My alien eye, and I wish I could pluck it out, leads me far astray, into back corners of the Internet. Here is one journey, that started out as a defense of the late Stephen Jay Gould and led into the dark recesses of the human heart.
It started with this post in an article on Gould's mistakes in The Mismeasure of Man.
Gould's style of thinking has consistently fallen in with the late 20th century California trend to revisionism in all fields....of the sort seen from anthropologists who have decided that Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal intermingled to become one and the same; from historians who have concluded all white European males to be the source of all evil in civilisation, denying that all societies on this planet (save a few Pacific islanders) engaged in warfare, torture, and slavery. Multi-cultural political correctness has formed the over-arching ethos of my generation, inspiring scientific conclusions that range from biased to embarrassingly silly.
Is it just me, or is this little post ladled with all sorts of conservative subtext?