For decades academics and human rights activists have screamed about biopiracy, which is what they labeled virtually any intrusion by Western scientists into the sanctified environ of the Third World. It's not too much to suggest that many defenses of intellectual property rights, genetic modification, and the like were answered with little more sophistication than "that's racist". Now this happened:

To understand the sheer scope of this disaster, you should realize that this description of his honors - which include the phrase "one of the most accomplished field biologists of our time" are underselling his achievements. Tetrapod Zoology recently did a four-post series about new mammals that van Roosmalen has discovered. This is a total outrage.

The point is not that there weren't instances when biological knowledge - for lack of a better word - was taken from indigenous populations and then placed within international IPR regimes. The point is rather that the style of the activism - the smug self-righteousness of the activists, the hysterical ad homs against anyone who tried to steer a middle course, etc - created an environment ripe for abuse. This is the inevitable result of that style of activism - it's how global warming research became an anti-scientific endeavor where data was withheld from dissidents until they reverse engineered flawed algorithms, it's how absolutist claims about scientific practice have recently been used to shut down open source science journals, etc.

A more measured model of scientific progress - one that recognizes the sociology of scientific communities while refusing to cede ground to the cultural left on the question of science's privileged relationship to truth - would go a long way to avoiding these pitfalls. But that would lack something in the way of smug sophistication, and where would that leave the soft anti-intellectualism of international human rights activism?

It is kind of amazing how the absurd excesses of leftist ideology - what Ann Coulter rightly ridicules as a condescending "Rousseauian respect" for any action of Third World governments - ends up colliding with what used to be the left's claim to the mantle of science and progress. It's almost as if the contemporary academic and cultural left has betrayed its heritage, forcing those who care about such things into the problematic - but more reasonable - camp of the intellectual right.