Not so very long ago, commentators used to talk about human evolution. No, not actual, Darwinian evolution. This evolution was more along the lines of wishful thinking. In the 19th century, Marx and his followers rejected so-called “bourgeois morality” (which properly recognized that humans, if freed from all restraints, act horribly) in order to tout the view that humanity was naturally decent. Not long after, science, rather than Christianity, became the new religion of the European left. Unlike either Catholicism or the various denominations of Protestantism, both of which believe in some form of original sin, science offered and continues to offer for some an answer for all social ills. Like the Parisian bank robber-cum-terrorist Raymond Callemin, nicknamed “Raymond-la-Science,” today’s happy-faced progressives’ diatribes go something like “science tells us to . . .” [insert left-wing program here]. This isn’t really liberalism per se; it is instead more akin to H.G. Wells’s “scientific socialism.”