In his chapter on politics, Pinker basically argues that the traditional left is shown by the new theories of human nature to be, well, wrong. While I find some of his arguments quite convincing - "Nice theory, wrong species," (thank you Mr. Wilson) is a conclusion about socialism I came to seperately a couple of years ago - I have a problem. I don't like the right wing. I tend to find the views of right wingers more bigoted, narrow minded, short sighted, etc, and although free market capitalism when expressed by it's advocates does seem a 'nice theory,' the reality is somewhat different - probably due to human nature. Therefore, without knowing that many of the details, I am declaring myself a darwinian leftist. I'll get round to getting that book he mentions sometime. Any thoughts?

Culture is Lamarkian, not Darwinian. And there is nothing wrong with making a moral judgement that the brutality of Capitalism should be ameliorated by compassion, legislated compassion if necessary. What is mistaken is to say we should treat people a certain way because human nature is a certain way; this is an ethical fallacy in any case, but it is worse when the presumption about human nature is dead wrong.

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Science is neither a philosophy nor a belief system. It is a combination of mental operations that has become increasingly the habit of educated peoples, a culture of illuminations hit upon by a fortunate turn of history that yielded the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived. E.O.Wilson