Jeebers. Everybody seems to be commenting on this thing. Here's Yglesias's take on a recent infamous Derbyshire article:

I don't know if John Derbyshire is being factually accurate when he states that certain kinds of genetic research are impeded by a chilling effect that can basically be laid at the door of liberals. He says researchers worry that if they do something that turns up race-correlated differentials or whatever, that they'll be pilloried. I can't say if that's true or not, but it has a certain plausibility to it. What doesn't have much plausibility is the notion that this sort of thing is really a bigger deal than the right's effort to expunge the main bit of science underlying all of contemporary biological research. But conservatives elites could hardly complain about that sort of thing.

In case this was unclear, by "the main bit of science underlying all of contemporary biological research" I mean the theory of evolution, and not anything as mundane as embryonic stem cells which, though certainly promising, are tangential to a lot of what one might want to do. If we don't teach evolution to the next generation of kids, it's hard to see how any biological or medical research could possibly go forward in this country.

First, the bad thing. Derbyshire doesn't deserve the attention; it's yet another paranoid pseudoscientific crank inventing a conspiracy to suppress science that supports his delusions. In this case, it's scientific racism, but I've heard exactly the same line of baloney from creationists. For example, Jonathan Wells cites a mysterious, unnamed scientist in China who says, "In China we can criticize Darwin, but not the government; in America, you can criticize the government, but not Darwin." I have a very strong suspicion about who Derbyshire's mysterious hot-shot young researcher in computational genomics is, and he's a crackpot, one of the new breed of so-called "scientific" racists, a follower of Herrnstein and Murray and Jensen and Shockley and others of that vile ilk. Quite contrary to the claim that it is risky to follow that path, these people seem to do quite well. There's always a market for someone willing to make stuff up to please bigots.

I will also note that the claim that "knowledge about human variation" is being suppressed by wicked, politically correct Leftists who think it is bigotry to mention that different people have different alleles is nonsense. Read Nature and Science; great stuff about pharmacogenetics and genetic variation revealed by the Human Genome Project gets published all the time and is enthusiastically received, even by this hard-core left-winger.

Second, the good thing: as Yglesias notes, it is absurd to accuse the left-wing of crippling science when it is the right-wing that is actively, vocally, and unashamedly behind all the anti-evolution crap that's going down in school districts across the country. Instead of carping about his fantastical delusions of leftist anti-science, maybe he and his cronies ought to spend some effort fighting the real anti-science being peddled by his side of the political aisle. Except, of course, that Derbyshire has admitted to being completely ignorant of biology and not caring much about the creationist attemps to stifle the teaching of evolution. Ah, but not teaching that there is a scientific basis to the beliefs of the Ku Klux Klan…now that is worth fighting against!