[subscribe2]One of my hobby horse items is the gap between official dogma and observable reality. It exists in every society. The degree is what I find interesting. My instinct is to think that the bigger the gap the closer to collapse, but that may not be true. The Romans held all sorts or weird ideas about the natural world, but that did not inhibit them from conquering the Mediterranean. The Incas had some really weird ideas and they did pretty well until reality came crashing in on them in the form of the Conquistadors.
Maybe there’s a tipping point somewhere. Once the gap between fantasy and reality exceeds a certain size, everything falls to shit. Within the tolerance, the society can stagger along at worst and prosper when the gaps are small. I’m not going to claim I have thought it through that carefully. It is more of a hunch than anything else. As we see with the Russians, practical magic is always the thing holding it all together. Since Marxist-Leninism has fallen in disrepute, they have picked up on Eurasianism again as an organizing mythology.
That brings me to some stories in the science sections lately. This one on genetics and the “gay gene” is interesting.
The Left loves to tell the Right that it’s anti-science, pointing (not without reason) to the correlation between conservative beliefs and a failure to come to terms with the scientific facts of evolution and human-caused climate change. But there’s a subtler tendency on the Left; a fear of research into human nature, in case the findings are in some way politically uncomfortable.
Let’s put aside the oogily-boogily of climate change and just look at evolution. According to this story, half of Americans think God created man as is and 32% think God guided evolution, in the Intelligent Design sort of way. Just 15% accept the official version as stated by evolutionary biology. The rest of the article is a sloppy use of statistics. (Why is it people cannot understand the difference between correlation and causation?) What’s certainly true is religious people are both more conservative (as defined by the CML) and less inclined to accept evolution.
That leaves plenty of room for members of the CML to reject science and evolution. The Telegraph article does a good job showing how the Left reacts like a vampire to garlic when the topic of the gay gene is raised.
Steven Pinker wrote at length about this in The Blank Slate – about a politically correct fear that, if we found genetic differences in abilities between sexes or races, it would undermine efforts to establish political equality between those sexes and races. Two pieces in the last few days have expressed similar fears about research into a possible genetic basis for human sexuality.
“I cannot think of a single positive application for such research, other than the generic claim that it will help us understand better,” says The Guardian’s Alex Andreou, adding that in the context of our failure so far to cure cancer and dementia “that a single cent of medical research should be devoted to explaining whom I choose to share my bed with is utterly obscene”.
Nick Cohen, in The Observer, claims that any such finding would be a gift to homophobes: “If you ‘biologise’ all aspects of human life, you have no right to be shocked if your opponents propose ‘cures’.”
The “what good will this research do?” trope is well-worn, and can be discounted easily enough. The history of science is littered with examples of unexpected, serendipitous findings that the researchers didn’t expect; the story of how the Big Bang was mistaken for pigeon poo is my favourite, but there are thousands, and scientists have to trot them out most years in defence of funding for pure research.
Nick’s suggestion, though – that a discovery that there’s a genetic component to human sexuality would be a gift to homophobic bigots – is on the surface more plausible, and needs to be addressed. He says (and Andreou agrees) that if there’s a “gay gene”, then people could try to find a “gay cure”, or even abort foetuses with that gene. He thinks that any “reductionist” approach to human sexuality would be “pseudoscience”.
If the choice is between science and their religion, they choose the religion and they will have no trouble burning down the offending lab. As long as science supports the tenets of the CML, the CML loves science. That’s not much different than the religious trying to use archeology to prove the Bible. ID’er do this regularly.
The gap between reality and official mythology in this case is pretty broad. The myth says the progressive faith is based in science while the non-believers are worshiping their sky god and attacking science. Reality tells a different tale. Science quickly becomes the enemy when it contradicts the one true faith. You can see it here in this story about the climate change nuts demanding the banishment of Charles Krauthammer.
Heating up: Climate change advocates try to silence KrauthammerCharles Krauthammer says it right up front in his Washington Post column: “I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier.”
He does, however, challenge the notion that the science on climate change is settled and says those who insist otherwise are engaged in “a crude attempt to silence critics and delegitimize debate.”
How ironic, then, that some environmental activists launched a petition urging the Post not to publish Krauthammer’s column on Friday.
Their response to opinions they disagree with is to suppress the speech.
Brad Johnson (@ClimateBrad), the editor of HillHeat.com and a former Think Progress staffer, boasted on Twitter that 110,000 people had urged the newspaper “to stop publishing climate lies” like the Krauthammer piece.
I’m going to bet that Brad Johnson knows as much about climate science as my cat. He certainly know nothing about how science works. Krauthammer is on firm ground when he says scientific facts are not put up to a vote. Therefore the babbling about a consensus is just anti-science nonsense. Otherwise, he remains on the fence, not knowing enough to come down on one side or the other. That’s a respectable position, but deemed heresy by people who claim the mantle of science, despite having no science. In another era, Brad Johnson would be accusing Krauthammer of being a witch.
Back to evolution for the finale. We know that genetics determines a great deal of the final product. Every year we discover more of what we think of as human is the result of genes. That includes personality. At some level, we have always known this. Humans have been remarking on how children look and act like their parents since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. Things like body type are not behavioral. they are genetic. No matter how hard to you try, you cannot make yourself taller or significantly more muscled. There is a genetic cap on how much you can lift and how fast you can run. It is why athletes resort to drugs to overcome these limits.
How do we know this? Evolution. Mutations that make survival more difficult or (most important) make reproduction less likely will be selected out of the gene pool over time. Traits that aid in survival or increase our odds of reproduction get passed on to the next generation. Put another way, if genes determine our hair color and our height, then they determine everything else about us. All of the measurable differences between human populations for which there is a mountain of evidence are baked in the cake, even the stuff that seems superfluous like the coccyx and the appendix.
When you see stories like this one, they can be read only one one way. The people behind this research think genetics and therefore evolution are bunk. How else could they waste so much time trying to reform the behavior of toddlers? Fat parents have fat children just as tall parents have tall children. America has more food than we could ever possibly consume. The poorest American is throwing away enough food to sustain your typical African. Humans evolved in scarcity and are wired to eat as much as possible in times of plenty. Guess what? It is times of plenty all the time here. The fact that life expectancy keeps ticking up says it is not a bad thing.
America has not reached North Korean levels of delusion, but we are marinating ourselves in an ideology that is antithetical to science. In many cases, it is antithetical to observable reality. Maybe it does not matter. My intuition says a society has to be tethered to reality in order to survive. The Greeks lost their minds in the Peloponnesian War and decided to attack Syracuse. The result was defeat and loss of empire. We have a lot of people strutting around thinking they are models of logic and reason when they are bundles of superstitious nonsense. At some point, reality has to intrude.
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Good Morning Z, I’m a regular reader & fan of your site. I’m not sure the Times article you picked is the best example that liberals believe genetics are “bunk”. I think that if you could change kids to eating meats, fats, and a small amount of complex carbs, you could have a considerable effect on their weight. Getting simple carbs out of their diet might do a lot of good weight wise. I’m not disagreeing with your overall point about the CML and its highly selective use of scientific data, only this particular example, which I think is weak.… Read more »