Alexander Riley is Professor of Sociology at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
Few topics are as controversial as behavioral genetics, at least to the partisans of political correctness. We are learning more every day about the effects of genes on human traits and the makeup of human societies. Intelligence has a genetic component, and hierarchies in modern, meritocratic societies reflect some stratification by intelligence. In her recent book The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Paige Harden makes flawed assumptions about the nature of moral agency and generalizes about how people value social status.
Date posted: 2022-04-10
The greatest challenge to my teaching is the relativist, anecdote-dominated view of knowledge many of my students have absorbed by the time they enter my classroom. Too many of their teachers embrace the view that relativist, subjectivist, and ultimately personal experiential knowledge is the only kind available to us - or at least that it trumps other kinds of knowledge.
Date posted: 2022-01-23