Another silly theory surgically dismembered.

Following the whole discussion on Intelligent Design, which is quite possibly the stupidest pseudoscientific theory since phrenology, I thought that it may be time to beat up a bit on the pseudoscientific left as well. After all, the religious right, while incredibly stupid and annoying, are way too easy and obvious a target, while the pseudoscientific left often get a free pass to continue bloviating.

What is the pseudoscientific left, then? The pseudoscientific left is that group of leftists who attempt to justify their leftist politics by appeals to empirical science and its methodology. Why is this problematic? Empirical science can only properly answer questions that are in some way connected to empirical events, and that can be demonstrated to be either true or false under carefully defined conditions. What is the textbook example of the pseudoscientific left? Keeping with the spirit of Sir Karl Popper, we can cite Marxism and psychoanalysis as the two definitive examples of pseudoscientific leftism.

Of course, the advocates of pseudoscientific leftism have moved well beyond trying to claim, as a matter of empirical science, that the dictatorship of the proletariat is inevitable, or that Kaiser Wilhelm staged his assault on Europe to take revenge on his father for having sex with his mother, or my personal favourite one, that the Unitd States federal government is insecure about the size of its metaphorical penis, as we can see in the despair over missile gaps during the cold war. (In addition to being flatly unverifiable and unscientific, these statements are just stupid.) They have begun to speak the language of "social science," trying to find some grounding for their beliefs outside of political philosophy and ethics.

The most egregious crimes against thought occur from perpetrators of evolutionary psychology. In a nutshell, this theory posits that all functions of the human mind can be explained in terms of serving some evolutionary function. The problem with this is that the answer is so vague that it can justify just about anything. And of course, it is used to justify just about anything. At this point, it is important to make a distinction. There are those thinkers like Stephen Pinker who postulate evolution as a mechanism for understanding the general structures and functions of the mind, who conduct reasonable science. And then, there are the ideologues.

As the Sokal Affair showed, there are any number of weirdos out there who try to read their political beliefs into natural science, and that we can almost always expect them to be from the postmodern left. The eruptions of idiocy occur when ideologues attempt to take evolutionary pschology and use it to determine micro-causality of specific actions by specific people, rather than providing general explanations of the human mind. A perfect example of this over-determining of evolutionary psychology occurs when radical feminists attempt to claim that men's minds are hard-wired to commit rape.

You would think that this is a joke. One would hope that this is a joke. But it's not. Any number of prominent feminists, like Andrea Dworkin, argued that men are biologically hardwired towards rape. These theories not only get discussed in college classes, but in 1994, actually got codified into law in the 1994 Violence Against Women Act.

So really, which group is worse, those who deny the validity of empirical science, or those who abuse it? I'm not entirely sure, but I know that both need to be taken out. The only people creepier than snake-handling religious nuts are those people who claim that we have an anti-serpentine module built into our minds because of the patriarchy.

Dheeraj