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Yann's avatar

When I studied anthropology, around the year 2000, I quickly realized that the left-wing activists in the field viewed any biological/genetic explanation to human behavior as highly “problematic”. Any time someone suggested that there were genetic bases for behavior such as rape or male aggressiveness, for example, they would immediately stand accused of “excusing” and “normalizing” said behavior, mostly by people who held purely socioconstructivist approaches and who clearly did not grasp the science presented to them.

It's clearly become worse since with the “woke” movement. Now, the mere acknowledgement that humans are biological entities at all is tantamount to holding Nazi views. Witness how even sex is now viewed as having no basis in biology, but is purely explained as a social status “imposed at birth”… Basically, any time you refer to biology to explain anything, you will be called a sexist, a transphobe, a racist, etc., depending on what you’re trying to explain. Case closed!

My wife is a biochemist/neuroscientist. A few years ago, I remember explaining these debates to her. She would roll her eyes, sighing at how childish and unserious we were in the social sciences departments. I kept telling her to watch out, because when they were done imposing their ideology in my department, they would come for hers. This is what we’re witnessing today. And the most scary part is, science seems to be caving in.

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Max Davies's avatar

When you make it impossible for anyone who wants a successful career in science to research racial differences between groups, what you also do is give racists a killer answer to the assertion that there is no evidence for such differences:

“Of course there isn’t - you’ve stopped anyone from looking for it” they say.

All the research that shows our species to be intellectually homogeneous, everything we have discovered about the role poor environment plays in the developments of IQ, all of it counts for nothing against the assertion that of course you’ll never find what you never look for. That argument is a powerful weapon, and we’re handing it over, fully loaded, to some extremely dangerous people.

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