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How do wokes/social constructionists/etc reconcile their views with the actual state of scientific knowledge or even basic logic? It seems clear to me that if one accepts genetics and evolutionary principles, it necessarily implies that 1: humans have a nature that is determined in large part by our genetics and 2: humans and human societies undergo selection on both an individual and group level. We've known for a long time now that intelligence, mental health and a whole bunch of other traits relating to ability and personality are very heavily influenced by genetics, and it's perfectly logical this could lead to differences in outcomes on an individual as well as population level.
However this gets dismissed away with a lot of spurious reasoning (which is usually presented with a huge amount of nose-thumbing and "Scientists say..." type wording in order to scare the reader into not questioning it). As an example, the whole "races can't be easily delineated, there's no gene specific to any race, and there's more variation within races than between them" argument seems to be a poor attempt at deflection and simply doesn't hold up as a method of dismissing population-level differences. Just because races can't be easily delineated does not mean that race is a "social construct" - race might not be discrete, but it is a real physical entity with roots in biology and just because there's no clear dividing lines which can be drawn doesn't exclude the fact that if you do decide to draw these lines it's entirely possible you'd find differences which exist. None of what's said is inconsistent with the idea of innate variations in intelligence and ability that roughly correlate with observable phenotypic traits. All it takes is for the frequency of specific alleles which code for these traits to be unequally distributed, and you'll find aggregate differences. But the way it's presented exists to mislead people into thinking that the continuum-like nature of genetic differences means that these differences or even the concept of race itself as a biological entity is not something that one should even entertain.
There is also another level to this denial of evolutionary principles that extends far beyond genetics, however. Many of these people also seem to think that social norms themselves are arbitrary vagaries of specific historical circumstances, rather than being adaptive practices which were selected for through the process of survival-of-the-fittest. This view fails to account for many commonalities among civilisations, one of the clear ones being religion (one of the favourite woke whipping horses out there). Not only is religion completely ubiquitous in pre-modern society, you can generally see a shift from animist-type religions in tribal societies to the more developed and organised forms of religion mostly predominant in societies that achieve "civilisation" status. This clearly seems to suggest that religious dictates don't simply arbitrarily drop out of the sky - it indicates that some form of selection was occurring and that societies that adopted certain religions had an advantage. Even more than this, these "successful" religions that are common in civilisations share quite a few similarities in their dictates - selflessness, self-discipline, abstinence, etc.
I'm no religious nut - I'm quite atheist, but religion is a social technology that exists so that large-scale societies can remain cohesive and retain a shared moral foundation, and I would call it a good thing overall (and yes, my perspective often pisses off both religious people and atheists). However this is never properly engaged with by the orthodoxy outside of "yeah people facing hardship make up bullshit to make sense of the world, it's got no validity or use outside of that". Such stock explanations that handwave away traditional social norms (at least, those which contradict the woke moral system and outlook) as being functionless at best and damaging at worst are painfully common, despite many of these social norms being absolutely everywhere up until recently.
Among the supposedly educated any discussion of these topics through these non-approved lenses tends to invoke accusations of "social Darwinism" with the implication that applying any kind of evolutionary logic to humans and human societies is invalid because it could be used to justify Bad Things. This is all consequentialist reasoning which has no bearing on the truth of the claim itself, and lumping in all kinds of belief systems under the same category is a very clear composition fallacy which is clearly done to tar every single idea contained within its bounds with the same brush.
More than this, despite these people being very intent on portraying themselves as secular, scientific people, their viewpoints clearly are in conflict with any kind of scientific understanding and come off to me as being borderline superstitious. In order to strongly believe that insights from genetics and evolution can't be applied to human behaviour and that humans do not come programmed with specific predispositions that depend on what you've inherited, you have to believe in metaphysical, dualist ideas of the mind which are essentially detached from anything physical that could be affected by genetics. Once you adopt a view of the human mind as a physical entity the shape of which is determined by the specifications of genetic instructions, it opens up that whole Darwinian can of worms and everything that stems from it, and many wokes simply do not want to acknowledge the possibility that it could have any amount of validity. Unless they're able to maintain an absolutely unreal amount of cognitive dissonance, I'm unsure how their ideas can be anything but superstitious.
It's even worse when it comes to their idea of social norms as something that just drop out of the sky and persist and propagate over the long term regardless of the adaptiveness of these norms, since there is clearly nothing controversial about the idea that societies compete against each other, and this will tend to select for those norms that promote functioning (which is why you find common threads). But you still come across this type of knee-jerk denial nevertheless. Regardless of how well-read they may be, their reasoning remains fundamentally sloppy, and I'm unsure how they manage to square this circle.
