The War on Human Nature
Source: npiamerica.org
Darwinian Evolution revolutionized the natural sciences. The social sciences have been immune for too long.
Enormous strides have been made in recent years in unraveling the evolutionary basis of human nature. Among other thing, this work totally undermines the Behaviorist view that everything human is environmentally determined. Behaviorism, for decades, hindered serious progress in the social sciences; it is well that it be put to rest.
Unfortunately the pervasive influence of Cultural Marxism and the tactics of its adherents have prevented evolutionary approaches from spreading widely in the human sciences. This is apparent in the persistent rejection of any discussion of the biological basis of human racial differences, nowhere more so than in issues relating to IQ. This rejection in unfazed by the fact that there are few, if any, constructs in the social sciences more powerful than IQ. It correlates with and predicts an extremely wide range of social phenomena including, but not limited to, school and economic performance, criminal behavior, differences in wealth between nations, and demographic groups within nations. Among research psychologists this is well known and not particularly controversial. Equally well-known is that, based on decades of research, IQ is, in large measure, genetically determined.
Among elite opinion makers, however, the importance and predictive power of IQ is denied, as is the idea that it is genetically based. This denial is completely at variance with 100 years of research on IQ and the consensus opinion among research scientists. For example, the American Psychological Association (APA), in response to the controversy surrounding The Bell Curve, created a task force to examine the questions raised, and in 1996 acknowledged the validity and reliability of IQ tests. In addition, the task force also endorsed the idea that IQ is, to a significant extent, heritable, though it remained agnostic on the issue of genetically determined racial differences.
The practical value of IQ is indicated by the reliance in recruitment by two of the nation’s most important institutions upon measures that are, for all intents and purposes, IQ tests. Colleges make extensive use of SAT and ACT scores in the admission process. Both of these tests correlate very highly with IQ tests. Likewise, the United States armed forces use the AFQT (Armed Forces Qualifying Test) in selecting recruits. The test is based on performance on four subtests—Word Knowledge (WK), Paragraph Comprehension (PC), Arithmetic Reasoning (AR), and Mathematics Knowledge (MK). Given the similarity of the abilities measured by the AFQT and standard IQ tests, it is hardly surprising that the two are highly correlated. Both college admissions tests and the AFQT are regularly used by researchers as reliable proxies for IQ tests.
Nevertheless, most intellectuals eschew the idea that important human characteristics and abilities are genetically determined. The reasons are plain, since for at least from the late 1960s, the social sciences and humanities have been dominated by self-conscious egalitarians. The journalist John Derbyshire has called one of the central beliefs of such academics the Dogma of Zero Group Differences, or DZGD; it holds that there there are no inherent human characteristics; human nature is a social construct. In this view, human behavior is culturally determined and the product of social and class conditioning. It follows that, barring certain inconvenient social distinctions, all people must be equal in their abilities and temperament; at the very least, they possess equal human potential. Therefore, any differences in economic or social status are the result of the social conditioning, and more often than not, attributed to the exploitation of the powerless by ruling elites. The powerless are, in this view, induced to accept their oppression because they have been indoctrinated by the ruling class into thinking that their inferior status is the necessary result of their inferior abilities. Put another way the working class is induced to accept the false understanding (false consciousness) that modern societies are meritocratic rather than organized and manipulated to benefit those in power.
Evolutionary explanations undercut this view since, from the evolutionary perspective, a substantial number of human characteristics must be determined by genes shaped by thousands of years of natural selection. Given the demonstrable reality of natural selection and the resultant evolution that it creates, the notion that the human mind is a “blank slate” is simply untenable.Nevertheless this conclusion is rejected by most all of the left-right spectrum, including many of those who claim to believe in evolution.
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