Duke est desipere in loco [it is pleasant to act foolishly from time to time — a line from Horace]. - Stephen Jay Gould

We grasp at the straw of progress (a desiccated ideological twig) because we are still not ready for the Darwinian revolution. We crave progress as our best hope for retaining human arrogance in an evolutionary world. Only in these terms can I understand why such a poorly formulated and improbable argument maintains such a powerful hold over us today.

Revolutions usually begin as replacements for older certainties, and not as pristine discoveries in uncharted terrain.

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.