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..because someone is wrong on the internet.

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You know, for all the ways that Sullivan has made back a little ground from his fifth column BS and giving Betsy McCaughey a platform to lie about health care reform*, it seems like the guy just cannot manage so much as one reasonable post about science. Somehow it always comes back to this romantic idea of a lone crusader challenging the so-called ‘establishment’ with their so-called ‘credentials’ and ‘relevant knowledge’ and asking uncomfortable questions that no one else will. Sullivan cannot get enough of these guys and it leads him wrong every. single. time.

Take this recent forinstance. Edward O. Wilson is an evolutionary biologist who helped create the modern science of social animals. What to think about his latest book? Why not ask a columnist who knocks global warming for a living. Lacking knowledge about climate climate change must give the guy some trenchant insights about evolution. Let’s find out what Darwin got wrong!

It is our ability to escape from the rigid frame of instinct which explains almost everything that distinguishes human beings from any other form of life. But one looks in vain to Wilson to recognise this, let alone to explain how it could have come about in terms of Darwinian evolutionary theory. No attribute of Darwinians is more marked than their inability to grasp just how much their theory cannot account for, from all those evolutionary leaps which require a host of interdependent things to develop more or less simultaneously to be workable, that peculiarity of human consciousness which has allowed us to step outside the instinctive frame and to ‘conquer the Earth’ far more comprehensively than ants.

So there you have it! Evolutionary biologists are full of it because Thomas Hobbes.

You know, my dog Max goes nuts for Greenie chew treats. He loves those things like nothing else. Yet a few years ago he left one on the kitchen floor for eight hours because I forgot to tell him ‘okay’ on the way out the door. Dolphins are maniacs for sex. They will sex just about anything that moves. Yet most (not all) dolphins resist molesting a skin diver. And so on.

Max in the grass

I also have a newborn baby. She is a creature of pure id. The idea that Dr. Mrs. Dr. F. Jr. (DMDF II) would override her instantaneous urge to poop or suck on things when hungry strikes my sleep deprived self as comical.

The difference? Max, like a lot of animals, has a frontal lobe. This part of the brain integrates past experience and lets him override his instincts when that seems like a good idea. DMDF II has an even bigger frontal lobe but zero experience, so when her hindbrain says poop she poops. As with our other parts the forebrain evolved by incrementally elaborating on simpler structures.

For the curious, E.O. Wilson wrote a book about social animals. There are two kinds: eusocial critters like ants which organize stereotyped cultures through instinct rather than flexible social intelligence, and creative social animals like us. Wilson argues that these two wildly different types of culture have a common theme that suggests one explanation every kind of very social animal: they maintain and defend large durable home sites that hold multiple distinct families and generations. It is an original and important idea, not that you would know if you only went by the snide comments of a guy known mostly for misunderstanding an entirely different field.

(*) Mostly torture, but that ain’t nothing. Sullivan’s work on prisoner abuse deserves real credit for being some of the strongest and most influential out there.

Reader Interactions

80Comments

  1. 1.

    Captain Comrade

    Carbon dioxide increases as a linear function with due to the burning of fossil fuels, it is currently 0.0387% of the atmosphere. The theory goes that this linearly increasing blanket creates insulation that traps heat within the atmosphere. This would then cause an acceleration of temperatures, as the blanket became more insulating.

    So, the fact that the earth’s temperature has been falling for the past fifteen years, makes the rational mind really wonder about the motivations of those who argue that the theory is valid. My theory is that is it a paycheck for the scientists and the media people, and the desire for control by those write the paychecks.

  4. 4.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    Somebody needs to tell the goddamned ants that keep invading my office and home that I, the human, am their conqueror. They don’t seem to get the message no matter how many times I poison them.

    Also, too, I bought my new car today. We got a good price (including on the trade-in) so we’re pretty happy. Still, it was hard to let the last vestige of my single life go, especially since I had it for longer that I’ve known G.

  6. 6.

