Who makes war on science?

(When former Harvard President thought out loud about the differences between men and women, one female faculty member reported that she was about to faint, presumably into the arms of a rugged Professor Charming.)

Speaking last week to a couple of neuroscientists, I was intrigued by their confession that they feel greatly hampered by liberal, politically correct assumptions about what kinds of research can and can't be done. For instance, Harvard's Edward Wilson, our best living scientist/writer, has been scored by fellow academics for arguing (in books such as Consilience) that humans share a tendency with other pack animals to select strong, confident males as their leaders. Here Wilson is being ideologically neutral; but when his non-scientific peers have decided that humanity has "progressed" past such a view, his findings are considered invalid. Look, no one is saying Hillary and Condi can't run, or that no churches can ordain women. But it's long been pointed out that humans have tendencies, and to act as though the tendencies don't exist is to invite inevitable backlashes to the constraining shackles of PC. If you want to make change, first you have to accept the current reality, dear Doctrinaires.

Similarly, ideology affects how we study sexuality. We're now in a situation in which it is heresy for a scientist to explore whether homosexuality is a result of nurture rather than nature; yet when Nazis attempted to prove that homosexuality was a genetic matter in order to persecute gays, scientists proclaimed that it was most certainly not a genetic matter. The real issue is that scientists need to keep exploring the matter objectively while the larger society extends dignity and respect to gays, women, minorities and any other subgroup that comes under its microscope.

Science seems on the verge of making fascinating breakthroughs in understanding human nature and human potential, but as these neuroscientist colleagues have noted, people aren't quite ready for true empiricism, due to ideology.

Ultimately, I've always seen religious fundamentalists and dogmatic liberals as being two sides of the same coin: Both are so obsessed with how they feel things ought to be that they can't make peace with how things seem to be.