Who does not swing by Arts & Letters Daily, if not daily at least often?

Here is the sparkling Denis Dutton, the force behind it:

What surprises me about the resistance to the application of Darwin to psychology, is the vociferous way in which people want to dismiss it, not even to consider it. Is this a holdover from Marxism or religious doctrines? I don’t know. Stephen Jay Gould was one of those people who had the idea that evolution was allowed to explain everything about me, my fingernails, my pancreas, the way my body is designed—except that it could have nothing to say about anything above the neck…

This position is unsupportable. We know there are built-in spontaneous features of the human personality, conspicuously present, for instance, in the evolutions development of speech. But other aspects of the personality as well, one which have to do with the arts, are also universal, appearing in childhood with little or no prompting, or simply arising "naturally," so it seems to us, as features of social interactions.

I cannot understand why there still is so much resistance among academics to such ideas. If you want to be a one-dimensional determinist, go ahead and make it all "culture." My side of the argument isn’t trying to make it all "nature," make it all genetics. Human life is lived in a middle position between our genetic determinants on the one hand and culture on the other. It’s out of that that human freedom emerges. And artistic works, the plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Jane Austen, the works of Wagner and Beethoven, Rembrandt and Hokusai, are among the freest, most human acts ever accomplished. These creations are the ultimate expressions of freedom.

It makes no more sense to claims that our artistic and expressive lives are determined only by culture, as it does to say that we are determined only by genes. Human beings are a product of both.

Why can’t we get over our post-Marxist nostalgia for economic or cultural determinism and accept human reality as it actually is?

Accept reality? Blimey, what an idea.