One of the most influential social phenomena in the modern world is also one of the least understood. It is the widespread denial of the laws of biology and of the biological reality in which the human species has evolved. Although this might seem, to some, to be an academic point, denial of biological reality can have an immense impact on a person’s values and political opinions.
The reality is that human society and behaviour is primarily a biological phenomenon.
Psychologists today know that all the warring and aggression shown by humans in today’s society is little more than adaptations to a biological past where violence was commonplace. In a state of Nature, resources are scarce. Because of this scarcity, it can happen that multiple creatures desire them. When that happens, conflict is the inevitable result.
The same is true of co-operation and love. It’s been well established, ever since the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth, that it’s impossible to make sense out of human history without understanding that the human species evolved sociality for the sake of overcoming survival challenges.
Human society, then, is most easily understood as a web of mutual aid that increases the survival and reproductive opportunities of all of its members. The more cohesive groups drive out the less cohesive ones. The Rambo-style individualist doesn’t survive a state of Nature, because one serious injury will kill him. The tribe that works together, on the other hand, can easily recover from non-fatal injuries to individuals.
However, this neat and elegant explanation for much of the complexity of the world does not appeal to some. There are some out there who deny that human behaviour is analogous to primate behaviour, or that human behaviour has evolved to meet survival and reproductive challenges in the natural world, or that significant biodiversity exists within the human species, or that ethology and evolutionary psychology are valid approaches that can make accurate predictions.
This insanity is known as biology denial.
As it turns out, there are several reasons why a person would deny biological science.
One of the most common reasons is narcissism. This is particularly true when it comes to evolution by natural selection. Many people don’t like to think that they evolved from a common ancestor with today’s monkeys. They prefer to think of other animals as a different category to themselves, something categorically lower.
This is related to another major reason to deny biology – religious reasons. The fundamentalist religious nutter believes that Yahweh created the entire Universe, perhaps as recently as 6,000 years ago, and therefore there’s no such thing as evolution. As anyone who knows anything about biology can tell you, if you deny evolution you deny all of biology. This is the reason for the “never say dinosaur” strain of Christcuckery.
The main reason why people deny biology is for political reasons.
This is most obvious when it comes to the subject of race and IQ. Every primary school student learns that there are no two things within Nature that are exactly the same – no two snowflakes, no two cats, no two mountains, no two races. Because biological life evolves to fill different ecological niches, the characteristics of life within those niches is always different.
On the subject of race and IQ, however, the truth is just about the most politically incorrect subject that it’s possible to speak of. As per Ibram X. Kendi, one of the world’s foremost biology deniers, “the races are meaningfully the same in their biology and there are no genetic racial differences”. Anyone who disagrees is cancelled.
In reality, Blank Slate Theory (what Kendi is pushing) is a form of biology denial, because it denies the heritability of natural characteristics. This goes against the available evidence, which is why Steven Pinker was able to meticulously and comprehensively demolish it in his book The Blank Slate. That biology denial can reach pathological proportions is evident from the magnitude of the evidence in favour of heritability.
Because biology denial is political, it varies in intensity depending on the aspect of biology under discussion.
Some people deny it totally. One notorious case involves a university student who believed that the reason why men are stronger than women is because they are encouraged to play more sports as children. Most children figure out when very young that there are significant physical differences between men and women. That an adult might deny this is incredible.
The modern transexual fad is another example of biology denial. Some heterosexual men are getting called bigots for preferring biological women over biological men pretending to be women, as if there was truly no difference between the two.
That men are naturally more violent than women, on the other hand, is accepted without question. That this heightened propensity towards violence necessitates exclusion of males from female spaces is, likewise, accepted without question. Any degree of biology can be denied, but whether it is depends on who would benefit from the denial.
All are equal, but some are more equal than others.
The ultimate end effect of biology denial is delusion and suffering. As Philip K Dick wrote: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Westerners are now discovering that human biodiversity is a real thing, and that immigrants from low-IQ nations can’t simply be educated to behave exactly the same way as everyone else.
Biology deniers are so twisted up in their irrational thinking that they believe Asian immigrants to America to have white privilege. Asian students in America frequently find themselves having to get better grades than non-Asians to access the same privileges. Sometimes they need to get even better grades than white students.
Biology denial can only lead to inaccurate perceptions of reality, and thereby to a failure to accurately predict human behaviour, and thereby to political policy that harms instead of helps. Had it been widely understood that intelligence was genetic and that some human populations are an entire standard deviation or more less intelligent than whites, the mass immigration of cheap labour from the Third World to the West might never have happened.
At time of writing, biology denial is one of the greatest threats to our ability to wisely navigate the ship of civilisation through the challenges facing us.
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