Political Affairs Magazine, an online journal devoted to Marxist thought, asks what it is in our society that fosters "Adult Resistance to Marxism." A neat synthesis of cognitive science and the graybeard theory of class conflict:

Children learn by trial and error and learn from their mistakes. They are natural born scientists using the empirical method and induction (as well some deduction after many experiences.) They learn the same way all mammals do. The scientific method is simply a more sophisticated extension of this "naive" common sense approach to understanding the world. They also have basic moral intuitions such as fairness and empathy which, if they wereproperly educated, would reinforce socialist ideals of equality and non-expoitation in adulthood.

I'm no evolutionary psychologist, but this doesn't quite pass the smell test (blame it on the dog, comrade). Kids are cruel and vicious as much as they are contrite and empathetic. To think that a pinko scribe has not had the experience of being shoved in a locker or wedgied when he was but a nestling of a revolutionary!

Nor is the scientific method an innate heuristic: Bacon wouldn't have had to invent it if it were.

Human beings formulate assumptions first, then cultivate facts to uphold those assumptions, but they're quite immune to contradictory evidence. (Being so immune in science is called fudging your data.)

That's why it's so seldom that you'll have an hour-long debate with someone that ends with one of you declaring, "You're right, I'm wrong."