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The writer is an award-winning science journalist and the author of “ Superior: The Return of Race Science ”
Ministers’ fears that activists might try to airbrush British history have led the UK government to summon officials from national museums and other heritage bodies to ask how they will pursue its new ‘keep and explain’ policy contested public monuments. This week’s summit, convened by the Department for Digital Culture, Media and Sports, follows the toppling of a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in June.
Scientific history is not exempt from government attention. As researchers know, archeology, anthropology, and the natural sciences have always been rife with prejudices, affecting the way people and objects are presented. But critics fear that as these stories are recognized, even great figures such as Charles Darwin could be knocked off their pedestals because of their racist and sexist beliefs.
Last year I joined a steering group at the Natural History Museum in London to look at naming and representation. This is a problem that all institutions take into account. Last month, the British Science Association renamed its Huxley Summit for Opinion Leaders to ‘For Thought’, due to concerns about the role of 19th century biologist Thomas Huxley in scientific racism, which fueled the ideology dangerous of eugenics. As more and more cases like this arise, museums are rightly wondering if they could be fairer in the face of the facts and broader in their stories.
The government believes that rather than removing offensive memorials, they should be put in context. In 2019, I saw for myself how difficult it is for a national museum. Since 1940, the American Museum of Natural History in New York has had on its steps an imposing statue of Theodore Roosevelt, former president and nature lover. He sits high on a horse, flanked below by an unnamed African man and an unnamed Native American man. The hierarchy is obvious. To address this issue, the museum’s curators set up an indoor exhibit explaining the problem with the statue, including – vitally – the reactions of the public.
But it was easy to miss. The statue, meanwhile, was unmissable. You could see him across the street. Last summer, the museum called for its complete removal, with the support of Roosevelt’s great-grandson.
If that sounds like politics that force hands, don’t forget the politics built into the statue to begin with. History is not written once. It is rewritten by each generation, not because facts necessarily change, but because our perspectives change.
Think about how we now view Alan Turing. In 2019, 65 years after his death, the New York Times published an obituary for the computer scientist and code breaker of WWII. What took them so long? This is not just because his accomplishments were classified upon his death, but because even in the decades since they became acquainted with his homosexuality – for which he was condemned – meant people were unwilling to celebrate it.
In 2009, the UK government apologized. Turing has taken his place in British scientific history. Changing social attitudes rewrote the past and helped Britain cope with its mistake. Scientific history is always updated with hidden figures, especially women and minorities.
“We cannot – and should not – try now to change or censor our past,” Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said last month. But censorship is already built into the way the past is written. Without understanding how some people and ideas have been erased, and others have been deliberately promoted, we end up with distorted narratives.
Also, it is difficult to maintain these fictions in the age of social media, where visitors only need to log in for five minutes to know that some of the people glorified as scientific or philanthropic heroes in our museums were racists, eugenics, benefiting from the slave trade. or held another bigotry.
Perhaps a better way to present scientific history is to see science for what it is – a slow collective struggle towards universal truths, hotly debated by academics, making mistakes as it goes. what more information arrives, and inevitably affected by the policy. Presenting the research in this way could also help the public understand why, for example, some health experts disagreed last year over treatment for Covid-19 or wearing a mask.
Darwin is obviously not in danger of being canceled. But we would do well to reconsider the starting point of scientific history. Maybe it never should have been with the busts and statues, but with the debates and tensions between scientists and the whole world in their time.
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