Reality-based conservatism

[nancylebov]

David Frum concludes that same sex marriage doesn't damage heterosexual marriage.

Is there anything else in American politics which is dependent on as weak an argument as opposition to same sex marriage? The war on drugs is based on a wild over-estimation of government power, but it doesn't quite have that weird "I'll make up a definition and insist that it's realer than what can be observed" quality.

Link thanks to nwhyte.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

There is a recent study that reports that Gould's evidence is historically unsound; a new investigation actually got out all of those skulls, remeasured their volumes, and found that the error was minimal, and that to the extent that there was bias, it was toward reporting slightly higher volumes for African-American skull than the new measurements indicated. The Wikipedia article on Gould's book sums it up as "In another study, published in 2011, Jason E. Lewis and colleagues remeasured Morton's skulls and reexamined both Morton's and Gould's analyses, concluding that, contrary to Gould's claims, Morton did not manipulate his results to support his preconceptions. To the extent that Morton's measurements were erroneous, they were in the direction opposite of his supposed bias."

The actual paper, if you want to read it (it has open access), concludes that Morton did have racist biases, but that his published data were not affected by them: "Science does not rely on investigators being unbiased “automatons.” Instead, it relies on methods that limit the ability of the investigator's admittedly inevitable biases to skew the results. Morton's methods were sound, and our analysis shows that they prevented Morton's biases from significantly impacting his results. The Morton case, rather than illustrating the ubiquity of bias, instead shows the ability of science to escape the bounds and blinders of cultural contexts."

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Footnote: It was actually 308 skulls out of a sample of over 600; so not "all of those skulls."