Jonah: Saletan’s liberal creationism piece is certainly striking, in a liberal publication. Just as striking, as I pointed out yesterday, was Amy Harmon’s NY Times piece about getting her genome sequenced.

This stuff is busting out all over. Human-sciences geeks have been muttering for years that “the dam is bound to break sooner or later”; i.e. that the SSSM (Standard Social Science Model—nurture yes!, nature no!) will fall apart. Perhaps it’s really happening.

If so, the news is worse for liberals, who want to transform people, than it is for conservatives, who want to leave people alone. If much of what we are is stamped right there in the genome, there may not be much transforming to be done, though of course we can always kid ourselves: “walking south on the deck of a north-bound ship.”

Not that it’s all good for conservatives. As Steve Sailer has very wittily apothegmatized: “The Left believes in evolution, but not in biology; the Right believes in biology, but not in evolution.” It is daily more plain that both evolution and biology are the case. We’re all going to have to come to terms with that, or live detached from reality (often a pardonable choice, of course, though not a very sound basis for public policy).

In fact, the current hum-sci buzz is that a groundbreaking new paper is about to come out, authored by some big names in biology, arguing that not only has natural selection been at work through human history, it has actually been accelerating. I’ll report back when I see the paper—though the NY Times (of all outlets!) is so on the ball with this stuff, you’ll probably read about it there first.