An evolutionary biologist and a black man, Joseph Graves took pleasure in the coincidence: His symposium “Pseudo-science, Biology, and the Education of African American Students” was held on February 12, the birthday of both Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln.

Science and race are Graves’s preoccupations, when he isn’t teaching at Arizona State University West or pursuing his research into aging in five species of fruit fly. Scientists, he says, are taught to observe, and if they have eyes to see, they cannot fail to notice that the condition of African Americans is deteriorating. A stint as a teacher in Detroit’s public schools in the late 1980s drove the point home.