From "How the Mind Works" by Steven Pinker

PSYCHOLOGICAL CORRECTNESS
The evolutionary psychology of this book is a departure from the dominant view of the human mind in our intellectual tradition, which Tooby and Cosmides have dubbed the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM). The SSSM proposes a fundamental division between biology and culture. Biology endows humans with the five senses, a few drives like hunger and fear, and a general capacity to learn. But biological evolution, according to the SSSM, has been superseded by cultural evolution culture is an autonomous entity that carries out a desire to perpetuate itself by setting up expectations and assigning roles, which can vary arbitrarily from society to society. Even the reformers of the SSSM have accepted its framing of the issues. Biology is "just as important as" culture, say the reformers; biology imposes "constraints" on behavior, and all behavior is a mixture of the two.
The SSSM not only has become an intellectual orthodoxy but has acquired a moral authority. When sociobiologists first began to challenge it, they met with a ferocity that is unusual even by the standards of academic invective. The biologist E. O. Wilson was doused with a pitcher of' ice water at a scientific convention, and students yelled for his dismissal over bullhorns and put up posters urging people to bring noisemakers to his lectures. Angry manifestos and book-length denunciations were published by organizations with names like Science for the People and The Campaign Against Racism, IQ, and the Class Society. In “Not in our Genes”, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kainin dropped innuendos about Donald Symons' sex life and doctored a defensible passage of Richard Dawkins' into an insane one. (Dawkins said of genes “They created us, body and mind"; the authors have quoted It as "They control us, body and mind.") When Scientific American on behavior genetics (studies of twins, families, and adoptees) they entitled it "Eugenics Revisited," an allusion to the discredited movement to improve the human genetic stock. When the covered evolutionary psychology, they called the article “The New Social Darwinist,” an allusion to the nineteenth-century movement that justified social inequality as part of the wisdom of nature…….

In 1986, twenty social scientists at a "Brain and Aggression" meeting drafted the Seville Statement on Violence, subsequently adopted by UNESCO and endorsed by several scientific organizations. The statement claimed to "challenge a number of alleged biological findings that have been used, even by some in our disciplines, to justify violence and war":

'It is scientifically incorrect to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors.'

'It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature.'

'It is scientifically incorrect to say that in the course of human evolution there has been a selection for aggressive behavior more than for other kinds of behavior."

"It is scientifically incorrect to say that humans have a "violent brain.""

"It is scientifically incorrect to say that war is caused by "instinct" or any single motivation. . . . We conclude that biology does not condemn humanity to war, and that humanity can be freed from the bondage of biological pessimism and empowered with confidence to undertake the transformative tasks needed in the International Year of Peace and in the , years to come."

What moral certainty could have incited these scholars to doctor quotations, censor ideas, attack the ideas' proponents ad hominem, smear them with unwarranted associations to repugnant political movements, arid mobilize powerful institutions to legislate what is correct and incorrect? The certainty comes from an opposition to three putative implications of an innate human nature.

First, if the mind has an innate structure, different people (or different classes, sexes, and races) could have different innate structures. That would justify discrimination and oppression.

Second, if obnoxious behavior like aggression, war, rape, clannishness, and the pursuit of status and wealth are innate, that would make them "natural" and hence good. And even if they are deemed objectionable, they are in the genes and cannot be changed, so attempts at social reform are futile.

Third, if behavior is caused by the genes, then individuals cannot be held responsible tor their actions. If the rapist is following a biological imperative to spread his genes, it's not his fault.

Aside perhaps from a few cynical defense lawyers and a lunatic fringe who are unlikely to read manifestos in the New York Review of Books, no one has actually drawn these mad conclusions. Rather, they are thought to be extrapolations that the untutored masses might draw, so the dangerous ideas must themselves be suppressed. In fact, the problem with the three arguments is not that the conclusions are so abhorrent that no one should be allowed near the top of the slippery slope that leads to them. The problem is that there is no such slope; the arguments are non sequiturs. To expose them, one need only examine the logic of the theories and separate the scientific from the moral issues.
My point is not that scientists should pursue the truth in their ivory tower, undistracted by moral and political thoughts. Every human act involving another living being is both the subject matter of psychology and the subject matter of moral philosophy, and both are important. But they are not the same thing. The debate over human nature has been muddied by an intellectual laziness, an unwillingness to make moral arguments when moral issues come up. Rather than reasoning from principles of rights and values, the tendency has been to buy an off-the-shelf moral package (generally New Left or Marxist) or to lobby for a feel-good picture of human nature that would spare us from having to argue moral issues at all.
The moral equation in most discussions of human nature is simple: innate equals right-wing equals bad. Now, many hereditarian movements have been right-wing and bad, such as eugenics, forced sterilization, genocide, discrimination along racial, ethnic, and sexual lines, and the justification of economic and social castes. The Standard Social Science Model, to its credit, has provided some of the grounds that thoughtful social critics have used to undermine these practices.
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The confusion of scientific psychology with moral and political goals, and the resulting pressure to believe in a structureless mind, have rippled perniciously through the academy and modern intellectual discourse. Many of us have been puzzled by the takeover of humanities departments by the doctrines of postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstructionism, according to which objectivity is impossible, meaning is self-contradictory and reality is socially constructed. The motives become clearer when we consider typical statements like "Human beings have constructed and used gender—human beings can deconstruct and stop using gender," and "The heterosexual/homosexual binary is not in nature, but is socially constructed, and therefore deconstructable." Reality is denied to categories, knowledge, and the world itself so that reality can be denied to stereotypes of gender, race, and sexual orientation. The doctrine is basically a convoluted way of getting to the conclusion that oppression of women, gays, and minorities is bad. And the dichotomy between "in nature" and "socially constructed" shows a poverty of the imagination, because it omits a third alternative: that some categories are products of a complex mind designed to mesh with what is in nature.
Mainstream social critics, too, can state any absurdity if it fits the Standard Social Science Model. Little boys are encouraged to argue and fight. Children learn to associate sweets with pleasure because parents use sweets as a reward for eating spinach. Teenagers compete in looks and dress because they follow the example set by spelling bees and award ceremonies. Men are socialized into believing that the goal of sex is an orgasm. Eighty-year-old women are considered less physically attractive than twenty-year-olds because our phallic culture has turned the young girl into the cult object of desire. It's not just that there is no evidence for these astonishing claims, but it is hard to credit that the authors, deep down, believe them themselves. These kinds of claims are uttered without concern for whether they are true; they are part of the secular catechism of our age.