The Erasmus path in science

I just received a copy of Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left. As I now have some marginal time I’ll probably be reviewing it in concert with the The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science–and Reality, in the near future. Of all the intellectual activities in my life my striving toward a better appreciation of the shape of reality which science outlines for us has always been of the first rank. I had a “STEM” orientation before I even knew what that stood for. But I part from the culture of science as it is in that my politics are not with sympathy with the Left. In most cases this is not relevant, but it does loom relatively large in the number of instances where normative considerations conflict with scientific possibilities. I have expressed my frustration with this in the past. In general I believe that most scientists are less open to genetic dispositions in behavior than they would otherwise be because genetic dispositions seem rather unsavory on normative grounds (that is, the Zeitgeist of Left-liberalism in the …