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John Harshman has a couple of times accused me of the tu quoque fallacy. Where is he now, when such an admonition would be appropriate? (Probable answer: He doesnât pay much attention to your posts.)
Itâs true, I generally donât. Perhaps everyone could tone it down a bit. Still, I do find you to be highly defensive and excuse-making. Maybe you could tone that down too.
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Iâll take your advice under consideration.
But why do you need that, when you can magically tell me whatâs in them, without even reading them?
In other words you want to forget the entire embarrassing business.
Have you noticed how when people make statements (and provide you with links), you require them to supply you with sources and show you complete texts, and when you make statements, you also require other people to go and locate the resources themselves to check that what you have said is accurate?
But I didnât demand that you read them. I listed them and pointed out that you can check them for yourself if you like. However I donât require you to read them. So thatâs patently false.
I am not complaining about your failure to look at them. I objected to you telling me about their contents when you hadnât read them at all, and had only skim read the titles and just made wild guesses about the content. This was incredibly embarrassing for you after all the fuss you made about the importance of reading articles before judging their content. And now youâre trying to change the subject. I provide links to articles, and instead of getting them for yourself you ask me to do it for you, and say Iâm lazy if I donât do the work for you. Telling someone else that theyâre lazy if they donât do what you canât be bothered doing yourself, is the height of irony.
If you had even bothered to search for the articles on Google Scholar, you would have seen that several of them use the term in the abstract, which youâre able to read in full, without having access to the entire article.
- In the Shadow of Intelligent Design: The Teaching of Evolution.
- When Science Meets Religion in the Classroom (if you had bothered to look you would have found that this letter is freely available online, in full).
- Still Creationism after All These Years: Understanding and Counteracting Intelligent Design (if you had bothered to look you would have found that this article is freely available online, in full).
- Intelligent Design and Creationism in Our Schools (if you had bothered to look you would have found that this article is freely available online, in full).
- Designer Scientific Literature (if you had bothered to look you would have found that this article is freely available online, in full).
- It Ainât Necessarily So: An Essay Review of Intelligent Design Creationism.
- Sober on Intelligent Design (if you had bothered to look you would have found that this article is freely available online, in full).
So out of the nine sources I cited, seven of them contain the relevant term in the abstract, which is visible in full, and five of the articles are freely available to download in their complete form. You didnât know this, because you didnât even bother to look, which is further evidence of your âresearchâ skills, and general approach to fact finding.
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You do? Where are the hyperlinks to the full articles? If I had seen them, I would have gone to them at the start. It was because I didnât see any that I asked for them.
You have a very long-winded and pompous way of telling me you arenât going to provide the hyperlinks. Yet if they are so easily available online â where you presumably found them yourself â it would be easy for you to give the hyperlinks along with the titles.
Yes. Not in this case, in previous cases (when, incredibly, it seems you didnât even bother clicking on the links either).
Why did you not do the research yourself? Why should people spoon feed you links? I gave you full citations.
I have a short and direct way of pointing out that it is completely unjustifiable to 1) fail to even bother typing in journal article titles into Google to find them yourself, 2) make false claims about the contents of articles youâve never read and havenât even bothered to look for, 3) accuse me of being lazy if I donât provide you with the articles in full, 4) insist that I provide you with direct links to all the articles so you donât have to look for them yourself.
Yes it would be very easy for me to do that. However, I want you to do it. It will teach you basic research skills that you clearly donât have. You didnât know about PubMed, and you apparently donât know about Google Scholar either.
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On this, one of my favorite Zippy the Pinhead comics, by Bill Griffith, seems relevant.
The cartoon depicts various activities, the ânormal wayâ and the âZippy way.â One example is a job interview. In the panel for the normal way, a young man is interviewing for a job and is enthusiastically telling the interviewer that heâd like to work at a big chain store like this, because he is interested in how big chain stores are managed and he hopes that after a number of years, he might even become a manager.
Under the panel âthe Zippy way,â Zippy has his feet up on the interviewerâs desk, and he says, âMassage my feet while I decide whether capitalism or communism is better!â
So often the IDists do it the Zippy way. They would like to challenge received wisdom; theyâd like to be edgy, insightful breakers-down of the status quo. But they do not wish, in the course of becoming all of these things, to do any actual work or have to think about stuff.
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Well, everything you say on that is true, of course, and I do not disagree, at least as it applies to the authors of the âprimaryâ ID literature. But there are people like Shedinger, and perhaps Eddie, who think there is something amazing about being a dissenter from something, a person who can insightfully challenge other peopleâs assumptions and think outside the box. They see in ID an opportunity to become something which intellect and learning has otherwise denied them. I would imagine, for example, that Shedingerâs attempts to tar Dobzhansky as a source of modern racism are very popular with those undergrads at his college who are into the whole âcall-out cultureâ phenomenon.
