How can liberals be both Darwinians and egalitarians?

I asked Steve Sailer:

It’s a truism on our side that there is a contradiction between liberals’ belief in Darwinian evolution, and their insistence that there can be no significant racial differences in mental abilities. But off-hand I don’t know of any occasion when a liberal has been directly confronted on this contradiction and replied. Do you know of any? Have you ever held a liberal’s feet to the fire on this issue yourself?

Mr. Sailer wrote back:

Yes, I asked Jared Diamond about it in a private conversation after his keynote speech at Mike Milken’s annual confab. We’d been talking pleasantly, but when I casually dropped the bomb on him—“But surely all these environmental differences among continents that you describe in so vividly in “Guns, Germs, and Steel” would select for cognitive and personality differences between continental groups over time?”—Diamond grabbed his stuff and jogged at about 5 mph out of the room saying over his shoulder that he’d never thought about any such thing.

I replied:

That’s funny. But he didn’t reply, and his feet weren’t held to the fire. So I must continue my search. Surely some liberal, somewhere, sometime, has been made to confront and to explain this obvious contradiction in the liberal belief system.

I can’t believe that I’ve never asked a liberal this question myself.

But maybe your experience with Diamond is the model. Maybe every time a liberal has been challenged on this point, he has simply walked (or run) away from the conversation, like Diamond, or, alternatively, became so exercised or enraged that his interlocutor was intimidated from pursuing the question further.

Steve Sailer writes:

Glaivester put it well:

Whenever someone denigrates evolutionary psychology, what they really mean is “I thought the whole point of evolution was just to deny God. I didn’t think it was actually supposed to tell us anything.”

In another blog entry, a reader provides a fascinating answer to my question.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 08, 2006 01:13 AM | Send