ABSTRACT
The science wars about the reality and legitimacy of many things have raged for centuries and have provided endless grist for pundits of all stripes. Aristotelians and Platonists, with their different temperaments and visions, have fought each other about everything from the nature of the universe to the nature of human beings. The science wars over gender and race were fought for decades like the trench warfare of the First World War with very little ground being lost or gained by either side. Gender and race are only the most recent theaters of engagement. A remarkable number of arguments against studying gender and racial differences have been arguments from fear, a logical fallacy that philosophers call argumentum ad metum. Arguments from fear easily slip into the moralistic fallacy, the lesser-known sibling of the naturalistic fallacy. Extreme political liberals are most likely to submit to the moralistic fallacy.
