The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after anot… - Stephen Jay Gould

There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can offer comfort or solace in human terms—if only because our species is such an insignificant latecomer in a world not constructed for us. So much the better. The answers to moral dilemmas are not lying out there, waiting to be discovered. They reside, like the kingdom of God, within us—the most difficult and inaccessible spot for any discovery or consensus.

A proper understanding of biology and culture both affirms the great important of biology in human behavior and also explains why biology makes us free. The old equation of biology with restriction, with the inherent (as opposed to the malleable) side of the false dichotomy between nature and nurture, rests upon errors of thinking as old as Western culture itself. The critics of biological determinism do not uphold the equally fallacious (and equally cruel and restrictive) view that human culture cancels biology. Biological determinism has limited the lives of millions by misidentifying their socioeconomic disadvantages as inborn deficiencies, but cultural determinism can be just as cruel in attributing severe congenital diseases, autism for example, to psychobabble about too much parental love, or too little.

I have spent the last week as a nearly full-time reader of platypusology.