A Brief History…

The left rails against fundamentalist Christians as enemies of science. Creationism is, indeed, anti-scientific but there are other motives for the adoption of this narrow philosophy by those who are still deeply religious. They are trying to defend themselves and their children from the hedonism of modern life. Science and atheism, in spite of exceptions, are intertwined. Atheism is not a good basis for conservative moral and ethical beliefs. After all, if there is no punishment for evildoers in the next life, why is virtue desirable ? We can say it is its own reward but that is a bit circular.

The Marxists, like our all-too-probable next president have their own rules about virtue and truth. They are useful only insofar as they promote the desired end. Science depends on truth and the willingness to tell the truth and accept it. Why do so many scientists see enemies on the right but not on the left ?

I have previously written about The Second Era of Bacteriology, which I believe will solve the energy problem for a while until nuclear energy takes over. The second area in which science is moving quickly is genetics and human behavior. Bacteriology may be safe from the Marxists but behavior is a major area of their concern. Larry Summers found out how intolerant they are and that was before we had a leftist president.

John Derbyshire has a piece today on Obama and science. I have previously written about Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve and the peculiar reaction to it when it came out in 1994. I was at Dartmouth and bought a copy when it first appeared. When others learned I had a copy, several asked to borrow it as they did not want to be seen buying it at the Dartmouth Bookstore. What did Barrack Obama think of it ?

science blogger Jason Malloy posts the transcript of an NPR discussion about The Bell Curve from October 1994, featuring “civil rights lawyer and writer” Barack Obama, who “lives in Chicago.” What did our young civil-rights lawyer and writer (?) think of Herrnstein and Murray’s pop-psychometrics masterpiece? He no like.

“Mr. Murray isn’t interested in prevention. He’s interested in pushing a very particular policy agenda, specifically, the elimination of affirmative action and welfare programs aimed at the poor. With one finger out to the political wind, Mr. Murray has apparently decided that white America is ready for a return to good old-fashioned racism so long as it’s artfully packaged …”

Does anyone think President Obama is going to fund genetics research on human behavior ?

Marxism is sociobiology without biology. The strongest opposition to the scientific study of human nature has come from a small number of Marxist biologists and anthropologists who are committed to the view that human behavior arises from a very few unstructured drives. They believe that nothing exists in the untrained human mind that cannot be readily channeled to the purposes of the revolutionary socialist state. When faced with the evidence of greater structure, their response has been to declare human nature off limits to further scientific investigation. A few otherwise very able scholars have gone so far as to suggest that merely to talk about the subject is dangerous.

This is the basis of Stephen Jay Gould’s theories of the Blank Slate and nobody is going to challenge them as long as Obama is president. At least Bush funded stem cell research, a credit denied him by the political left. I don’t expect to see similar open mindedness when his opponents take office.

Tags: human behavior, Obama, science

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 11:02 am and is filed under politics, science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.