Evolutionary Programming

If you are a hack social science researcher who dabbles badly in pseudo-science and fatuous wrenchings of correlation into causation, you are living in a golden age.  Even Scientific American is running your drivel, and paying for it, with a straight face.

As we see in this piece – which attributes (white) men “stockpiling” guns to…

…well, pick your threadbare feminist trope:

The short, broad-brush answer to the first part of that question is this: men, who on average possess almost twice the number of guns female owners do. But not all men. Some groups of men are much more avid gun consumers than others. The American citizen most likely to own a gun is a white male—but not just any white guy. According to a growing number of scientific studies, the kind of man who stockpiles weapons or applies for a concealed-carry license meets a very specific profile.

These are men who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears. They tend to be less educated. For the most part, they don’t appear to be religious—and, suggests one study, faith seems to reduce their attachment to guns. In fact, stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. Taken together, these studies describe a population that is struggling to find a new story—one in which they are once again the heroes.

Of course, we’re in the post-logic era – where the last thing you should look for in Scientific Ameircan is “Science”.

Turn, instead, to actual science – the evolutionary science that so many on the left chant their fealty to when it’s time to vent their two minutes’ hate against Christian fundamentalists, but which nearly none of them supports when it comes down to the many areas where evolution kills and dresses out their sacred political cows.

American men – especially American men in the Red States – are buying guns because it fulfills the evolutionary imperative to protect what is yours, and those who depend on you – and a rational person sees that a gun is a useful tool toward that end.

Scientific American’s not going to pay for that insight, though.

4 thoughts on “Evolutionary Programming

  1. I’ve been reading up on, and watching videos of, Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize (Economics) winner from Princeton (we might be hiring him as a keynote). He and his wife, a fellow Princeton prof, were the ones who’s research highlighted the sudden rise in the white death rate in Midwest and west, beginning in 1997. Everyone seems to want to jump in with their interpretation of what this means, including Hillary and Bernie during the campaign. Prof Deaton pointed out in one interview, however, that most people seem to be overlooking that it isn’t just white middle-aged men; it’s white men AND women in these regions committing suicide or otherwise dying prematurely.

  2. Scientific American thoroughly beclowned itself with its attack on Bjørn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist in the January 2002 issue, in which the attacked Lomborg personally and professionally but did not actually refute the thesis of his book. They are so clearly beholden to the interests of the moneyed grantors of the scientific community that it would be naive to credit the veracity of any of their publications.

  3. Pingback: They’re Coming For A Lot More Than Your Guns | Shot in the Dark

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