Just my own observation. Seems like every other person I hear of who claims the earth is flat is a democratic supporter on most other issues. But, that may just be that it’s only the famous ones I hear about, and you’re average Jane FE’er is a conservative.
The thing is that flat earthers think there’s only 2 sides to everything.
Yep. And political spectrum isn’t left and right, it’s right- and up-side down.
Give it some time for the right wing to become the majority for those…
The right wing propaganda managed to get most of the anti-evolution, anti-climate science, anti-civil rights and now anti-vaccine crowd on their side.
The common thing all those items have is one of the most American of things: anti-intellectualism. Usually fringe ideas are being weaponized, and the results are becoming deadly thanks to one party making them a big part of their agenda.
Neil deGrasse Tyson was wrong, the Republicans are not learning when to stop from making the nation poor and dangerous to most by choosing ignorance.
https://billmoyers.com/api/ajax/?template=ajax-transcript&post=57534
BILL MOYERS: All right. According to the Pew Research Center, back in 2009, a comfortable majority of Republicans accepted human evolution as a fact. But now, a plurality rejects it. So I ask you, politics can trump science, can’t it?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, in a free, elected democracy, of course. You vote who you want on your school board. There is no provision in the constitution for the government to establish what’s taught in schools. That’s all relegated to the states. Hence, we speak state to state about what’s in their science textbook versus another.
And so that’s the country we’ve all sort of bought into, if you will, or born into. I think it’s a self-correcting phenomenon. Nobody wants to die, okay? So we all care about health. But above all else, among the Republicans I know, especially Republicans, nobody wants to die poor, okay?
So educated Republicans know the value of innovations in science and technology for the thriving of an economy and business and industry. They know this. If you put something that is not science in a science classroom, pass it off as science, then you are undermining an entire enterprise that was responsible for creating the wealth that we have come to take for granted in this country. So we’re already fading economically. If this, if that trend continues, some Republican is going to wake up and say, “Look guys, we got to split these two. We have to. Otherwise, we will doom ourselves to poverty.” And so I see it as a self-correcting, I don’t know when it’ll happen, but they know.
Well, that was back in 2014, Republicans still don’t know.
Republicans will choose power over anything else. As long as they are on top, they won’t care if the only constituents left are 4 bums roasting a rat over a burning garbage can. The important thing is that they’ll be in charge of who gets the best bits of the rat.
That’s been the story of power and human institutions since the day of the cave rat.
Pretty much the whole left is in denial about genetics. This article does a both-sides thing, but people who believe genes are everything really are an irrelevant fringe:
I’m loving how you’re running with this new narrative. One person in another thread tsks at your use of “heritable” in a context in which it questionably applies, and you and a certain cephalopod immediately misrepresent this as “OMG THE LEFT DON’T BELIEVE IN GENETICS”.
Have fun playing with your strawman.
Seriously? I’ve known this for decades. Read the article and see what sort of reaction Harden got. How many people in this thread do you think are willing to admit that genes affect educational attainment?
There’s nothing at all controversial in the idea that genes could affect achievement differences between individuals. The controversial (and baseless, evidence free) part is that some races have superior or inferior genes for intelligence.
Well then, why do you think SAT scores correlate with parental education level?
Not sure how this is remotely relevant, and I don’t know.
“The left is wary of the potential gross misuse of data relating to genetics and race” does not equate to “the left doesn’t believe heredity is significant in any circumstance”. And, ironically, it’s the historic misuse of data relating to genetics - and before that, other real or presumed physical and mental traits - to justify some quite horrific racism that has led to the “left” being so skittish about any new claims about race, genetics and achievement.
It’s rather understandable that when you have 99 previous examples of racist assholes claiming that this time they’ve got definitive proof that blacks are genetically inferior as long as you accept certain dubious premises and exclude certain other data and squint the right way when you look at the results and therefore any poor outcomes for black people are purely down to their own genetic failings and not in any way racism, you’re not going to immediately accept the 100th person as acting in good faith without considerable persuasion. And when they encounter someone wringing their hands at how terrible it is that the “left” won’t consider their findings outside the context of all the previous efforts and that this time they won’t pull away the football are being completely objective in their findings, well, it’d be silly not to suspect ulterior motives.
