I wrote briefly on that nonsense from Max Ross in Men's News Daily (as did Sadly, No). Now the publisher of MND has leapt to Ross's defense in a numbingly dull-witted article. Ross mangled the concept of sexual selection in his tale of sexism; this fellow LaSalle now goes on and on, giving a muddled accounting of memes and Kuhn and paradigm shifts and Dawkins…it's a load of sophomoric tripe from someone who clearly has only heard about these things second hand.

His conclusion, believe it or not, is that because so many biologically competent people jumped hard on Ross's bastardized evolutionary tale, 1) they must feel threatened, 2) they would only be threatened if Ross were telling the truth, and 3) we must be on the verge of a dramatic paradigm shift in the sciences that will 4) show that Ross is right, and that MND is a bastion of science and thought! Also, 5) MND gets more traffic, so they win.

What does all of this have to do with the Max Ross piece, and the subsequent reaction by evolutionary biologists from Sadly No! and Pharyngula.org?

Simple. These critics say they are scientists. Yet it appears that even scientists occasionally converge in pack groups, and conduct co-ordinated dive-bombings of infidels.

Put another way: the very people who claims to be advocates for the free expression of science have demonstrably twisted the truth of the Max Ross article for purely ideological reasons. In short, Sadly No!'s 'divebomb' operation was a 'pre-emptive strike' on a potentially dangerous heretic. (And if you consider Kuhn's notion of paradigm shift as a subset of evolutionary theory, you could almost infer that the posters have felt a communal shudder of fear at Ross' heretical disregard for their world-view.)

Sadly No! and friends are thus demonstrably intellectually dishonest. They are also very poor scientists indeed!

There is a simpler explanation. Ross's biology was so appallingly and obviously wrong, that anyone could see how ludicrous his understanding was. Take this example from Ross's article:

Almost universal among mammals, ‘nature’ has mostly opted to leave the desires of females out of the equation in regards to procreating.

That's completely backwards from what we've learned about sexual selection since Darwin. Much of sexual selection is about mate choice by females—male birds have flashy colors and elk have massive antlers because they are trying to get females to mate with them; if rape were the rule and females did not exercise choice, we wouldn't see these kinds of interesting phenomena.

Mike LaSalle seems to be a bit nutty. He also has a long-winded essay on why he is not a conservative. Surprisingly, he doesn't mention anything about his political positions…that might actually make sense. Instead, we get this:

I am not, apparently, a Conservative. How could I be? I don't come from "Jesusland". I was born, instead, on the outskirts of a major left wing outpost, the SF Bay Area. That means, by definition, I have no ancestral (or maybe 'meme') affiliations with Protestant Christian Conservatism in all its glory.

Maybe this is another of those 'paradigm shifts' we're going to have to accept—"conservative" and "liberal" are going to become hereditary titles. Either that, or LaSalle is just a kook.

I guess it doesn't matter. Since number of visitors to a website is the important thing, as long as insanity draws in the traffic, he'll be happy.