicine,
you're gonna face it there.
If you go to business, you're gonna face it there.
If you go to sports, you're gonna face it there.
So there's nothing that you can do in this society
where that's not gonna be a role.
So the advice I give is not to fall into imposter syndrome,
and really, my career takes off
when I defeated imposter syndrome,
when I recognized that it wasn't me,
that it was the system that I was living in
that was causing all of my problems.
So that's the primary advice I would give.
- Right, I'll pass the questions back to Nelson.
- I hope you can see the comment "Standing ovation"
from the webinar participants, so thank you very much.
I wanna make that vocal for everybody.
The next question is,
"Do you think that science can be married with politics
to spur further action with regards to equality
and human rights?
What do you currently see?
And if so, how do we go about doing that?"
For context, this is a person
who's a criminal justice major, so they're interested in-
- Okay, so chapter, oh, I forgot which number,
I think it's Chapter 12 (Nelson chuckles)
of "Voice in the Wilderness,"
it's called the Evolutionary Science of Social Justice...
Bill Hamilton, William D. Hamilton,
was one of my professors at Michigan,
and for folks that know evolutionary biology,
he made a tremendous contribution
when he explained the evolution of altruism
in social insects.
And basically there are two groups of organisms
on the planet that have altruism,
the social insects and vertebrates
such as birds and mammals, okay?
So this is something clearly that evolved
'cause not all other taxa have this.
And when you look at, you know, the mechanism,
the first mechanism is, you know,
altruism towards close relatives,
which almost everybody agrees, you know,
you do for solid evolutionary reasons.
But the other mechanism,
which was put forward by Robert Trivers,
was the idea of reciprocal altruism,
which is you can give altruistic acts to people
who aren't your close relatives
so long as they are reciprocal.
And so the question then becomes, you know,
what improves the survivorship of individuals?
The exploitation of others
or reciprocal altruism towards them?
I would argue, and I do argue, that reciprocal altruism,
that is, doing things that benefit others
that aren't your close relatives is a win-win situation
that create an environment in which all individuals
have an opportunity to see their kids grow up
and be safe and healthy.
- Yes.
- And the alternative, of course,
is what we're seeing in the Ukraine right now,
where people are being, you know, bombed and killed
for the, you know,
I don't understand reasons of a despot,
leading to greater global insecurity.
You know, we've seen over the last couple of weeks,
you know, spy balloons passing over the United States
at high altitude, which were probably always there
and now finally detected.
And it's not as if the United States hasn't been spying
on China too, because they certainly have been.
But, you know, the responses now from both nations
are leading us towards possible nuclear annihilation.
I'm sure you all follow the work of, you know,
the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists"
and the Doomsday Clock is closer to midnight
than it's ever been.
So I think an evolutionary perspective
would tell us that, you know,
win-win scenarios can lead us to a sustainable society
where people aren't shooting nuclear missiles at each other,
that it isn't necessary.
And one of those things that can help us
solve all the other existential problems we have,
like, for example, anthropogenic climate change,
starts with this issue of social justice.
If we cannot solve this,
we will not solve the other existential problems,
and I would predict that we are absolutely doomed.
Now, I believe we can solve this,
but it requires the political and moral will to do so.
- As a follow-up on that, if I may, Dr. Fisher,
could you speak about the importance of voting?
I think that we had a talk yesterday,
talking about climate change and encouraging people
to use their education and vote.
- Well, honestly, I think voting
is the least effective way to make social change.
- Okay.
- Don't get me wrong, I think people need to vote.
That is not what I'm saying.
But it is an extremely passive way
and you're left with, by the way,
the choices of who's in the political system,
and I think that's our problem.
- Okay. - We have
two political parties in which, you know,
their members are more concerned with reelection
than they are the good of the American people
or the international people,
because as I was pointing out,
our problems are not just American, they're global now.
And so we need a different kind of politics.
We need people to start, you know, standing up
and taking responsibility for the places they live, okay?
And from that grassroots movement,
I believe that we need new political formations
because the ones that currently exist, I think,
are incapable of leading us towards a sustainable future.
So yes, we vote now,
but we vote for issues and we vote for people
who have some idea of what direction we should be going,
but we should have no illusions
that the current political system is capable
of meeting the needs of the human species.
I don't think it is.
- [Nelson] Hmm.
- Dr. Graves, I have a broad question
from one of our online guests,
which I'll tie in perhaps a question from myself,
given that we probably need to wind this down.
So the question-
- [Nelson] (indistinct) started here, Ryan. (chuckles)
- So the question from the guest is,
"What do you hope to see in evolutionary biology
in the future?"
And then my question to sort of connect to that is,
what's your outlook?
Are you glass half full, glass half empty
in terms of homo sapiens on planet Earth?
- Well, that's a tough question.
I definitely think the glass is halfway,
so it's a question of which direction, right?
(host chuckles)
And if we're gonna go on the basis of current events,
I would say we're headed down,
so we're sort of half full
and the slope is rapidly downhill,
but that doesn't mean we can't reverse things.
And that's where, again, where I think that, you know,
deploying our understandings
provided by evolutionary science provide us with the means
to turn the direction around,
and that's in a number of areas.
So for example, my research group has been involved,
you know, over the last couple of years
looking at how bacteria evolve resistance
to novel materials.
Now, this is absolutely crucial area because, as you know,
you know, bacteria are resistant
to virtually every antibiotic that exists on the planet.
The pharmaceutical industry can't come up
with new antibiotics fast enough.
So one of the things that evolutionary science
allows us to do is to come up with methods
like evolutionary traps in which the organism, microorganism
can't evolve its way out,
because you're attacking it in things
that are fundamental trade-offs.
For example, the receptor for a phage
confers antibiotic resistance.
Well, if you attack it with phage
and antibiotics at the same time,
the organism can't evolve its way out,
or at least it will take a much longer time
for it to evolve its way out.
And so, using these kinds of approaches,
I think evolutionary science is gonna help us
solve a lot of these existential things.
Certainly, again, going back to climate change,
it is imperative that we get a handle on this
because we already know that vectors of tropical diseases
are moving into the temperate zones.
So you didn't have to worry about Zika virus
a few decades ago.
Now you do.
Well, that's a tropical virus,
which is carried by a tropical insect.
So I think we're now at, you know,
some people would say that tipping point.
I think we're still at the tipping point where,
if we deploy our best science
and we deploy it with moral and ethical fiber,
I think we can survive.
But if we don't do that,
I would say the glass is nearly empty, not half empty.
- Dr. Graves, I wish we could just go
for another hour at least, but unfortunately we can't.
So thank you very, very much.
We really appreciate your talk
and your willingness to speak today.
- I hope you guys invite me back some time.
- Good deal.