    Mike E

    @dmsilev: Ah. The same Cap’n Crunch who, in a previous thread, had this plan for overweight welfare recipients:

    1. Starve the poors;
    2. Poors ‘feel’ better ’cause of rapid weight loss;
    3. ????
    4. Poors can now afford to buy food.

    Yep. It ain’t just the logic that’s searing.

  7. 7.

    Captain Comrade

    Why does the Wikipedia close-up temperature versus year graph end in 2004, on a subject of such intense debate? In the spirit of accuracy, I checked and the data in Nerull’s link also ends in 2004.

    The link below contains forty-eight 2012 papers by a range of credentialed professionals that come to a different conclusion that the Wikipedia link with the 2004 graph.

    http://climateconferences.heartland.org/iccc7/

    As global cooling has been taking place during all of President Obama’s term, it is odd that he does not seek to take credit for the accomplishment.

  8. 8.

    ranger3

    Sullivan writes circles around anyone posting on this crap blog, even if he does get things wrong from time to time. And he needs to stop apologizing for the 5th column post. It was spot on, there is indeed a noisy faction on the left which does in fact hate America and wants the terrorists to win. That is a fact. Where Sullivan was wrong was in thinking that the Iraq War was a done deal by May of 2003, or that it was ever a good idea to begin with. But the left had demonstrated just how much it truly despises the US and her armed forces by that time.

    If you can take off the revisionist history goggles and go back and read what people were saying in the spring of ’03, you will note that the naysayers were bleating on endlessly about how taking Baghdad would be a bloodbath and there would be months of bloody urban warfare. It was nothing but defeatist propaganda, pure and simple. Anyone who actually bothers to look at the history of the war can clearly see that nothing like had happened, nor was such an outcome inevitable by the time of the infamous “MIssion Accomplished” speech. It was the decision to disband the Iraqi Army, made by Cheney’s inner circle, which sent things spiraling out of control… much to the delight of those who had loudly opposed the war from the left. It was a major gift to y’all, from Dick Cheney. You got your Vietnam, and you got to preach sanctimoniously to us all about the suffering of the Iraqi people, whom you had never given a shit about prior to the summer of 2002.

  9. 9.

    Not Adding Much To The Community

    The very first comment was from a global warming denier? Wow, that gig must really pay.

  10. 10.

    RandomMonster

    Somehow it always comes back to this romantic idea of a lone crusader challenging the so-called ‘establishment’ with their so-called ‘credentials’ and ‘relevant knowledge’ who asks uncomfortable questions that no one else will.

    This is the distinguishing feature of modern conservatives. It doesn’t matter if the individual in question knows jack fucking all about the subject at hand. It’s about a single person standing against the establishment, that’s all that matter. Well, and that they reach the convenient conclusion (darwinians don’t understand evolution, climate scientists are wrong about global warming, etc).

  11. 11.

    ed

    from his fifth column BS and giving Betsy McCaughey a platform to lie about health care reform*,

    Also, too, The Charles Murray Situation. Fuck Sully.

  12. 12.

    Supernumerary Charioteer

    Jesus, what brought the RedStaters out to play?

    Insofar as thrusting your pelvic region out and shouting ‘COME AND KICK IT MOTHERFUCKERS’ in the mistaken belief that no one will could be considered ‘play’.

  13. 13.

    Not Adding Much To The Community

    “there is indeed a noisy faction on the left which does in fact hate America and wants the terrorists to win.”

    Uh huh, all 50 anarchists in Eugene, OR are surely what Sullivan was referring to in his “enclaves on the coasts” remark. You defend his broad brushing of the anti-war left then turn and paint just as widely when you dismiss the “naysayers” because they did not exactly predict where on the Clusterfuck Scale the invasion of Iraq would fall. Here’s your rope, proceed pissing up it.

  14. 14.

    mdblanche

    Andrew “Bell Curve” Sullivan just cannot manage so much as one reasonable post about science? Say it ain’t so. I truly don’t understand why anybody still pays attention to him.

  15. 15.

