- Feb 2023
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www.technologynetworks.com www.technologynetworks.com
- Jun 2022
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www.scientificamerican.com www.scientificamerican.com
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Second, the application of the scientific method matters: what works for ants and other nonhuman species is not always relevant for health and/or human outcomes. For example, the associations of Black people with poor health outcomes, economic disadvantage and reduced life expectancy can be explained by structural racism, yet Blackness or Black culture is frequently cited as the driver of those health disparities. Ant culture is hierarchal and matriarchal, based on human understandings of gender. And the descriptions and importance of ant societies existing as colonies is a component of Wilson’s work that should have been critiqued. Context matters.
The author is going in two opposite directions here and neither match up. A massive swath of our medicine research is wholly based on translational genetics. (That is, our basic research on organisms like flies (drosophila), worms (C. elegans), zebrafish, mice, rats, primates, etc. is contingent on moving medicines applicable to simpler genetic models in these animals will also work for humans who share large amounts of genetic material as the result of evolutionary dynamics. Sure some of it may not be relevant for humans because of both genetic and epigenetic (environmental) factors, but generally we expect that more will than won't.
This basic fact is wholly separate from the health disparities issue. While there are some (and few of these are generally scientists in my experience) who believe that culture is the driving factor, there is enough proof to show that structural racism is the driving factor in almost all cases. I'm unaware of any translational genetic work on ant culture into human culture in any of the scientific literature and she certainly doesn't cite any to provide any sort of evidence to the contrary. As a result, she isn't providing any context at all.
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