Several bloggers have shared my puzzlement at the stated topic of last week’s AEI panel (the full two and a half hours of which are on the AEI website under “past events.”) Rand Simberg at terrestrial.com, for example, says:

“This seems like kind of a strange symposium:

“[Quoting the conference ad] ‘There is a growing debate among conservative thinkers and pundits about whether Darwinian theory helps or harms conservatism and its public policy agenda. …’

“Doesn’t it matter whether or not the theory is valid? Is it only something to be discussed in terms of its effects on conservatism (or for that matter progressivism)? If it turns out that it somehow is harmful to traditional morality and family life (I’m not sure that the empirical evidence bears this out, even if it does in theory), does that mean that it shouldn’t be taught in science classes, even if it’s the best scientific explanation for the fossil record (and human behavior)? What is the point of this symposium?”

[Derb] That was exactly the thrust of my opening remarks. The issue of whether Darwinism–or any other large theory about the world–is good for conservatism, or for liberalism, or for me, or for you, or for society at large, should alway be secondary to: Is it true? The truth/falsehood, on the one hand, and the utility/inutility to any particular social program, on the other, are independent of each other.

There are in fact (I pointed out) four logically tenable positions:

A. Darwinism is true, and good for conservatism.

B. Darwinism is true, and bad for conservatism.

C. Darwinism is false, and good for conservatism.

D. Darwinism is false, and bad for conservatism.

I have never heard any creationist address possibility (C), though the support of useful falsehoods for social purposes has a long and respectable history–at least back to Plato–and is perfectly tenable on practical political grounds. Atheist and Jewish conservatives, for instance, believe Christianity to be false, but they are well-disposed towards it anyway, because they (well, most of them) think it is good for conservatism.

Supposing Darwinism to be true, though–which is what I do suppose–than, as I said in the debate: “If Darwinism is bad for conservatism, so much the worse for conservatism.”

In fact, the truth value and the good-for-conservatism value being independent, the answer to the question posed by the debate topic is:

“Sometimes A, sometimes B.”

A lot of the findings of modern biology confirm conservative intuitions–about innate differences between men and women, rooted in biology, for instance.

In other cases, results from the human sciences, rooted in standard-model biology (“Darwinism”), make conservatives unhappy. The results we kicked around here a few months ago, for instance, about parenting suggest that, ceteris paribus, a child raised by two homosexual parents will be no less likely than a child raised by two heterosexuals to turn out just fine. Conservatives don’t like that.

It seems to be the case, though, so we must put up with it somehow.

Reality, as someone once said, is the stuff that doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.

Conservatives should be realists. Wishful thinking is for children and lefties. Big, fat, solid, scientific consensuses that have survived decades of inquiry, like the one that exists on evolution, give us our clearest insights into reality.