Friday, November 6, 2009

A Fundamental Miss-understanding of Darwin gets Corrected



In an Earlier post here, entitled Sean M Carroll Re-writes The Big Bang Theory a piece about Cosmologies attempt to tell of the story of the history of the universe and how that story influences our identity in the age of science, I opined:
Without a scientifically based story opportunists, snake oil salesmen, and the fear-mongers of the ultra-conservative right begin to gain traction amongst young people, the ill-informed and addle-minded. Intelligent Design is an example of this - it is essentially disguised racism and attempts to obfuscate Natural Selection which when understood, remains a progressive idea when applied to issues of equality.

(NOTE: A fundamental miss-understanding of Darwin persists in popular America thought; the phrase, 'survival of the fittest' is used out of context in discussions about class and economics - and misrepresents On the Origin of Species. That, for another article.)


Well someone has beaten me to it (again), namely Anne Innis Dagg, a professor at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, (no wonder)who's new book "Love of Shopping is Not a Gene: exposing junk science and ideology in Darwinian Psychology" takes my kernel of a notion and writes a whole book on it.

BoingBoing reviews the book and in the first paragraph, Cory Doctorow paraphrases me from my obscure blog a month ago:
Dagg, a biologist/geneticist at the University of Waterloo, identifies Darwinian Psychology as a nexus of ideological pseudoscience cooked to justify political agendas about the inevitability of social inequality, especially racial and sexual inequality.

It's a small planet, and if we're monkeys I hope I'm the hundredth, so we'll all soon be thinking like Professor Dagg.



mh

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