Evergreen

This blog last engaged with Dr Bret Weinstein last he said something worth engaging with, which concerned Christ. Weinstein is no theologian, we learnt. What he is, is a biologist. That's where his PhD is from, and he authored The Reserve-Capacity Hypothesis warning that the generational differences between humans and mice are now, at least 70 million years later, so large as to make animal-testing dangerous. Nowadays Weinstein is still making a name for himself in biology... sort of.

Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying taught at Evergreen until 2017. With that, he became a confessor, if he excuse the theologic jargon, for the American Right against the Woke. This opened up a revenue-stream from insecure White folk here. Since these Whites are, to put it mildly, not exactly the most literate Whites on this good Earth, and also are increasingly elderly so with money to burn; they are open to any charlatan peddling to Take The Fight To The Enemy. Like the antivax movement.

Keep in mind that Weinstein and Heying ended their academic careers at Evergreen, not at (say) Johns Hopkins. By academic standard, this is the D-list, even before its student mob raised the place to our attention.

Off topic of vaccines, Weinstein and Heying have a new book out, parleying Weinstein's admitted expertise (however dated) in human evolutionary biology with respect to chronic disease. Unfortunately for them, the Guardian found another biologist to review this book, one Stuart Ritchie of King's College London (which was high B-list, last I looked; I recall Imperial College as the A-list in that metroplex). Ritchie rates this book to be arrogant and riddled with errors. I got a kick out of the URL, that the book is "Sciencey"; the Grauniad, it seems, has headline-editors now.

Which is not to say that the old rag has yet found a copy-editor. Ritchie cannot resist the temptation to pull in the antivax stuff as a means to impugn the book by way of impugning its authors. He also whinges that the lab-leak hypothesis is still unproven, which I suppose it is... in the same way as the Standard Model of Particle Physics is still unproven. (Here's lately the Lancet, soliciting a retraction.) May I suggest that Ritchie take the Tube over to the Imperial College mathematics department to discuss with them what "proof" means?

When it is all said and done, we once again have two tribes of ogres hurling insults at one another between the pines. Weinstein and Heying will learn no lessons from this, and neither will their marks. If "scientody" and "scientistry" can be differentiated, let us now differentiate the biologist from the biologer, and let us hope these two find their way back.