C. Rakesh,
From the first, Darwinism created in the popular mind its evil twin Social Darwinism. While Darwin was a real scientist - full of skepticism and respect for the unknown. Others, including those who might otherwise be called scientists, have used evolutionary theory to put the world in an imagined order with themselves almost invariably at the top. While people like Stephen Jay Gould accept the notion of randomness and unknown events, people like Steven Pinker try to fashion an evolutionary "fact" out of all their present observations.
This leads to idiotic efforts such as the search for the "homosexuality gene". There is one gene for blue eyes because blue eyes are simply an expression of a few pigments. One protein can easily affect such a system. Processes of the mind are obviously the result of hundreds, possibly thousands of genes governing the development of the brain, not to mention those genes that govern the reaction of the brain to various environmental cues. Not only that, but those genes are obviously forming something which is, by its very nature, plastic and adaptable. After all, If there is one clear adaptive advantage Homo sapiens has it's that our minds are adaptable.
The effort to assert that the way people act today reflects their genes and not our society is inherently normative. Underlying it is the claim that our society is a reflection of the "true" primeval human society. Therefore, how well a black child reads a "Dick and Jane" book is not a test of how alienation affects an individual member of a clearly social species but a test of intelligence. After all, "Dick and Jane" played an important role in our coming down from the trees, as everyone knows. Our society, in the minds of the Social Darwinist, is as pure as a laboratory. It's an odd assertion since the first thing a scientist removes from the laboratory (or tries to) are social or emotional factors that might cloud the interpretation of results. The Social Darwnist, however, is not checking man's behavior against nature or precise mathematical logic, but prejudice itself. His answers are baked in to the "experiment".
peace