    Splitting Image

    No one who uses the word “Darwinian” to describe modern evolutionary theory deserves to be taken seriously.

  17. 17.

    Mike E

    allowed us to step outside the instinctive frame and to ‘conquer the Earth’ far more comprehensively than ants

    I’ll paraphrase EO Wilson in this case by pointing out that despite the fact that your average-size world conquering industrialist is one million times the size of your average ant, the total biomass of humanity (7 billion and counting) isn’t greater than the total biomass of the world’s ants. Never will be, either.

    Wilson also points out that the total biomass of bacteria dwarfs the combined biomass of all other living things. Evolution eats hubris, whole, without any effort at all.

  18. 18.

    kc

    You know, for all the ways that Sullivan has made back a little ground from his fifth column BS and giving Betsy McCaughey a platform to lie about health care reform

    Not in my book . . . unless he apologized profusely and I missed it?

  19. 19.

    Tim F.

    @kc: He did apologize for his fifth column stuff. About Betsy McCaughey I expect him to stand by it like every other dumb decision he made at TNR.

  20. 20.

    fka AWS

    @ranger3:

    Sullivan writes circles around anyone posting on this crap blog,

    Fuck Andrew Sullivan with a rusty pitchfork sideways. He’s a privileged Tory idiot, and I hope he ends up cleaning toilets at McDonalds.

  23. 23.

    Schlemizel

    How many chances does the inflamed asshole get before we are willing to admit the Sully’s MO is not good intentions or some desire on his part to be contrarian. Sully is evil, his goal is to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. Sully is paid to shovel shit, to confuse and defuse and pile up so much FUD that the evil can slither along for now and survive to lie another day.

    There is nothing honest, nothing honorable, nothing decent, nothing sincere about that useless piece of shit. To ascribe anything but evil intent to him is to credit him with traits he has NEVER – EVER displayed

  26. 26.

    Bob

    “And all this science I don’t understand” but what drives me up the wall Sully-wise is his constant blowing of the new pope. Jez, Andrew, give the old guy a few days to recover.

  28. 28.

    Mike G

    @ruemara:

    Did someone use the Shill Signal, because suddenly, here they are.

    I prefer the “batshit signal”.
    Quick! To the Batshitmobile!

    Hey, does Exxon pay by the post or by the word?

  30. 30.

    liberal

    …it seems like the guy just cannot manage so much as one reasonable post about science.

    I’d wager good money that part of it is that his science/math IQ isn’t very high. Which is pretty ironic given his idiocy in pushing The Bell Curve.

  31. 31.

    Kyle

    Somehow it always comes back to this romantic idea of a lone crusader challenging the so-called ‘establishment’ with their so-called ‘credentials’ and ‘relevant knowledge’ and asking uncomfortable questions that no one else will.

    Only when the “establishment” has been designated “librul”, thus triggering their persecution/victim complex where they are the brave little rebel alliance (shills for the world’s largest industrial corporation) battling super-powerful evil (climate scientists).

    When the establishment is conservative, it’s authoritarian-follower time, tribal obedience uber alles, shut up and prove your loyalty, like “You don’t criticize the President at a time of war.” Funny, we’re still at war in Afghanistan yet I haven’t heard that rightard catchphrase much since, oh, January 2009 or so.

  32. 32.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    I keep reading about this person named Andrew Sullivan and all of the right-wing talking points he’s fond of perpetuating, and how he almost seemed to walk some of them back from time to time, but then well, no, and I can’t help wondering — why in the world do people read him so much? I mean reality-based people, I’m sure Camille Paglia loves him.

    The last time I saw him was as a panelist on Bill Maher where he was pushing trickle-down Reaganomics and austerity as the cure for depression for all he was worth. Nothing about his ridiculous, arrogant rant made me even slightly tempted to know what he thought about any other subject.

  34. 34.

    Yatsuno

    @Bill E Pilgrim:

    Nothing about his ridiculous, arrogant rant made me even slightly tempted to know what he thought about any other subject

    Unless he’s linked here, I totally ignore Sully. I shall gladly join you in our shared ignorance. And maybe enjoy some gamay Beaujolais too.

