Do (self-proclaimed) Darwinists hate anthropologists?

Jon Marks at Savage Minds seems to think so, and puts forth his ideas using rather strong language:

The movements – Social Darwinism, eugenics, Darwinian segregationism, sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology – share very little in terms of their particular content. But they do share two notable attributes: (1) the claim to speak on behalf of Darwinism, and (2) a rhetoric explicitly repudiating the field of anthropology.

In Consilience (1998), E. O. Wilson actually wrote, “Ignorance of the natural sciences by design was a strategy fashioned by the founders [of social science], most notably Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Franz Boas, and Sigmund Freud, and their immediate followers.” Now, a decade later, he’s come around to realizing that group selection actually does happen in humans, so I guess all that reductionist posturing from the early days was mainly blather (Quarterly Review of Biology, 82:327, 2007).

Anyway, I’m sitting around on February 12 – “Darwin Day” – reading “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins and his acolytes in Darwinian atheism also don’t care too much for anthropology. Since they believe that religion is only for children and morons, and anthropologists tend to think that religion is for everybody – that is to say, anthropologists believe in cultural relativism – Dawkins has us in an enemy camp. He used to ask, “When you actually fly to your international conference of cultural anthropologists, do you go on a magic carpet or do you go on a Boeing 747?”

And I’m thinking to myself, “If this schmuck speaks for Darwinism, isn’t that an argument against evolution?”

But you know what’s worse? There are even bigger schmucks out there claiming to speak for Darwin. After all, that’s who James Watson was invoking last autumn, when he wrote that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.”

So here is my proposition. Scientific racism is worse than un-scientific creationism. After all, nobody was ever killed or maimed or sterilized in the name of creationism.

So as we look towards the upcoming Darwin anniversary (bicentennial of birth, 150 years since the Origin) maybe we need to think less about the creationists – the external enemies – and think more about the erosion from within. The creationists can’t embarrass science; only scientists can do that. Darwin always has ventriloquists behind him, putting thoughts and words in his mouth, and somehow the job always falls to anthropologists to keep his name unsullied.

That last sentence is a bit intriguing though: are anthropologists the only self-proclaimed Darwinists who do not put their thoughts and words in his mouth? So, I guess, I need to modify my title, by asking, do (self-proclaimed — non-anthropologist) Darwinists hate anthropologists?!

Anyway, an interesting thought — take a look!

Tags: Darwinism