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As a liberal who grew up near California’s Bible Belt in Orange County, I was brought up to believe that the enemies of reason were the Christian creationists who taught that the world is 6,000 years old and that biologists can’t explain the evolution of complexity without invoking a divine creator.
While I still believe creationists are wrong, I have come to see their progressive academic counterparts as a bigger problem. I’ll call them the New Creationists. They use Darwin as a bludgeon against the old creationists, but then reject scientific conclusions when they conflict with their political convictions.
For example, there is more skepticism on the political left about the safety of vaccines and genetically modified food, despite a scientific consensus to the contrary. This may be because people who see nature as embodying all that is good and pure are disgusted by attempts to alter it.
More troubling than skepticism about life-saving medicine and food, at least for an academic like me, is the widespread disdain among progressives for people who entertain the possibility that there are biological differences between groups, including races and sexes.
The famed Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues in his book The Blank Slate that while biological differences explain some of the observed differences in the behavior and outcomes of different groups, it has become taboo to openly discuss that in most academic journals and college classrooms.
Read full, original post: The New Creationists
