Liberals deny science, too, Chris Mooney reports:
The new study, by University of Texas-Brownville sociologist Mark Horowitz and two colleagues, surveyed 155 academic sociologists. 56.7 percent of the sample was liberal, another 28.6 percent was identified as radical, and only 4.8 percent were conservative. Horowitz, who describes himself as a politically radical, social-justice oriented researcher, said he wanted to probe their views of the possible evolutionary underpinnings of various human behaviors. “I wanted to get at the really ideological blank slate view, it’s sort of a preemptive assumption that everything is taught, everything is learned,” he explained.
Sure enough, the study found that these liberal academics showed a pretty high level of resistance to evolutionary explanations for phenomena ranging from sexual jealousy to male promiscuity.
In fairness, the sociologists were willing to credit some evolutionary-style explanations. Eight-one percent found it either plausible or highly plausible that “some people are born genetically with more intellectual potential than others,” and 70 percent ascribed sexual orientation to “biological roots.” Meanwhile, nearly 60 percent of sociologists in the sample considered it “plausible” that human beings have a “hardwired” taste preference for foods that are full of fat and sugar, and just under 50 percent thought it plausible that we have an innate fear of snakes and spiders (for very sound, survival-focused reasons).
Yet the study also found that these scholars were less willing to consider evolutionary explanations for other aspects of human behavior, especially those relating to male-female differences. Less than 50 percent considered it plausible that that “feelings of sexual jealousy have a significant evolutionary biological component,” for instance, and just 36.4 percent considered it plausible that men “have a greater tendency towards promiscuity than women due to an evolved reproductive strategy.” While it is hard to be absolutely definitive on either of these issues (we weren’t there to observe evolution happen), evolutionary psychologists have certainly argued in published studies that people exhibit jealousy in sexual relationships in order to ensure reproductive fidelity and preserve the resources that come from a partner, and that men are more promiscuous because they are not constrained in how often they can attempt to reproduce.
Ok, so 19% are insane.
How exactly did intelligence evolve if there are no related genes?
More insanity.
Caused by genes != variations must be due to genes. Presumably they would argue that all relevant variants have gone to fixation in living humans, and so there is no genetic variation which influences *variation in the population* (==”some people are born genetically with more intellectual potential than others”).
Much the same way that the reason people grow legs is due to “related genes” but the number of legs each person has is unrelated to their leg-genes, as opposed to, say, environmental effects like “tried to jump in front of a train”.