Ideologue writes crap – just answer with a smile

by cogdogblog
Old fossil “disproves” Darwin!:
[Via Pharyngula]

The old fossil is Pat Buchanan, who has published a freakishly antiquated diatribe against Darwin. It’s extremely old school — he uses arguments straight out of 1960s era “scientific creationism”, trying to tar Darwin with guilt by association with Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. He is apparently inspired by a “splendid little book,” The End of Darwinism: And How a Flawed and Disastrous Theory Was Stolen and Sold, by a creationist crank named Eugene G. Windchy. You can get an idea of Windchy’s level of scholarship by this quote:

That Darwinism has proven “disastrous theory” is indisputable.

“Karl Marx loved Darwinism,” writes Windchy. “To him, survival of the fittest as the source of progress justified violence in bringing about social and political change, in other words, the revolution.”

“Darwin suits my purpose,” Marx wrote.

John Lynch has rebutted this claim; I rather doubt that Marx could love someone as bourgeois as Darwin, a prosperous landowner and investor, a fellow who thought his greatest success in life was his talent as a businessman, and I can be fairly confident that any affection would not have been returned. And please, don’t even mention the false claim that Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin.

[More]

I get so tired of this. He brings up stuff that has been well debunked and he knows it. He is not a stupid nor ignorant man. He appears to be deliberately spreading lies for political and ideological purposes.

He is writing about matters that have been shown to be false. He is repeating things that are not true and have been known not to be true for a long time. He obfuscates the facts at almost every opportunity.

As a scientist, I have to deal with questions from crap like this. People act like it must be true because Buchanan would not knowingly write something that was false. Of course he would. It is a gambit utilizing a logical fallacy.

One side says A. The other says C. So the truth may really lie somewhere in between, at B. By taking an extreme position, he hopes to move many ignorant people away from A, even if A is objectively true. Moving them to be gets them much closer to his side.

Particularly if he starts at V and can move them to H. A may be objectively true but if he can move people to H he can have a huge effect on policy, which is his purpose.

He is not interested in actually describing what happens in the natural world. Like all deniers, he can not accept evolution for political and ideological reasons so he must denier it, using any and all tools. To a denier, outright lying is fine. The goal is to affect policy not to tell the truth.

So, I will have to answer the same questions that I have many times before. I have to do this almost every time a denier spews out something, even if every single thing in the missive has already been shown to be completely false many times before.

I have to try and move them to A because that is where truth lies. Making decisions on anything based on lies and fabrications will always result in failure. Yet that is the goal of deniers, often because failure for society means lots of success for them.

So, 6 months, a year, from now, he, or one of the innumerable ideologues will spew some more lies on evolution or some other science.The cycle starts all over again.

Buchanan and others of his ilk have no shame. And it is scientists like me that are simply supposed to be nice and courteous when dealing with ramifications of this crap being spread around yet one more time.

You know, one of the most mind-nubing abuses of a prisoner is to make him dig a hole, then fill it up, then dig it again, then fill it up, then dig it again…

Responding nicely to the questions of people responding to the ideological ramblings of people like Buchanan, after having done it many times before, becomes very, very hard. It becomes like filling in a hole that will never be allowed to stay filled in. Someone always digs another and we have to fill that one.

Yet, if we show any sort of displeasure or lack of grace from a legitimate questioner responding to Buchanan’s crap, we are chastised for treating them like idiots.

And, of course, that is another aspect that Buchanan hopes to achieve. Not only will people move to the middle but the people who actually are talking factually will drive them there, or even further towards his position.

Because Buchanan and other deniers would love to receive these people with open arms. They want people to believe falsehoods because it serves their ideological purposes.

So, while I may disagree with some of Chris Mooney’s new book, which lays blame on scientists for causing people to retreat from science, I can certainly understand this. It is very hard to maintain a nice attitude when the same question has been asked and answered a thousand times, and when the number of ignorant people never seems to end.

It makes it even harder when a substantial number of those asking questions actually do not care what the answer is. They have already made up their minds and simply want to attack.

The number of deniers of evolution, of those that really do not want to learn about Nature, that do not want to understand objective truth, greatly outnumber the genuine seekers of truth that are simply skeptical and can be reasoned with. In fact, I’m close to believing that without some other knowledge or insight about an individual, we might as well assume that close to 100% that ask questions of evolution are deniers.

Start from there and it makes things much easier. It gets trickier with other types of deniers, as I think the number of real questioners may be much larger. But, I think it is likely that the deniers are still in the majority.

In the long run, we fall into Buchanan’s trap if we get upset or treat people like idiots. He wants us to do that so we drive more people to his position. We must act against the very human tendencies we would have.

Because in some very important areas, we need to produce policies also, ones based on truth. Getting more people to see the truth will make it easier to create policies that work.

So hard as it is, I’ll do my best to remain nice and explain things patiently. But if I get a hint that my overtures are in vain, that I am in the presence of a denier who can never be moved towards the truth, then I will refuse to fill up that hole.

And I may not be nice about it.

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