  35. 35.

    The Dangerman

    @Mike G:

    Quick! To the Batshitmobile!

    No fucking way; the batmobile was fusion powered. The batshitters would drive a Hummer (and give them, too).

  37. 37.

    Villago Delenda Est

    So there you have it! Evolutionary biologists are full of it because Thomas Hobbes.

    The stupid. IT BURNS!

  38. 38.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    People should probably be aware that there’s a lot of criticism of Wilson’s new work, but mostly from the entirely opposite direction from the one the climate change denier takes.

    http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/edward-wilson-social-conquest-earth-evolutionary-errors-origin-species/

    I heard Wilson on NPR and during the interview he said something along the lines of how this “selfish gene” theory “didn’t really work out”. Now, he may not believe that it’s valid, and obviously doesn’t, but dismissing it like that as if the entire scientific community had evaluated and discarded it years ago was one of the most arrogant, and simply false, assertions I’ve ever heard, anywhere. I was stunned.

  41. 41.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Bill E Pilgrim:

    The problem with the “selfish gene” is that (and Dawkins makes this abundantly clear) it’s a difficult metaphor for dumbass humans to grok. Dawkins makes the point that this is not consciously directed selfishness, but most humans can’t grasp that concept. They INSIST that there must be some sort of consciousness directing all this…hence the idiocy of “intelligent design”. There has to be a “reason” for everything. Sometimes, no. Shit just happens.

  42. 42.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @ranger3:

    about how taking Baghdad would be a bloodbath and there would be months of bloody urban warfare

    Which, of course, turned out to be true. The same brilliant brain trust that made the decision for a war of choice did indeed engage in all sorts of ideological stupidity, like “de-Baathifcation” and disbanding the Iraqi Army. Same crew. So we got the bloodbath that was warned about. So much so that we needed a “surge” to try to quell it. GEN Shinseki predicted all of this crap well before the illegal invasion took place. Thousands of American soldiers died for your fucking vicarious adventure.

    You are a shithead.

  44. 44.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @Villago Delenda Est: It’s a common problem when coming up with ways to describe concepts in evolutionary theory. Dawkins’ point was exactly the opposite of the idea of something consciously directing its own destiny, but as you say, the percentage of people who grasp even the basics about how evolution works is surprisingly small. E. O. Wilson clearly does understand evolution, or so we all thought, but I think he’s gone off the rails with his theory.

  47. 47.

    Captain Comrade

    You sound like a mean person trollhatten. Acetylene being the hottest of the hydrocarbon gases, with the triple carbon bond wielding a whopping 839 kilojoule per mole of energy. My poor bottom.

    Yikes!

  51. 51.

    Comrade Carter

    Sullivan uses the term “Darwinists” too often. Like, any time he uses it it’s too often.

    Oh, and he’s a Catholic, too.

    Poor guy, I got over that second one by the time I turned 8.

  53. 53.

    Redshift

    all those evolutionary leaps which require a host of interdependent things to develop more or less simultaneously to be workable

    Ah, the red flag of “I can’t imagine how those things could happen, and those eggheads can’t possibly know any more than me.” And then lying about what scientists understand about how evolution works to make it sound implausible.

  59. 59.

    daverave

    “that peculiarity of human consciousness which has allowed us to step outside the instinctive frame and to ‘conquer the Earth’ far more comprehensively than ants”

    I don’t remember who, what, where, or when I heard this but I seem to recall the statement that if ants magically disappeared so, eventually, would the human race. If humans disappeared… the ants wouldn’t even notice.

