It's been called science wars but that doesn't seem quite apposite. It isn't that words are the only weapons, wars can be fought with words, but that it isn't a respectable, serious conflict so much as a theatrical adventure drama. In this scene John Holbo sings an aria accusing John Derbyshire of hypocrisy for pointing out that scientific progress is retarded and scientists are inhibited by fear of career damage when they have the temerity to study certain subjects that undermine liberal orthodoxy.

Furthermore, if A and B both come from a population that has been breeding mostly among themselves for a few hundred years, while C comes from a different, remote population, it is very highly probable that you could discover this situation just by examining the three genomes. And now you know why the datanaut keeps his identity secret. He, or more precisely his website, has already been denounced as "bigoted" by one of those people who find their fulfillment in life by denouncing other people as "bigoted."...

As my friend is toiling away with his nucleic acid molecules, at the other end of the scale population geneticists such as Luigi Cavalli-Sforza are mapping disease frequencies and patterns of inheritance across entire nations and continents. The work of each reinforces the other.

And all this work has to be done while keeping a sort of radio silence, because it is deeply unpopular. I know some of the scientists doing this work — people like the datanaut. They are just like other scientists I have known, driven by a kind of hypertrophied curiosity, by an innocent urge to understand the inner secrets of the world. In other respects, they are just representative human beings, with the normal range of human weaknesses and failings. To the guardians of our public morality, though — the media and political elites, the legal and humanities academics — they are very devils, peering into what should be kept hidden, seeking out things better left alone, working to secret agendas, funded by groups of sinister anti-social plotters — "bigots!" ...

The state our science is in right now, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit. No need to go committing professional suicide.

In the recitative Holbo alludes to accusations made earlier and elsewhere that Bush is conducting a war on science. He is supported by a boy's chorus.

I should also, at this point, reach over to my bookshelf and pull down a couple volumes and quote chapter and verse from canonical conservative thinkers about the dangers of the attitudes Derb praises - "driven by a kind of hypertrophied curiosity, by an innocent urge to understand the inner secrets of the world". That's bad, because it leads to rampant rationalism, scientism, Englightenment hubris. Conservatives are very big on standing out in front of that train and shouting halt! Respecting the inviolable mysteries of the human spirit, human nature, not mucking with such clinical presumption. This is, at any rate, the official line. Leon Kass, anyone? The wisdom of repugnance?

Holbo suffers from the same confusion noted in Hare Brained, mistaking caution for opposition and so failing to see that conservatives are just as interested in progress, in this case in the sciences, but that they are cautious, aware of the potential for both material and social damage.

Holbo pulls his punch a bit by trying to be even handed.

That said, I suspect there is a tendency - more on the right, where there are explicit arguments to support it; but also from the left - to assume that something ethically inconvenient couldn't possibly be true. It's an oddly Panglossian twist of thought. (If you asked people whether they can deduce the way the world is from the way it ought to be, mostly they would say no.) What do you think?

Is it more on the right than the left? Of course not, that's selective awareness of history, a result I suspect of listening to the boy's chorus in the opera house too much, neglecting to seek varied and diverse musical experiences. It's not just a matter of seeing operas at other houses, perhaps one with an adult chorus rather than a shrill boy's chorus, but also other musical forms.

Holbo seems to confuse conservatives with the right, a mapping that doesn't describe reality. There are conservatives on both the right and left, cautious souls who resist abrupt change and fear disruption. More progressive hares find the pressure to consider alternatives and consequences a bit tedious and have a tendency to incontinence. The conservatives of the left do have special worries about progress in the sciences that threaten their dogmas. It's not just their unscientific beliefs about human uniformity and the implications of genetic diversity, for example they also resist threats to natural theology. There is a long list of such beliefs. Conservatives of the right have a long list too that differs from the left significantly though there is some overlap.

Progressives would do well to understand conservatives of the left and right and accommodate them a bit to achieve better integration into the social mind. Conservatives would do well to reciprocate. No one is going to win, dominate the other for long, and focusing so much on these areas of contention distracts us from the many other issues on which there is better agreement. I know that this won't happen, at least not very much, since primates just love to squabble. There's a reason that opera thrives, adapting itself to the times - trading hauberks for horses and horses for space ships as time passes - but it is useful to suspend belief now and then and remember that it is just entertainment.