College cites ‘scientific racism,’ renames Linnaeus building | Hacker News Reader

College cites ‘scientific racism,’ renames Linnaeus building

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21 pointsBostonian19 comments

Dismissing Linnaeus work is insulting all biologists in this planet in a single move. The guys in the Gustavus Adolphus College are sending a clear message, and the message says that they are complete morons that replaced science with ideology.

Everything that is alive currently is either named by Linnaeus itself or named after the work of Linnaeus. We call ourselves Homo sapiens because Linnaeus created that name.

Is a private place and they can replace every bust with pig heads for fun, or name it anyway they please, but I would never, ever, go to a place that did this to one of the most relevant scientists in the history. Is simply repugnant.

Why would this be insulting to anyone? There is no benefit to worshiping people from the past. Quite the opposite, ideas can and should stand in their own. The person who “discovered” them is of no consequence and at best a distraction.

species classification was one of the most important achievements of that period of biology. It lead to enormous improvements in our understanding. He played the key role in kicking that off and established norms that lasted for centuries and remain visible even today on a regular basis.

Naming a building after a person isn't worship, it's out of respect. of course the person who established this is of consequence.

> There is no benefit to worshiping people from the past.

I'm sure that the Evangelic church that founded this college would disagree with you

Isn’t naming things after certain people always ideological? There’s no science behind which person gets their name slapped on the side of a building. Even leaving it named Linnaeus is ideological, it just happens to be an ideology that was the status quo

The ideology of naming buildings after scientists.

This is what happens when you pay milliennials 6 figure salaries to be college "administrators" and they have 0 actual work to do.

precisely. or people who never really had to hustle.

i know its anecdotal, but the loudest cry babies around me are the most pampered individuals...

It's not possible to behave in ways that won't eventually be seen as barbaric by somebody in the future, unless you simply don't do anything worth recording. It's ridiculous to act as if somebody did something wrong for making a suggestion that didn't pan out.

> It's not possible to behave in ways that won't eventually be seen as barbaric by somebody in the future

Not true, but even if it was, who cares. You’re dead and everyone who ever knew you is dead.

In this particular case, I don’t understand why anyone would care about renaming the building. It is strange to name a building after a guy who had a bunch of incorrect theories that are very popular with racists. Just rename it, who cares.

Of course it's not possible. For most of human history, many things considered barbaric today simply didn't warrant batting an eye lid. People literally had no notion that they would one day be at all controversial. You therefor have a very odd notion of how it should have been possible for them.

That however is secondary to the obviously mis-guided thing you so dismissively claim: that it's "strange" to name a building after a highly praised scientist at a time when modern notions of social justice hadn't yet entered. Much stranger would be the case of people in the past somehow just knowing how we'd react to certain things today. Why rename it? If we judged all the many enormously influential and sometimes celebrated figures of civilization's history by modern moral standards, there would be virtually none left to applaud who were born before the 1960s. Those old names shouldn't be removed from historical reference by modern nagging..

> If we judged all the many enormously influential and sometimes celebrated figures of civilization's history by modern moral standards, there would be virtually none left to applaud who were born before the 1960s.

Good! We have a major issue with hero worship in our society. We should not be naming anything after anyone. It serves no purpose other than to create cults of personality.

> We should not be naming anything after anyone. It serves no purpose other than to create cults of personality.

To inspire the new generations to work hard to move our societies further is a basic goal in any schools and has proven to be a really profitable move for everybody.

On the other way, falsely accusing main scientists of "the sin of the jour" is harming deliberately the trust of the new generations in knowledge and any school doing that should close ASAP. Linnaeus was as racist as me or you. His real sins were much, much worse.

1) placing people among monkeys in the order Primates.

Religious people are trying to disprove that without any success for more than 250 years. Yes we all are "monkeys" and chimps are our closest alive relative in the planet. Linnaeus was right. Deal with it.

2) Exploring the logical possibility that if a genus can include more than one species, our genus could do the same also.

And he was right also in this. The genus Homo includes more than one species. Period.

This is not debatable or unclear and is not racism. Is the naked uncomfortable truth that will make your life much more complicated if your goal is to promote a Creationist agenda.

Of course he was wrong with the species proposed, but before to blaming him we should remember that genetic analysis were not available in 1768. And he still somehow managed to find the right answer in thousands of cases without knowing anything about the DNA. And this is really impressive if we think about it.

People being racist or more and more stupid with time and some obscure agents promoting "cancel knowledge" is not Linnaeus fault in any way.

I'm quite sure that eating meat will be considered barbaric in the future, just it's so hard to avoid with the way society is set up. When society makes it easy to do the right thing people generally will, but there's so much terrible stuff going on and so little time that you really need to prioritize .

I'm sure you do a bunch of barbaric things, probably eating meat will be considered among the worst when humanity has more practical alternatives.

Is not even a building, an arboretum is a collection of trees. A park.

But he wasn't even barbaric. He did separate humans into races per stereotype. This is wrong as we know today, but people that make him the forebearer are plainly wrong (and unnecessarily gives those theories even more credit for connecting his name to them).

For the time he lived in this is negligible, he was completely dedicated to science which could indeed serve as an example for more ideological ambitions.

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