Web Letters: Only Words

I have been an ethologist (or evolutionary psychologist) for thirty years. Yet somehow I have never learned of our "determined campaign to reduce human beings and their accomplishments to insignificance," in Alan Wolfe's words. I have known only dedicated scientists trying their best to elucidate human nature. As Wolfe acknowledges, most of us are liberals who are not trying to use science to promote some ideology--but appaently we are being duped into gathering data to support some illiberal agenda.

I don't know where to begin, to refute such nonsense. Evidently Wolfe does not understand that science is supposed to avoid subordinating its findings to its ideology--remember Galileo? If instead science were to subserve ideology, it would cease to be science. This is what the Nazis did.

George Scialabba grasps this point, writing: "If science really and truly discredited liberalism, then the only honest reponse would be: so much the worse for liberalism." In other words, if science were to reveal that a particular ideology was based on incorrect beliefs about human nature, then the ideology ought to be revised. The science could only be refuted by contrary evidence, not by ideological assertions or attacks on science.

Since we Darwinians are often assailed by the right as well as the left, we must be doing something significant, an encouraging thought for us. The evolutionary perspective on human behavior is growing, thanks to people more open-minded than Alan Wolfe.

Glenn Weisfeld
International Society for Human Ethology

Detroit, MI

Mr. Scialabba, in his criticism of Purdy's Iraq war comments, commits the unfortunately common fallacy of mind-reading. No one can read minds; we can only make inferences from a persons words and actions. To claim that the primary actors in the Iraq war have one set of pernicious motives among a constellation of possible ones is to claim that one has godlike powers of perception that no human being has.

Jed Fribley

Oxford, MS

Mr. Scialabba is always good to read, showing the reader an enduring critical view that takes down the numbing Tory autism of Alan Wolfe and the godawful gee-whiz Golden Book autism of young prof Purdy--that paragraph of his chosen for dissection by Scialabba is not just "piffle" but downright odious.

Yet at the end, Scialabba rapturously opines that we are this close to a "participatory political culture," with the Internet and whatnot. How wrong can an observer be? Americans are an atomized, extremely lonely people, reducing their social anxieties to little carpings and whingings in comments sections. We blather on, with the supersystem in full control and socialism in view only in the long-abandoned, decrepit urban union meeting halls that generations ago hosted workers, people, the actual sound of "democracy."

Martin White

Salem, NY

George Scialabba takes issue with Alan Wolfe's assertion that Christopher Hitchens (in God is Not Great) "just barely" acknowledges the right to free belief, while Sam Harris (in The End of Faith) rejects it wholesale. Claiming that "anyone who has read" their books will see the falsity of Wolfe's assertion, Scialabba goes on to say that what Wolfe really "means" is that the new atheists merely show an unbecoming lack of "respect" for people of faith.

But Wolfe appears to have read these books more closely than Scialabba. While Hitchens and Harris do show a lack of "respect," they hardly stop there. Harris, in particular, does indeed (as Wolfe asserts), at least implicitly, call for the suppression of free belief in The End of Faith: "It is time we recognized that belief is not a private matter," Harris writes, going on to say that "certain beliefs are intrinsically dangerous" (p. 44). A page or two later, revealing the authoritarian instincts clearly underlying his argument, he asks, "Should Muslims really be free to believe that the Creator of the universe is concerned about hemlines?" (p. 46). This is no less chilling for its vagueness, and clearly implies that belief is a legitimate object of regulation.

That sort of thought control, of course, is what synagogues, churches and mosques were designed for--which goes some way toward explaining why these writers are so often described as "secular fundamentalists."

Later in the book Harris offers a lengthy defense of torture à la Dick Cheney, who of course is still in the news, after having his world view soundly rejected by the electorate.

While Scialabba raises valid questions in his review, especially about Wolfe's treatment of evolutionary psychology, he badly misses the mark on the new atheists.

Colin Wells

Westport, NY