Scientist and social commentator Richard Dawkins has spoken out against woke efforts to scrap “binary” terms like “female” in favour of “inclusive” terms like “egg producing” in science.
Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist who first made his mark as a public figure with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene but is better known today as a scathing critic of religion, made his views known after the EEB (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) Language Project was launched in the Trends in Ecology and Evolution journal, with the goal of eradicating “problematic” words “emphasising hetero-normative views”.
The offending words include terms as basic as “male” and “female”, which the EBB Language Project wants to replace with supposedly more inclusive terms like “sperm-producing”, “egg producing”, and “XY/XX individual”.
“The only possible response is contemptuous ridicule,” the notorious atheist — or “anti-theist” — told The Telegraph.
“I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words. I am a professional user of the English language. It is my native language,” he vowed.
“I am not going to be told by some teenage version of Mrs Grundy which words of my native language I may or may not use,” he added, referring to a stock character in British discourse dating from the late 1700s, characterised by a tendency to censorious priggishness.
The EBB Language Project is not only concerned with phasing out terms reinforcing the reality of biological sex, however.
Terminology which might be linked, however loosely, to the rhetoric of people who do not support mass migration and multiculturalism is also recommended for the chopping block — for example, “invasive” or “non-native” to describe species.
While such species do clearly exist and represent real challenges to the ecology of the environments they arrive in, the Language Project objects to them on the basis that they sound “xenophobic, anti-immigrant, and militaristic” and recommends their replacement with terms like “newly-arrived” or “nuisance species” — the latter hardly less politically correct than current terminology.
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