Related Readings
Stephen Jay Gould and the Nature of Evolution by Robert Wright.
Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ, and the Press by Bernard D. Davis
Philosopher Michael Levin, in his Feminism and Freedom (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1987), draws the following parallels between feminist theory and Creationism:
One usually thinks of creationism as a doctrine for religious fundamentalists, but from a methodological point of view, belief in the special creation of the human species is entailed by any refusal to apply evolutionary theory to man. It is irrelevant whether this refusal is sustained by a literalistic reading of scripture or committment to a secular ideology. Indeed, a case can be made that religious critics of Darwin display a stronger sense of the unity of nature than do scientific critics of innateness in man. This is most especially true of scientists like Richard Lewontin and Steven Jay Gould, who take a wholly naturalistic stance toward all living creatures apart from man (and are prepared to use the theory of evolution polemically in ideological debate), yet reject all but the most trivial comparisons of other living creatures to man. (p. 66-67)
The noted humanist and biologist Garrett Hardin makes a similar comment in his book, Naked Emperors (Los Altos, California: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1982), chapter 8:
"I am," said Charles Darwin, "a firm believer that without speculation there is no good and original observation." Darwin's followers, who have not hesitated to speculate, have found that speculating about the causes of human behavior is no less perilous today than it was in Aesop's time. It is no longer fashionable to hurl prophets from cliffs, but many of the defenders of the conventional wisdom are perfectly willing to destroy a man's reputation with polemics. Pejorative labels substitute for the objective examination of evidence....This calm faith [in free speech] is not is not shared by those who in our day are members of an organization bearing the righteous name, "Science for the People." At a symposium on sociobiology held in San Francisco in June, 1977, the meeting was disrupted by political activists who chanted for more than two minutes (by actual measurement), "No free speech for racists! No free speech for racists!"......
Are the races equal? Are the sexes equal? Is there a heriditary component to human behavior? These are questions a right-thinking person never asks unless he immediately makes it clear that the answers are (in the same order): Yes, Yes, and No.....
One of the joint productions of the Cambridge-Boston caucus of "Science for the People" is entitled "Sociobiology - Another Biological Determinism," and begins with this sentence: "Biological Determinism represents the cliam that the present states of human societies are the specific result of biological forces and the biological 'nature' of the human species." ...As for biological determinism, I know of no one who fits the caricature attacked by the Scientists for the People. A thoughtful biologist maintains that our nature - no need of derogatory quotation marks - has something to do with social organizations and social problems (which problems are the consequence of our variable nature not fitting the straitjacket we call social organization.) If human beings had the pituitary-adrenocortal-gonadal system of domestic sheep our social problems would surely be different; so also if we had the endocrine systems of weasels or shrews. The characteristics of these endocrine systems are inherited, and what is inherited has social consequences. This is not to say genes rigidly determine the social order: even populations of housemice develop social differences due to what can only be called historical accidents. How much more important the accidents of human history are hardly needs arguing. "Biological determinism" with its implications of absolute rigidity is a straw man set up for the convenience of polemicists; we would do well to ignore it. Determinism, like racism, sexism, and social Darwinism, is less a definable formal intellectual position than it is a pejorative used to tar an opponent.
The opposite of complete determinism is complete indeterminism. Do the critics of biosociology [Hardin suggests this term is more accurate than "sociobiology"] assert that inheritable behavior is completely indeterministic of the social order? It is hard to see any other interpretation of this assertion by Richard Lewontin: "Nothing we can know about the genetics of human behavior can have any implications for human society". Lewontin is a brilliant theoretician; it would help us all if he would enrich this ex cathedra statement with a mathematical demonstration that social organization is utterly independent of individual behavior (which is necessarily affected by individual variations).
... to suppose that human behavior is uninfluenced by heredity is to say that man is not a part of nautre. The Darwinian assumption is that he is; Darwinians insist that the burden of proof falls on those who assert the contrary.
Science and ideology by Edward O. Wilson tells of his colleagues' attempts to ideologically dictate "truth" at Harvard University.
Stephen Jay Gould and the Nature of Evolution by Robert Wright.
Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ, and the Press by Bernard D. Davis