There is a good article on Everything Studies with a nice graph showing how let's say rationalist view reality and how some more humanities inclined people view it. If one accepts the latter framework, then saying reality is socially constructed means the social order is socially shaped as opposed to the physical universe is socially conjured.
To further muddle the waters, many people say that social construction does not mean things are not real. Often used example is money: value of otherwise worthless physical pieces of paper stems from other people giving it value. Money undoubtedly is "socially shaped" but it does not make it unreal meaning that pieces of green paper are an illusion or somehow physically not existing. In that sense claim that race is socially constructed may mean that certain social aspects of race and its impact on daily lives of people is socially shaped even though it is obviously real in a sense that there are people with white skin and people with black skin.
This really is often confusing and even well meaning people may talk past each other. As an example I will use the term science. For somebody it may mean body of knowledge gathered by scientific method. For somebody else it means more philosophy and sociology of science meaning ways how grants are awarded, social processes that steer researchers into certain fields of research more than other fields and so forth. So saying that science is social construct is obviously true as science is done by people and they are working in socially shaped organizations using socially shaped processes. It does not mean that scientific body of knowledge is just some arbitrarily made up stuff. But then again it can be if let's say scientific social processes were driven by racism or whatnot.
Now to be frank, even if I do somewhat understand where social constructionists come from I think their insight has limited value. It would be better to define special terms for what they actually mean so if one says "science" we know if we are talking about scientific body of knowledge or something else. These discussions often take form of sophistry spreading confusion and they paradoxically contribute to the whole social constructivist premise. Which in a sense may be ultimate level of trolling: see, we made scientists say stupid things by sophistry and social pressure. We were right all along except in the past the social pressure was based on racism and misogyny and homophobia!
There are a lot of ways that things can be "real," for some value of real. The Statue of Liberty is a real thing, as it is a actual object in the physical world--reality in the most trivial and literal sense. But there are other legitimate senses of "real"--the US national debt, the number 2, Frodo Baggins, and Alexander Hamilton are all real on various different levels. As you say, the value of a dollar has a legitimate, socially-constructed reality, but so does something like "Donald Trump's reputation"--its exact parameters are highly contested, but no one doubts that "Donald Trump" is real, and that he has a reputation, which is socially constructed from the aggregate of perspectives on his character.
(I would describe "science" as a tool/process/methodology, rather than a body of knowledge.)
Coincidentally Everythingstudies also have a very good article about what real can mean and also how it creates confusion. But here I think is that the distinction is a little bit different: even taking Sherlock Holmes that exists as a fictional character, somebody can say that he also has some other aspects that were socially shaped or that this character himself impacts society in certain way. So if somebody says let's say Sherlock Holmes is racist this can have multitudes of meanings and it is not apparent which one is relevant in context of the discussion: is the character in the novel racist to other characters? Were the novels featuring this character some way perpetuating racism later down the road? Of course it also has to be noted that by playing with words in this way it opens large space of various rhetorical tactics and sophistry.
It is also often a feature, especially if the target of discussion is something else such as social transformation. For instance you can use these words with multiple meanings in order to fish for some hooks that are relevant to your discussion partner, thus finding out which context connects with the other person the best personally - for instance so called Freierian "generative themes". Then you can use other examples and connect it back to the original context, the original theme in a process of recontextualization in order to achieve some other end outside of just discussing ideas. In this sense this vagueness is a feature and not a bug.
Thanks for sharing that article; I thought it was insightful. "X exists" is a particularly slippery phrase, but it's one piece of a larger issue with communication--ultimately, there's a tradeoff between efficiency and precision, and the various aspects of language exist to manage that balance.
Indeed, in fine detail, various languages manage specific micro-equilibria differently, due to local conceptions of where efficiency can be sacrificed to precision, or vice versa.
English pronouns traditionally distinguish among first/second/third person, singular/plural, sex in the third person singular but not elsewhere, subject/object/possessive/reflexive, and so forth. Sometimes combinations of distinctions exist, and sometimes not: "you" is clearly second person, but ambiguously singular or plural--or subject/object, for that matter, it's all context-determined --whereas "I/we/me/us" retains both the singular/plural and subject/object distinctions.
There's a language--I forget exactly where, but I want to say Southeast Asia or Australia?--that has a distinction in its pronouns that English lacks: two different senses of "we," each with its own pronoun. In one sense, "we" includes the person or people being spoken to, in that "you and I" are part of "we." In the other sense, it does not, in that "you" are not part of "we."
"Are we in agreement?" includes the people being spoken to. "We are going to the store; do you want to come with us?" does not, but English uses the same word. The people using this language felt that there was a valuable distinction that justified maintaining two words here; English speakers generally don't even notice the same ambiguity.
Indonesian has that, and I always thought it was a super-useful concept.
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