The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. I… - Matt Ridley

In the 1970s a few brave “sociobiologists” began to ask why, if other animals had evolved natures, humans would be exempt. They were vilified by the social science establishment and told to go back to ant-watching. Yet the question they had asked has not gone away.
The principal reason for the hostility to sociobiology was that it seem to justify prejudice. This was simply a confusion. Genetic theories of racism, or classism or any kind of ism, have nothing in common with the notion that there is a universal, instinctive human nature. Indeed, they are fundamentally opposed because one believes in universals and the other in racial or class particulars.

The conclusions of both behaviour genetics and evolutionary psychology remain distinctly unpalatable to many non-scientists, whose main objection is a superficially reasonable argument from incredulity. How can a gene, a stretch of DNA ‘letters’, cause a behaviour? What conceivable mechanism could link a recipe for a protein with an ability to learn the rule for making the past tense in English? I admit that this seems at first sight a mighty leap, requiring more faith than reason. But it need not be, because the genetics of behaviour is, at root, no different from the genetics of embryonic development…The idea of genes for behaviour is no more strange than the idea of genes for development. Both are mind-boggling, but nature has never found human incomprehension a reason for changing her methods.

It’s time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy,’ said Albert Shanker, long-serving President of the American Federation of Teachers.