Herr Professor on the Ropes with Watson

Apparently my most bitter barb of all for the Professor is that he failed to comprehend the salient points of the post that started it all.

I will remain silent on his more lengthy… rant? but focus on this quote because of course my contention is that his comments were poisoned at the well and this addresses that.

Which of course is why he spent the first four paragraphs talking about Watson putting his foot in it and this just goes to show that you shouldn’t give scientists “undue regard.” He was talking about the school board in Maine. Of course, how silly of me.

Yes, how silly of him. Let’s look at the facts. Here are the first four paragraphs, plus the first sentence of para 5:

Unlike Dr. Livingstone of lore, we can expect that if Dr. James Watson- of DNA and Francis Crick fame- were to go evangelizing in Africa today, he’d not fare very well. In an article from the Independent I read: “Dr Watson said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”.

Well, that’s putting your foot in it. In other places on my blog here I have tried to raise awareness of the fact that scientists are people just like the rest of us and there is no reason to believe that they are especially more logical or rational than anyone else… or more ethical. For example in this entry here I discuss how more than two dozen spina bifida babies died in an experiment to see to what extent people will defer to medical and scientific authority. Sounds like a pretty unethical experiment to me, but the doctors involved were cleared. And one can hardly read an article like this without thinking of Dawkins (who is a buddy of Watson) and his view that religious instruction can be construed as child abuse.

Dawkins no doubt will be on the advisory board for determining what child abuse is and what the remedy will be. He’s a scientist, so that’s a good idea. Right?

It is a plain fact that people do defer to scientists and though we can certainly all agree that some deference is healthy, we ought to be prepared to use our own judgment and perform our own investigations, especially when it is our own health, the health of a loved one, or the health of our own society at risk. A scientist who does not want us to get a second opinion is a scientist that should not be trusted. A scientist that makes an ethical declaration is probably speaking outside his field. Scientists can be very helpful in ascertaining actual facts but they are not in a special position to tell us what conclusions we ought to draw and which ones are moral.

A more clearer example than the situation in a Maine school district can’t be found.

It couldn’t be any more clearer that Watson’s remarks were a springboard to a larger discussion- the undue regard stuff- and ultimately purposed to frame it for application: The Maine School District. Watson isn’t even mentioned in the third and fourth paragraph. He is only referenced briefly, in passing, in the second paragraph, because of his relationship to Dawkins (whom the Professor loves). Basically, if we were going to be accurate, only the first paragraph was about Watson, not the first four. Does accuracy matter to the Professor?

The Professor continues to whine that I am anti-scientist, but I have bolded a portion from these same first four paragraphs that should have put cold water on that. He agrees with me that we shouldn’t give ‘undue regard’ but proper regard (within their field), so one begins to wonder what his real problem is. He even agrees with me on the matter of deferring to a scientist’s grasp on ethics. In fact, he said that I understated the case:

he tries to clarify one or two points, but mostly he takes it as an opportunity to recite another one-sided litany of scientists behaving badly.

I think his list is a bit short.

That list was the second paragraph and expanded on in my response to his point. I expanded on it under the illusion that he really grasped that this was a critical point. In fact, as we now see, he interpreted that litany as being ‘about Watson’ so we know that the real bee in his bonnet is, and always was, my apparent agreement with Watson that there is scientific justification for racism… from his original reply:

The irony is that scientists, pretty much without exception, have vocally and strongly denounced Watson as being wrong, whereas Horvath is agreeing with Watson’s assessment. So we have Watson and Horvath on one side saying that the scientific evidence justifies racism, and the vast majority of scientists (whom Horvath is trying to paint as morally unreliable) saying that it does not. That’s irony.

Now scroll up and look at the first four paragraphs again. Is there any sense in which I state agreement with Watson on his alleged racist remarks? No. I hardly even talk about it, yet somehow, the Professor eked out an ‘agreement’ with Watson. Not only that, but the article I cited has Watson denying even saying it which the Professor wasn’t even aware of until I pointed out to him. Whether he really did say it or not was irrelevant to my initial post, where my mention of it is mainly a first paragraph ‘hook.’ The next three paragraphs, contrary to the Professor’s beleagured attempts to redeem himself, show that Watson is no longer central, and besides that, as I have just shown, what they do talk about Herr Professor actually agrees to a large extent.

The bizarre assertion by the Doc that I agreed with Watson led me to make my comments about the hyper-sensitivity to evolutionists when evolutionists say things that are not politically correct, because there is no way in heck that you can justify this accusation from my original post. See? Poisoned at the well.

His whole initial response and all those that followed were like that. Except for using some of the same key words, it can hardly be said that he was ever responding to what I actually wrote.

I am more confident than I was before that what we have going on is a knee-jerk reaction trying to save atheism and evolution from any insinuation that it might lead to conclusions that ‘civilized’ people would be disgusted by. They are desperate to show that they can be just as ‘moral’ as the rest of us. Any appearance to the opposite, even if briefly mentioned as an introductory anecdote, needs to be quashed! Immediately!