But it is, as I said earlier, cargo-cult intellectualism. Tweed jackets with patches on the elbows, pipes to smoke, beards to stroke, references to Plato, and fancy-sounding expressions, but no actual thinking. Will it bring the cargo?
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I recognize that this is now an ancient thread, but I have been on âRobert Shedinger credibility death watchâ for a while now since reading his awful, awful book, and last week he posted this extraordinary stinker over at good ole EN&V:
Is Methodological Naturalism Racist?
Now, there really are no polite words for this sort of thing. âStupid,â I have often been told, is, for example, an impolite word. But anyone familiar with the literature of ID will have come up against the problem that there are times when one cannot be polite and accurate at the same time.
Now, the odd thing here is that Shedingerâs essay seems rather racist itself. Itâs impossible to see racism in methodological naturalism. But Shedingerâs notion that African-American people are characteristically resistant to methodological naturalism, and would feel unwelcome in an atmosphere where it is employed (he seems, oddly, to assume MN to be unique to evolutionary biology and ecology, as opposed to other biological fields of study), DOES strike me as drawing a harsh, negative stereotype which is both untrue and unfair.
He concludes:
The reigning philosophy of methodological naturalism will continue to be a force for exclusion. And to the extent that that exclusion falls along racialized lines, methodological naturalism can only be understood as a contributing factor in the perpetuation of systemic racism. If this is not a reason to jettison methodological naturalism, I donât know what is!
That last sentence contains wisdom of which Shedinger seems to have been unaware. It is, indeed, not a reason to jettison methodological naturalism, and no-one who reads this piece by Shedinger can be left with any doubt that he does not, indeed, know what is.
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Here is a link to the Social Psychology paper Shedinger references in his essay:
Notably, searching the paper on methodological or naturalism turns up blank, so Shedinger is taking an already shaky correlation in terms of religion and leaping to an framing in terms of methodological naturalism.
I shake my head at the following quote concerning ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB)âŚ
It is well established that people of color are poorly represented in STEM fields compared with their representation in the larger population. That is for a host of complex sociological and economic reasons. But even taking this into consideration, the authors note that African Americans are even more poorly represented in EEB fields in comparison with non-EEB fields of biology. This extremely poor representation in EEB cannot be explained by the factors leading to underrepresentation in STEM fields, so there must be something else going on.
So Shedinger is building a case that among STEM, methodological naturalism is keeping students from pursuing EEB in particular. Exactly what methodology does he think holds sway at faculties of chemistry, physics, astronomy and geology? Is he suggesting these other disciplines are preferred because they are inclusive of methodological supernaturalism?
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Yes, the paper he cites really doesnât support him in the least. If heâd made some claim about African American students that was in the paper, one could at least attribute that claim to that study rather than to Shedinger. But he makes up this business about methodological naturalism all on his own, without the slightest warrant from the paper, and assumes that African Americans donât like it. Why? Nobody knows, but it seems to me that attributing a basic intellectual impairment like that to African Americans isnât exactly a commitment to racial equity.
And, yes: where does the idea that methodological naturalism is somehow a particular feature of ecology and evolutionary biology, but not of other fields of study, come in? Do they do a lot of divinations in, say, biochemistry? If so, I was unaware of it.
On re-reading, this is an amusing line:
As a religion scholar conversant with the science of evolutionary biology, I would love to be able to lead such an effort.
Nobody could possibly read his horrid book and think that he is even minimally conversant with evolutionary biology. Heâs the guy who says thereâs no âdocumented evidenceâ that the mammalian ear ossicles evolved from jaw bones. So much for being able to pass a high-school biology exam.
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I did once see the face of Jesus in my Northern blot of degraded RNA. Or maybe it was Kevin Bacon.
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Clarification: are you saying you saw the face of Kevin Bacon in a Northern blot or that you saw the face of Jesus in Kevin Bacon? (Iâm fairly sure Jesus never appeared in a movie with Kevin Bacon, but I havenât checked IMDB to be sure.)
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My wording was ambiguous. I thought my RNA smear looked like either Jesus or Kevin Bacon. But youâre right - theyâve never done a movie together.
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Thereâs an easy way to tell which. If the face turns to you and rebukes you for using methodological naturalism, thatâs Kevin Bacon. He hates methodological naturalism. If the face doesnât do that, itâs definitely Jesus.
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Ah, but did Jesus appear in any movie six degrees separated from Kevin Bacon?
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Trivially easy. 
Jim Caviezel played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, and was in The Thin Red Line, which also starred Sean Penn, who was in Mystic River with Kevin Bacon.
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My family have long subscribed to a perverse/âMurphyâs Lawâ form of weather prediction, whereby the chance of rain is affected by whether you wear a raincoat, whether youâve brought in the washing from the washing line, etc.