The Powerlinebloggers report that they have a critic who thinks that because one of their number is sceptical of Dawin's Theory of Evolution we should therefore ignore all commentary on the blog because they are clearly st00pid (OK I'm performing some light paraphrase and précis here). Curiously enough the Powerline bloggers have not exactly filled their blog with discussions of evolution, genetic diversity and whether we are related to a monkey on our mother's side or our father's- In fact in the original post picked out for this exposé the Hind Rocket fails to go into detail about why he believes "that Darwin's theory of macroevolution is plainly wrong, on strictly scientific grounds" and that is about as much detail as we get on the whole subject of evolution in their entire blog - though they do like Darwin awards as do I - so going there for insights into human biodiversity is unlikely to be terribly rewarding whether one is a creastionist, a darwinist or favours so other theory. However, it seems to me that one can appreciate, learn from and agree with people in one area without agreeing with them elsewhere. I think that evolution is right in broad outline but I don't see why I should immediately junk everything every uttered by those who hold a different belief. This is after all the difference between Mathematics, where theories can be proven and Science where they can only be disproven. Insisting that evolution must be true smacks not of science but of religious dogma.
On a similar note over at the NRO's Corner, Jonah Goldberg draws attention to a Matt Yglesias comment:
STRANGE NEW RESPECT. Now that Larry Summers is suddenly garnering strange new respect from conservatives, I can't help but wonder if his new friends on the right will start paying attention to his views in his actual areas of expertise. Social Security, for example. It seems to me that when he talks about that stuff, the wingnuts don't much care for him.
The same confusion between intellectual discussion and religious dogma is clearly illustrated. The hypothesis that "if you agree with Summers about subject A then you must also agree with him on subject B" is so obviously false that it is laughable. What is even worse is that many of us "on the right" who respect Summers are making no coment what so ever about what he said, what we are complaining about is the dogmatic accusations of heresy that his comments provoked. I have no idea whether females are less capable of top science than men or not but I do think one should at least be able to produce various hypotheses for the disparity in numbers and look to see what proof supports each.
The logical theory of these people seems to be something like this.
My enemy once said X
X is in fact wrong
Hence my enemy is always wrong.
(Hence I may ignore him forever)
It was this sort of claim that us CompScis at Cambridge used to mock the Philosophers for when they tried to invoke logic. Like those Cantabrian Philosophy lecturers of yesteryear, todays critics could use a course in Symbolic Logic and Boolean Algebra.