Standing with Isis

I subscribe to a stubborn rule against voting for politicians that do not believe in evolution, and the prospective Republican presidential candidate for 2012, Bobby Jindal, might put my rule to the test. “Jindal's position on creationism and intelligent design reveals a colossal break with reason that we cannot accommodate again in our elected officials,” the Huffington Post’s Rationalist-General Jeff Schweitzer recently warned. “Denying the validity of evolution is no different than claiming atoms do not exist or that the DNA is not genetic code, or that al Qaeda was in Iraq before our invasion. Jindal's position is untenable.”

It’s hard to fumble the defense of evolution, but Schweitzer did it: The hideous Mr. Movies louse-turned-drone of the prophet Muhammad and leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, entered Iraq to kill infidel Kurds well before the invasion (and recall that under the Baathists getting into Iraq without permission was as hard as getting out).

This bagatelle aside, Schweitzer is more right than he knows. Indeed, Americans shouldn’t “accommodate” politicians that make “a colossal break with reason.” That rules out Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison. Like all Muslims he believes Muhammad is the messenger of God. Beliefs can’t get much more “untenable” and obviously false than that.

But I’d add a more direct equivalence to Schweizer’s list: denying evolution “is no different than” denying evolution’s role in creating racial differences in brain power. Will Schweitzer vote for someone that denies that European descendants might have more brain power than African descendants? Of course! Otherwise who’d be left on the ballot? Liberals that condemn the study of innate brain differences are as naïve and backward as creationists. Alas, I might have to settle for Jindal after all.

The Star Tribune boldly ran an LA Times article last month describing a new brain theory: Ashkenazi Jews have inheritable genes that are especially susceptible to certain diseases, and evolution compensated by encoding in these same genes a brain power boost. For my money, creative brain power doesn’t get any better than Spinoza’s The Ethics, Einstein’s physics, Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man, and Bruce Spingsteen’s Thunder Road – all Jews. My personal affinities aside, the Ashkenazi ethnic group contributes a disproportionately high number of scientists and CEOs, and scores better on IQ tests than Northern European and African descendants.

Cue the murmurs of the aghast: “Neil Risch, director of the Institute for Human Genetics…finds the matter so offensive he can barely discuss it without raising his voice. ‘Do they have genetic theories about why Latinos and African-Americans perform worse academically?’”

Why yes, see the 1994 book on the inheritability of intelligence, The Bell Curve, which was condemned with populist Swine flu fury. Liberals fear an inevitable link between “innate differences” and eugenics. Yet The Bell Curve’s libertarian authors wanted the government out of demographic engineering. It was the all-star progressives of yore (e.g. John Maynard Keynes and Margaret Sanger) that proposed the demented utopia-striving racial programs.

A more legitimate objection is that the truth hurts. A Jewish scientist withheld findings similar to the recent Ashkenazi gene study for fear of an anti-Semitic reception. Spanish philosopher Miguel De Unamuno wrote stories about this fight between faith in feel-good lies, and sheer reason. In one of his parables a village wiseman explains his religious charade to a young doubter: “The truth, Lazarus, is perhaps something unbearable, so terrible, something so deadly, that simple people could not live with it!”

John Milton’s Aeropagitica speech had more confidence in truth’s utility. He recalled Scripture’s comparison of truth to a stream: “if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.” Truth is like the mangled body of the Egyptian God Osiris, taken from his virtuous wife Isis: conspirators have scattered it in a thousand pieces across the world, and “ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as dare appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them.”

To defend the search for the truth of innate brain differences in less abstract terms: it could save lives. If brain size and structure differ between races, it might help if brain surgeons know it. Understanding these differences helps neuroscientists map the brain. Perhaps the new brain pacemakers that dramatically control the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease could be customized to complement patients’ genes. So if religious fanatics oppose funding stem cell research, what do we call the people that oppose fully researching neurotechnology?

I suspect that when it comes to some truths, Schweitzer (like Unamuno) doesn’t mind “a colossal break with reason.” As for me, I stand with Isis.