Fred Reed wants to talk biology. In the process he calls out Razib Khan for booting him out the mailing-lists. It all reminds me of the great air-clearing I did a decade back concerning certain figures of "the counterjihad".
I read this piece a couple days ago but felt it would be too important just to dash off a response in the couple hours between sundown and bedtime.
Since maybe 2000 or so I have contracted an allergy to the Just Asking Questions genre including to any comment that ends "just sayin'". Often this line of argument is not done in good faith. The tone is passive-aggressive. Such an author has his answers already. You could argue for your side (as if your whole body of work wasn't already doing that) but you're not convincing him. He'll just be back in a few weeks to Jusk Ask the same Questions. The aim isn't to debate the site's hosts, but to hit the peanut gallery - on the occasion the hosts (being human) say the wrong thing, are out looking at a telescope, or are just watching Big Bang Theory or whatever. And to top it off these duplicitous liars present themselves as honest men cowering in fear as they plead before the powerful lords... "but I'm just saayyyin!!"
Another rhetorical technique is the farrago. There is never just the one question. Such an article will contain multitudes; Reed, here, raises six. Relevant or not, already answered or not, he who would answer one of them is obliged to answer all of them. This takes time. And the time spent chasing rabbits is time not spent on more productive pursuits. Especially if the rabbits are gaily hopping about in some wholly different pasture, like (most egregiously) question #4 here. That's on abiogenesis. This precedes biology by definition. This therefore lies as far outside our scope as the multiverse lies outside our universe's spacetime.
The most despicable of such rhetorical ploys is that sly ad-hominem, that personal attack from the shadows: Alinskyism. The author doesn't argue against Crick, Watson, and Mandel; he doesn't even argue against Khan. He argues against a strawman, inextricable from the earliest discoveries, whose name has been attached to more odious movements elsewhere. I suppose an antiHindu ideologue could be found to rant against the swastika and "Aryanism". In the biological debates the devil is "Darwin". Sometimes "Huxley", "Galton", and "eugenics". Personalise the target, isolate him...
Given all that, Fred Reed pretends not to understand why his Questions (which are, characteristically, repeated, despite his promises) had wearied his hosts. Reed has been silly on other issues, like on extralegal migration. So I am not all that concerned with arguing with Reed himself. I can however wrestle with this one essay.
There's a serious point buried in Reed's latest apologia. Start with the assumption that some serious basic questions remain in your science. How do we know the difference between a mop-up operation and a need to rethink the entire science? Before you answer too quickly, I recommend reading a bit about category theory in mathematics. Sometimes we do have to rethink it all. We pick a model first, then see how it stands up.
For biology we do own a model: the modern biological synthesis of Darwin, Galton, and genetics. We ignore abiogenesis (=Reed#4) so as to work with biology as it has evolved from Life Form Alpha, whatever that is or was. For the intelligent-design debate, which is philosophical, we can propose a meta-model, of how debates are conducted in those other nonmathematical sciences. Take physics. We can discuss a model that (so far) works, against a model that has failed.
I propose the search for the Higgs Boson as such an example; its general context being the Standard Model. Once electroweak theory was proposed, which required a field to generate the required masses for other bosons, we just needed to find those other bosons. For electroweak this was done in 1983. After 1983 we didn't need to find the Higgs itself. We kept at it anyway and found other particles on the way, like the Top Quark. As the experiments kept validating the Model, it was getting more and more likely that we'd find little more than "vanilla Higgs". Against that, there was the model of Newtonian motion and gravity, which Einstein a century ago overturned.
But note what happened in either case. The physicists did not fall back into some mediaeval Islamic dismissal, "G-d wills it". They took the uncharted parts of the Standard Model as a challenge to go look. Same with planet Mercury's non-Newtonian motion and gravity.
Amongst Fred Reed's actual-biological questions is #2, on homosexuality. I'd like to Pounce On and Seize this, as an illustration of how even when Reed tries science, he fails at it. The Modern World would like us just to accept this condition; for our adolescent children, to join it, under the tutelage of much older men, like Shepard Smith. Fred Reed would rule out heredity. Greg Cochran has proposed a disease. Fred Reed then asks, where's the virus. Those of us looking in from the outside, serious about the science, would like to find whatever causal agent there be. Sometimes disease-agents are bacterial; sometimes even fungal. Homosexuality might be a crack in the mind more than in the brain.
For our purposes here, though, we don't care. We just know that we've been learning a lot about the associations surrounding this abnormality. We would not have made this progress if - like Reed - we'd spent our time sniping at the researchers and muttering Deus Lo Volt to ourselves.
I could go on to address Reed's other questions, like #5 on the kidney's nerves and other deleterious biological factors - which one can explain, with Elaine Morgan, as Scars Of Evolution. But I won't, because we've already done down two of his six bleatings here, and it's all boring, and has already been answered, despite Reed's asinine efforts not to hear the answers. He'll be back with the same bad examples in a fortnight or in a month. He's done it for years and there's no stopping him.
When I conceived writing this response two nights back, I was willing to give Fred Reed the benefit of the doubt, that he honestly wanted some answers. Then, I wondered if he was just trolling. But now I understand his type. Fred Reed is a Gamma Male - the hero in his own story.
All the rest of us can do is not to enable him, and to work hard not to be like him. And, with Razib, to keep him out of our comments.
And PS: Darwin was right. About multicellular lifeforms anyway. At a lower level of life, about united coalitions.
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