Significant others: the ape-human continuum and the quest for human nature

[T]he antioevolutionary forces of creationists have all along argued loudly that biology has nothing whatever to teach us about humanity. They put their money where their mouths are, fighting a relentless and often successful political battle to cast a shadow over evolutionary fact in the name of theological politics. Their ranks in the fight against science have been joined, ironically, by some scholars in the social sciences and humanities who consider scientific theories to be just social constructions of reality, rather than descriptions of reality itself. They reject the idea of a human nature for altogether different reasons than creationists do, feeling that science may be just a political tool of white male scientists. These scholars tend to be horrified by people like me, who look for intersections of biology and culture, and often find them. Since the most important questions in the human sciences arise from these intersection points, I find the anti-biological approach, whether outright creationist or clothed in the intellectual garb of science-is-just-another-culture, to be appallingly shallow and intellectually nihilist.