"My potential salvation...must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our … - Stephen Jay Gould

Thus, physics and astronomy relegated our world to a corner of the cosmos, and biology shifted our status from a simulacrum of God to a naked, upright ape.

The solution, as all thoughtful people recognize, must lie in properly melding the themes of inborn predisposition and shaping through life's experiences. This fruitful joining cannot take the false form of percentages adding to 100—as in “intelligence is 80 percent nature and 20 percent nurture,” or “homosexuality is 50 percent inborn and 50 percent learned,” and a hundred other harmful statements in this foolish format. When two ends of such a spectrum are commingled, the result is not a separable amalgam (like shuffling two decks of cards with different backs), but an entirely new and higher entity that cannot be decomposed (just as adults cannot be separated into maternal and paternal contributions to their totality).

The enemy is not fundamentalism; it is intolerance. In this case, the intolerance is perverse since it masquerades under the “liberal” rhetoric of “equal time.” But mistake it not.