It’s an amusing list of the various ways skeptics can be dickish. I’ve noticed that there’s been a massive eructation of YDIW skeptics lately, myself.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
It’s an amusing list of the various ways skeptics can be dickish. I’ve noticed that there’s been a massive eructation of YDIW skeptics lately, myself.
A while back, Larry Arnhart wrote an article claiming that evolution supported libertarianism. I was invited to write a reaction essay, which I did, and I argued that evolution supported diversity, and that it was silly and inappropriate to claim it for a single narrow human political movement.
I’d suggest that my criticisms must have stung, because Arnhart has now written a rebuttal to my rebuttal, except that he seems to comprehend neither what I said nor the basics of evolution, so I think everything I wrote sailed right past him on a cloud of confusion. Especially since his response was to accuse me of being a creationist.
Stop laughing. He’s serious. He repeats this bizarre claim several times.
But I was surprised when I saw his argument that evolutionary science cannot explain morality and politics at all. He conceded that Charles Darwin himself was a classical liberal. But he insisted that this had nothing at all to do with his evolutionary science, because science cannot explain the moral life of human beings, which is completely unconstrained by natural evolution.
When, of course, my essay said nothing of the kind. I said that Darwin’s personal political preferences did not privilege his favored views as somehow having the blessing of four billion years of evolution, because there have been many contributors to evolutionary theory — and I named Kropotkin, Dobzhansky, Lewontin, and Crick — with different views. Nowhere do I claim that biology makes no contribution to morality and politics, or that our moral history has been unconstrained by evolution. There’s a difference between saying, “your political philosophy is not the ultimate goal of evolution” and “your political philosophy is independent of history, experience, and biology”. I said the former, not the latter.
It gets crazier. Apparently, now I’m in the pocket of the Pope.
Pope John Paul II agreed with Wallace in his claim (in a 1996 statement) that evolution could account for the human body but not for the human soul as expresed in morality, politics, and religion. To explain that, John Paul insisted, we needed an “ontological leap”–some kind of miraculous transformation that could not be explained by science.
Oddly enough, it seems, Myers agrees with Wallace and Pope John Paul about this “ontological leap,” because Myers seems to believe that human beings have moral and intellectual powers that are expressed in political life that are completely unconstrained by evolutionary nature. As he says: “To suggest that the science of evolution supports a specific view of the narrowly human domain of politics is meaningless. Evolutionary theory supports the existence of ants and eagles, lichens and redwood trees, and finding an evolutionary basis for any human activity is trivial.”
No, there was no magic leap. Our natures are not independent of our biological properties. I’m saying that libertarianism is as much a necessary outcome of evolution as petticoats. That does not imply that petticoats are independent of biology.
Ah, libertarians. They’re the crazy, deaf, bellowing uncle of the great family of political perspectives.
Of course! This would work! What do you need to prevent pregnancy? Why, an extract made from babies, of course — 100% pure organic Brazilian rainforest babies.
Unfortunately, it won’t work for atheists, because you have to consume the babies homeopathically.
There is a wonderful program in place at a bible camp in Massachusetts: the children get phone calls…from God. He tells the kids to proselytize for him, to be just like Jesus, and if they’re really, really good, that he’ll swoop in some day on his magic sleigh and harvest their souls to bring to heaven with him (OK, that last bit is an extrapolation). I like this plan, though. It sets the kids up with concrete expectations that will be shattered later, and then there’s always the wonderful day when Mommy and Daddy explain that that really wasn’t God, it was just Pastor Greg pretending to be the voice of God, just like he does every Sunday.
This program is so good that it has won Atheist Ireland’s really, truly True Believer™ of the month award.
What is it about Elsa Lanchester and The Bride of Frankenstein? She’s the “it” girl of the 20th century, and here’s a whole gallery of Bride images. I have a favorite, for some reason.
Let’s do commercials for the 100th entry in the thread of agony!
(Current totals: 10,935 entries with 1,110,958 comments.)
Here’s a swami with his magic breathing advice for coping with throat cancer. How these guys can dispense bogus medical advice and not get lynched by angry cancer patients is a mystery.
At least he looks really goofy when he curls his tongue and breathes. Now if only there were some yogic enchantment that could do something about his creepy squink eye…
Roy Peter Clark wrote a book about language which was savaged viciously on Language Log — in other words, the poor guy was publicly ridiculed and his work rudely trashed. He couldn’t possibly have learned anything from that, could he? He has a guest post now in which he describes his reaction.
In brief, the criticism, some of it harsh and uninformed, helped me straighten out some crooked thinking about language, a process that resulted in the recent publication by Little, Brown of my book “The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English.” On August 22, Ammon Shea gave the book high marks in the New York Times Book Review, calling it “very much a manual for the 21st century.”
I write this on Language Log not to tell you that my success has proved some of your commentary off the mark. Quite the contrary, I have often said now to friends and colleagues that had I not been roughed up by the Language Loggers, I could not have developed the muscle tone to write the book.
Hmm. Who would have thought that maybe the response to criticism was dependent on the attitude of the recipient? Oh, gosh. Me.
