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When I discuss Critical Race Theory with leftists, I often make the point that, while I'd rather public schools not encourage students to speculate on the causes of racial disparities, I'd be amenable to a compromise where systemic racism is taught as one possibility, alongside cultural and biological explanations.
The response to this (when it's not an accusation of racism on my part) is that I'm just like the creationists who wanted their psuedoscience taught alongside evolution. This is kind of true, in that I am asking that ideas I like be taught alongside ones favored by the academic establishment. However, when you take social desirability out of the equation, HBD is more similar to evolution because it literally IS just applied evolution, and systemic racism/CRT/disparate impact/wokeness/social justice/anti-racism/whatever label we're using this week is analogous to creationism in that we have little direct evidence it exists, but we assume it must exist because the current state of affairs would make sense as its outcome, even though it would also make sense as the outcome of other processes.
I doubt that I'm the first person around these parts to say that the Pastafarian explanation for gravity (an invisible, non-corporeal Flying Spaghetti Monster physically pushes us onto the ground) has no less evidence supporting it than the woke explanation for half-Asian, half-white children having a mean IQ between that of Asians and that of whites (stereotype threat impacts them half as much).
I also doubt that I'm the first person around these parts to draw a comparison between creationists who acknowledge microevolution while denying Darwinism to leftists who acknowledge within-group heritability while denying between-group heritability.
However, a thought occurred to me today that frightened me, and my hope is that when I voice it, you will unanimously dismiss it as ridiculous, because if it's in any way true, then I'm going to be devastated.
What if the truth value of Darwinism had little, if anything, to do with its acceptance by the academic establishment, and the falsehood of intelligent design had little, if anything, to do with its rejection by the academic establishment? If truth was that important, we'd expect CRT to be seen as equivalent to creationism, but it's not.
You know the Schmitt meme about how all disputes can be reduced to friend vs. enemy? Well.. maybe that's what happened with the debate over evolution in public schools. Maybe evolution was pushed specifically because the religious right objected to it, and not because it was real. That evolution actually WAS real was incidental at best.
Promote evolution and CRT because they hurt the right. Eliminate intelligent design and HBD because they hurt the left. This is how a Schmittposter would describe what happened, and maybe that literally is what happened.
Please tell me I'm just mindkilled. I'm not being rhetorical here. I would find that reassuring.
We can test evolution in real time. How can evolution not be real if antibiotic resistance is real? If bacteria evolve, then so should everything else, just more slowly. I personally can't see how eyes might evolve for the first time but I accept that it happened. For that matter, I can't see how an AI can distinguish between male and female eyes with 97% accuracy given only photos of the iris, yet that too has happened. Reality doesn't need to sound plausible, it only needs to be true.
Indeed, you must agree that evolution is true since you follow HBD. It makes too much sense. We know genetics is a thing, we can edit genes and they control traits singly or collectively(though we can't perfectly link every trait to a genes). We know Pacific Islanders tend towards obesity. We know Europeans aren't going to outrun blacks in a sprint at the Olympic level. We know certain ethnicities have a weakness to alcohol, others are better able to handle certain diseases. Why else did Europeans struggle conquering Sub-Saharan Africa until the mid 19th century? Intelligence follows suit - we can observe the results (blacks collectively having fewer STEM Nobels than Ireland, promiscuity, STDs, school results, criminality, national strength, the pleasantness/unpleasantness of many US cities). I conclude that Europeans and Asians are better at running civilizations than blacks are. There are gradations in 'what precisely do you mean by European, Asian and blacks (what about Igbos)' but broadly speaking, this is a natural conclusion from analysing history. If there are ethnicities who are taller or shorter, fatter or thinner, faster or slower, better or worse at resisting disease, tolerant or intolerant of alcohol there should also be people who are more or less suited to civilization.
I also agree with your Schmitt interpretation though. CRT is there to help the left and hurt the right, as is racism generally. But that doesn't mean evolution could be wrong.
Off topic, but this is my area so I can't resist.
The key thing to understand about the evolution of complex biological systems is that they didn't just pop up fully-formed. Instead, they evolved through a series of small changes to simpler systems. The changes which worked better than the original were passed on to the next generation, and the next generation had a more functional but more complex version of that system. The story of the eye's development goes something like this:
Billions of years ago, a cell contained some retinal. Retinal is a simple molecule that has a special property: when light hits it, one of its double bonds can switch between the cis and trans conformations. The cell can then extract energy (in the form of a proton gradient across a membrane) by flipping it back. Being able to harvest energy from light was a massive advantage, and this adaptation spread like wildfire. An explosion of thriving life turned the world purple.
Once cells had retinal, their internal chemistry would change depending on whether they were exposed to light. This allowed cells to adapt their behavior based on the presence or absence of light.
Fast forward to multicellular life. Organisms could save energy by having cells express only the proteins they needed for their specific functions. The PAX genes allowed for specialization of cells based on their location, and clusters of photosensitive cells evolved into the first eye spots. If an animal had two eye spots on different sides of its body, it could tell the direction of light, helping it orient which way was up.
Over time, eye spots became cup-shaped, allowing them to distinguish light from more directions. The deeper the cup, the better it could do this. Eventually, the cups closed over at the top, turning into pinhole cameras with images projected onto a layer of photoreceptors at the back. Organisms like nautiluses can see blurry images with eyes like these.
Finally, lenses made of clear proteins with different refractive indices came along. Selective pressure favored organisms that could see better, pushing for the development of lenses—specifically, lenses shaped to focus light more precisely onto the retina.
So that's how eyes evolved for the first time—through steady selective pressure stacking small adaptations, one after the other, all the way from basic photosynthesis to the human eye.
Reality doesn't need to sound plausible to be true, but it usually does end up making sense once you understand the driving mechanisms.
Except quantum physics, or so I am told!
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Interesting, thanks for the explanation.
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