Heredity is significant in some areas to varying degrees. It’s rarely an all-or-nothing thing. And genetics of course matter at an individual or genetic sub-group level. Of course there are genetic factors involved in overall intelligence (by whatever metrics one chooses) as well as other physical traits, and these will (in a broad sense) aid or hinder people with that genetic makeup. And there are genetic factors involved in behavior, most notably with regard to mental health (a predisposition for depression can be hereditary, for example).
But - as has been pointed out over and over in an endless stream of race-realism threads here - phenotype is not genotype, and assumed genetic correlations based on physical characteristics are often spectacularly wrong. The amount of genetic diversity in sub-Saharan Africa is staggering, with some groups much more closely related to white Europeans than groupings from elsewhere on the continent. One can no more make generalizations about the genes of “black people” than one can about “Asians” or “white people”; in fact, less so for that reason. And race as a social subculture is a whole other layer of remove. So trying to ascribe certain outcomes for social subgroups wholly or primarily to genes is a pretty questionable endeavour. And admitting that is not “rejecting any influence of genetics”.
Why would that have more to do with genetics than with environment? Growing up in a household where reading, academic effort and attending higher education institutions are valued or at least the norm is likely to have a far greater influence than having a gene for reading.
If that was ALL the left was wary of there wouldn’t be problem. The issue is people on the left being wary of or simply ignoring the entire subject of genetics, and denying things that are well established within the discipline.
The article describes the attitude of the left:
Harden has spent the last five years thinking about Darity’s objections. As she put it to me recently, “When I reread his e-mails, it all struck me as very Chekhovian. Like, here are all the guns that are going to go off in Act V.” Harden understands why the left, with which she identifies, has nurtured an aversion to genetics. She went to graduate school in Charlottesville, the birthplace of Carrie Buck, a “feeble-minded” woman who was sterilized against her will, in 1927, under a state eugenics program sanctioned by the Supreme Court. But she does not believe that a recognition of this horrifying history ought to entail the peremptory rejection of the current scientific consensus. The left’s decision to withdraw from conversations about genetics and social outcomes leaves a vacuum that the right has gaily filled. The situation has been exploited as a “red pill” to expose liberal hypocrisy. Today, Harden is at the forefront of an inchoate movement, sometimes referred to as the “hereditarian left,” dedicated to the development of a new moral framework for talking about genetics.
She believed that the left’s standard-issue response was unhelpful. “This is a very Christian thing I’m about to say, but it reminds me of the episode where Jesus is tempted by Satan in the desert,” she told me, in Bozeman. “There’s just enough truth in Murray that if you say, ‘This is all wrong,’ you paint yourself into a corner where you say intellectually dishonest things. Jesus has to say, ‘This part is true, and this part is false.’ ”
And I have noticed over and over again that people on the left (maybe on the right too) are skeptical of genetic explanations, but accept environmental ones uncritically. Yet blaming parents for their children’s autism or depression (or homosexuality!) is not a benign thing either.
Why do you need to speculate? There is plenty of research on various aspects of this question. The fact you apparently don’t know about any of it is part of what I am talking about here. Race is not involved, but still you prefer to speculate than to do ten minutes of research. Safer not to know?
I thought it was the right who thought that homosexuality was a choice, not genetic.
(I’m not sure why I’m responding to a transphobic scientific racism proponent, but here we are…)
@Gyrate, see ^^^
You can’t talk about this stuff with people on the left because they believe genetics => scientific racism.
That’s a fucking lie. I’m saying you’re a scientific racist.
I have three kids – I know that all kinds of personality traits, skills, intelligence, musical talent, athleticism is passed down through genetics. You’re the one saying that somehow your skin color determines your intelligence. That’s because you’re a racist transphobe.
So, so close. You can’t talk to people on the right because they believe racism =genetic science.
Your scientific illiteracy is, thank Christ, not my problem.