The politics of science

I almost missed this since it hit over the holidays. Maybe you did, too. The subject is the backlash against Jared Diamond’s books Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse. The original story A Question of Blame When Societies Fall ran in the NY Times on Christmas. (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/science/25diam.html?_r=1&oref=slogin).
Here’s an excerpt:

The backlash had been brewing since a symposium last year, “Exploring Scholarly and Best-Selling Accounts of Social Collapse and Colonial Encounters,” at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Jose, Calif. Although “Guns, Germs and Steel” has been celebrated as an antidote to racism — Western civilization prevails not because of inherent superiority, but geographical luck — some anthropologists saw it as excusing the excesses of the conquerors. If it wasn’t their genes that made them do it, it was their geography.

“Diamond in effect argues that no one is to blame,” said Deborah B. Gewertz, an anthropologist at Amherst College. “The haves are not to be blamed for the condition of the have-nots.”

Now Steven Pinker has weighed in, via a letter to The Times: (//topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/steven_pinker/index.html?inline=nyt-per:)

Re “A Question of Blame When Societies Fail” (Dec. 25): The conference designed to discredit Jared Diamond highlights the worst of what goes on in contemporary academia. The organizers’ failure to invite Mr. Diamond might be attributed to elementary rudeness were it not for a more damning explanation: they were afraid he would give the lie to their glib accusation that because his work is widely read, it must be oversimplified. These anthropologists’ beef with Mr. Diamond clearly has less to do with the content of his thesis than with the fact that he tries to understand why things happen rather than writing a morality play conforming to their lefter-than-thou politics. Steven Pinker,
Cambridge, Mass.

It is worth noting that Pinker, E.O. Wilson and now Jared Diamond have all come under attack for basically the same thing: saying in print that something other than human culture – usually genes, but in Diamond’s case geography – is at least partly responsible for the way things are in the world. This is an extension of the argument that all human behavior is socially determined and all we have to do to create a utopia is change the system. Pinker, Diamond and Wilson have all been attacked from both the left and the right for research that refutes that premise. If everyone hates them, might they be onto something?