AI-related technology has been shown to include implicit racist messaging.

In this day and age, something as innocent as using Canva can lead to deeply offensive and racist products.

Here, I describe a situation, connected with Darwin, in which racist messaging inadvertently created upset.

Modern technology amplifies racist and sexist worldviews; exactly what the world does not need right now.

Here is a story of something awful that happened last semester. I think we can all learn from it. I know that I did.

As Founding Director of the Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) program at the State University of New York at New Paltz, over the past two decades, I have learned a lot. The centerpiece of this program is an interdisciplinary speaker series that helps to bring important insights regarding life to our campus and to the broader community. Past speakers have addressed topics such as law, medicine, politics, literature, art, disease, and more—with a consistent focus on how Darwin's big ideas can help to shed light on so many issues of the human condition. Generally, I am proud of this program, including its diversity and its consistent capacity for helping to bring about insights for so many students, professors, and others who have an interest in learning more about how Darwin's ideas continue to advance our understanding of all facets of life.

As an evolutionary scientist, I have heard rumblings over the years of racist bias connected with some evolutionary thinking. As a full-on political progressive and humanist, these rumblings have never sat well with me. The Darwin that I learned about was famously abolitionist in his worldview (Desmond & Moore, 2014). And the standard learnings that I had gotten on this issue have consistently portrayed social Darwinism as a set of misinterpretations of Darwin's ideas to advance often-racist social agendas (see Wilson, 2019). It turns out that there is more to the story.

Last semester, an unprecedent-and-unfortunate situation took place. In an innocent, community-oriented effort to advertise a club event, a student group put out a flyer. Here is a snapshot from the flyer.

The number of people and........

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