David Friedman looks at who opposes evolution. It turns out to be a larger group than you might think. Conservative religious opposition to evolution is well known, but there's a wide strand of opposition on the left that surprises many.
Friedman distinguishes between opposition to teaching evolution and opposition to taking it seriously.
Face it. If evolution happened, it has certain implications for humankind, and it implies things that fly in the face of the leftist vision of how the world should be.
Stephen Jay Gould liked to say that "human equality is a contingent fact of history." This means that things could easily have been very different – we could easily have had several subspecies of human, with very different levels of mental ability, and some of those would have made very good slave classes. That hasn't happened, largely because many strains of hominids died out in prehistoric times.
However, Gould took great pains to ignore the contingent nature of equality when looking at human variability. Different groups of people have different physical appearances – different enough that we call them "races". That each race is equal in terms of mental ability, personality, and other mental traits is purely contingent. The ins and outs of genetic drift could easily have given different groups an advantage here, or a deficit there.
And there's no evidence that it hasn't.
Ideas: Who is Against Evolution?people who are against taking seriously the implications of evolution, strongly enough to want to attack those who disagree, including those who teach those implications, are quite likely to be on the left.
Consider the most striking case, the question of whether there are differences between men and women with regard to the distribution of intellectual abilities or behavioral patterns. That no such differences exist, or if that if they exist they are insignificant, is a matter of faith for many on the left. The faith is so strongly held that when the president of Harvard, himself a prominent academic, merely raised the possibility that one reason why there were fewer women than men in certain fields might be such differences, he was ferociously attacked and eventually driven to resign.
2 comments:
I think the main problem is in the multiple meanings and connotations in some of the terms discussed. To say that races are unequal in terms in terms of mental ability can imply that mental ability can be defined in an absolute term and not a qualitative one. For example different individuals can have various strengths and weaknesses, yet I believe it is impossible to declare one strength equal to another, or that one strength outweighs a weakness in another area.
It may not be possible to define mental abilities in absolute terms, but your argument seems to depend on it being impossible to define them even in relative terms.
A numeric score for IQ may or may not be meaningful, but is it possible to say one person is smarter than another?
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