The right is nutty about the new-fangled creationism called “Intelligent Design.” This is because religious people, some of them nuts, are an important part of the coalition, and nobody wants to offend them. So The New Republic did a survey, with some glee, exposing he creationism “wedge issue” for the entertainment of the left. This is fair game, because the whole creationist side is nutty. But turnabout is also fair play, so Todd Zywicki played a similar game with Evolutionary Psychology that made the knee-jerk left cry “foul,” mainly in the person P. Z. Myers, the idiot savant biologist who’s trapped firmly in the intellectual straight-jacket of radical feminism that will admit that no difference between men and women can be anything but the product of patriarchal oppression.
Here’s a bit from Zywicki:
As a policy question, there is one difference between religiously-motivated science on the left and the right may or may not be relevant. This is that the right’s program is to add new (dubious) ideas to the educational system (i.e., add intelligent design to the teaching of evolutionary theory) whereas the left’s goal is to censor and exclude investigation of certain (potentially explanatory) scientific hypotheses from the educational system. As a policy question, my sense is that most people ascribe to something like a “free marketplace of ideas” conceptualization of education, meaning that they would prefer to err on the side of including erroneous ideas if they are also countered by better ideas, rather than the exclusion of potentially true ideas. I personally would have no problem with excluding ID and including EP, but then I think that these investigations should be questions of science, not religion.
And a lame attempt at rejoinder from the Rainman, Myers:
And what a silly question! “Are there biological differences between the sexes?” I do agree that if any liberal pundit says no, he or she is as much an idiot as those conservatives who claim evolution didn’t occur. As for evolutionary psychology, I’m a biologist, and I’m in the camp that says it’s a load of poorly done hokum, so I’ll forgive Paul Krugman if he should think EP is junk; I’ll be less pleased if he says he agrees with it, but since EP does have many proponents in academe and is taught at places like Harvard, I’ll just have to roll my eyes and be understanding.
I love this sort of thing.