Tag Archives: creationism

Arthur Jensen

Outside the sphere of psychometrics and differential psychology, my attitude toward [Stephen Jay] Gould was largely positive. I admired and supported his battle against creationist efforts to demote Darwinian thinking in high school biology courses and textbooks. When it comes to human variation in psychological or behavioral traits, however, Gould himself seemed to be a creationist rather than an evolutionist. I regard differential psychology as a branch of human biology, and I would have hoped that Gould did also. Too bad he never wrote an autobiography, which might have explained the origins of his antipathy toward psychometrics, the g factor, and their relevance to advancing the scientific study of human differences. That would have been most interesting.

Arthur Jensen, in Frank Miele, Intelligence, Race, and Genetics: Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen, Boulder, Colorado, 2002, p. 156

Craig Stanford

[T]he antioevolutionary forces of creationists have all along argued loudly that biology has nothing whatever to teach us about humanity. They put their money where their mouths are, fighting a relentless and often successful political battle to cast a shadow over evolutionary fact in the name of theological politics. Their ranks in the fight against science have been joined, ironically, by some scholars in the social sciences and humanities who consider scientific theories to be just social constructions of reality, rather than descriptions of reality itself. They reject the idea of a human nature for altogether different reasons than creationists do, feeling that science may be just a political tool of white male scientists. These scholars tend to be horrified by people like me, who look for intersections of biology and culture, and often find them. Since the most important questions in the human sciences arise from these intersection points, I find the anti-biological approach, whether outright creationist or clothed in the intellectual garb of science-is-just-another-culture, to be appallingly shallow and intellectually nihilist.

Craig Stanford, Significant Others: The Ape-Human Continuum and the Quest for Human Nature, New York, 2001, p. xiv