A lot of you probably already heard about or saw Will Saletan's nauseating foray into 'black genetic inferiority' pseudo-science a week or so back. On the key issue, I think Matt Yglesias, Henry Farrell and Brad DeLong have said about all that need be said and about as well as it can be said.

But there's another aspect to this embarrassing episode that's been rattling around my head.

Saletan writes ...

If this suggestion [i.e., the genetic mental inferiority of Africans] makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you're not the first to feel that way. Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution. Their faith in human dignity rests on a literal belief in Genesis. To them, evolution isn't just another fact; it's a threat to their whole value system. As William Jennings Bryan put it during the Scopes trial, evolution meant elevating "supposedly superior intellects," "eliminating the weak," "paralyzing the hope of reform," jeopardizing "the doctrine of brotherhood," and undermining "the sympathetic activities of a civilized society."

The same values—equality, hope, and brotherhood—are under scientific threat today. But this time, the threat is racial genetics, and the people struggling with it are liberals.

Evolution forced Christians to bend or break. They could insist on the Bible's literal truth and deny the facts, as Bryan did. Or they could seek a subtler account of creation and human dignity. Today, the dilemma is yours. You can try to reconcile evidence of racial differences with a more sophisticated understanding of equality and opportunity. Or you can fight the evidence and hope it doesn't break your faith.

This is quite a statement. The theory of evolution is the cornerstone of modern life sciences. Its central claims have been abundantly confirmed in fields ranging from genetics to paleontology, geology, cosmology and archeology, among others. To Will, to deny the reality of evolutionary theory is on a par with resistance to claims that blacks are innately intellectually inferior to whites -- claims based on studies that range from the rankest pseudo-science peddled by open racists to work on the margins of mainstream science that have never been accepted by most experts in the relevant fields.

But the two are pretty much the same, since right-wing inability to come to terms with modernity and modern science must be equalled by something on the other side of the aisle.

It's an equation of almost unparalleled absurdity. I'm not sure I've ever seen a more nonsensical example of that TNR-originating disease of facile contrarianism for its own sake.

(ed.note: In fairness to TNR, I would say the current crew running the place suffers from the disease far less than past editorial teams. So there's some unfairness in labeling it thus. But like many syndromes and maladies the disease can't help but carry the name of the location of the original outbreak.)