A grassroots initiative, featured in ‘Trends in Ecology and Evolution’, calls for terms used in ecology and evolutionary biology (BSE) to be re-evaluated to make them more inclusive and accurate.
The initiative, called the EEB Language Project, has been launched by like-minded scientists from the United States and Canada. “The project started as a conversation on Twitter among a few people discussing potentially harmful terminology,” says Kaitlyn Gaynor, Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, author of the paper studying the impact of human activity on biodiversity. .
“We got in touch with different ecology and evolution networks focused on increasing inclusion and equity in this field to gather support for a very specific action – he explains -: revising terminology that might be harmful to certain people, in particular those belonging to groups historically and currently excluded from science”.
The EEB Language Project will provide resources and support actions to reconsider harmful terminology at the individual, institutional and scientific communities in general. This crowdsourcing effort includes a repository of words that community members identify as harmful, with suggested alternatives, which is intended to serve as a starting point for dialogue.
Haley Branch, a doctoral candidate in botany at the University of British Columbia, published a companion article in the American Naturalist in July outlining the roots of ableism in evolutionary research and how it limits the potential of this field.
“While part of it has to do with language, the most important thing is looking at the conceptualization of our field,” Branch says. “What kinds of issues are being overlooked because of the limited breadth of the field? It is a call to broaden our understanding of the natural world and to see what kinds of questions we will be asking ourselves in the future.”
As he points out, terms such as “aptitude” are not only harmful to some people in an ableist context, but also imprecise. “The definition refers to reproductive performance, which doesn’t take into account individuals who don’t have offspring,” Branch explains. “Researchers often don’t even measure the number of offspring. They look at fitness indicators, which It’s very complicated.”
Other words like “optimization” can be misleading, as they perpetuate the idea that a species evolves towards a defined permanent optimum, when there is no true species-wide optimization. Optimal phenotypes fluctuate over time and in different environments.
Both members of the EEB Language Project and Haley’s research group are quick to point out that the use of harmful language is often unintentional: what is harmful to one person may not be perceived as problematic by another, and unintended harm may arise as a result of the inherent complexities and historical legacies of language.
Both ecology and evolutionary biology have histories rooted in eugenics, ableism, and racism, beliefs that fueled harmful practices in North America and Europe and unfortunately continue to influence these fields today. Part of this legacy is rooted in the disciplinary terms we use every day.
“There have been a lot of important conversations regarding inclusion across disciplines, and often there aren’t clear steps people can take,” says study co-author Dr. Alex Moore. “It was important to us to think of a manageable approach that people can adopt in their work individually, and at different scales within the discipline, to make thoughtful decisions for the future”.
“The EEB Language Project will be a living document, as the specific words that are harmful and their alternatives can change over time,” says Dr. Danielle Ignace. “People can submit their suggestions online and make their views heard.” They can also get more involved individually, as an institution or at the community level. The hope is that this grassroots effort will unite people,” he concludes.