  60. 60.

    patroclus

    Sully’s problem is that he self-identifies as a “conservative” which is an ideology that is incapable of definition although he clings to the idea that it is coherent. This takes him in odd directions, prompts him to accept nonsensical talking points as fact and to latch onto crackpots and crackpot theories that any normal person would avoid naturally. He writes well, but his best stuff is when he is walking back some idiotic thing or idea that he embraced in the past. He was at his absolute worst on Iraq, but then he went anti-torture and kind of made up for it. He’s never made up for his “blacks are stupid” shtick and his anti-science stuff is just drivel. He was ahead of the curve on gay marriage bu his Catholicism made him embrace some really awful discriminatory stuff while doing so. He’s worth reading on issues which personally affect him but he’s so schizophrenic as a regular pundit that no one should really trust him to get average issues right until months after his first post on the subject. He had an irrational loathing of the Clintons but has generally been pro-Obama – I suspect he’ll lurch back to the dark side after Obama’s gone.

  62. 62.

    Captain Comrade

    Joel;

    There comes a point when ignorance will no longer be an excuse; this whole energy myth is coming to a close, and you’re on the record as being a Believer. People will be pissed.

    In any case, love Seattle and wish its residents all the best.

    Most sincerely yours;
    Captain Comrade

  63. 63.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Captain Comrade: this whole energy myth is coming to a close, Energy myth? Do tell what’s the latest in Post Social Realism from the Right.

    Follow up question Captain – since the burden of truthyness is on Brooker’s side does that PROVE beyond a fashionable doubt that evolution theory is wrong? After all if scientists can’t get climate measurements right then we have no need of the scientific method and electricity must be just angels doing God’s will.

  66. 66.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Captain Comrade:

    So, the fact that the earth’s temperature has been falling for the past fifteen years,

    Nice epic log fail Captain – even if we accept your assertion human pollutants are causing goal cooling that’s still a bad thing as the Little Age shows.

  68. 68.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @Villago Delenda Est: Agreed. If anyone actually read Dawkin’s book in which he presented it and didn’t get exactly what he meant by selfish, well I’d be surprised. Most people critical of it haven’t read it. Dawkins would be the first to agree that “shit just happens”, essentially.

  69. 69.

    SRW1

    @ranger3:

    And he needs to stop apologizing for the 5th column post. It was spot on, there is indeed a noisy faction on the left which does in fact hate America and wants the terrorists to win.

    Fuck you, you asshole. The Iraq invasion wasn’t about fighting ‘the terrorists’. That still hasn’t sunk in, you idiot?

    The terrorists weren’t in Iraq. Of course, they roam there now as well. Bush/Cheney made sure of that.

  70. 70.

    kbuttle

    @Captain Comrade:
    You give the game away with your .0387 bullshit. Insert cyanide analogy here. But it’s the “falling for 15 years” that makes it winger art. 1998 is the hottest on record, because of a whopper of an El Niño. (Or God made the central Pacific ocean real hot and the anchovies real sad that year, as you’d prefer). But just because something topped out under extremes conditions and then leveled off doesn’t make the corrolary of a “fall” true. I won’t even get into the measured heat uptake in the deep oceans over the last decade, cuz your poor little brain has surely had enough, but you’re going to have to come with more than winger talking points, k?

  71. 71.

    SpaceSquid

    Booker demonstrates perfectly here the underlying solipsistic that distinguishes almost every “skeptic” of science and academic thought: “If I haven’t found what I haven’t bothered looking for, it cannot possibly exist”. It takes a little longer to work through Booker’s position than O’Reilly’s insistance that no-one can explain the movement of the tides, but that is the only meaningful distinction between the two claims.

  72. 72.

    Hunter

    I used to read Sullivan daily, and watched him make himself more and more irrelevant, until there was no point in reading him any more. I came to the conclusion that he’s just another privileged Villager. I mean, really, showcasing Megan McArdle because he admires her? That should be a definite clue as to where he’s at.

    As for Sullivan and science: he quite obviously has no understanding of science as a discipline, neither its aims nor its methods, and fancies himself an “independent thinker” — which means he’s ripe for any loony contrarian bullshit that’s floating around. He also tends to make emotional investments in topics that short-circuit his critical thinking skills, such as they are.

    The fact that he’s as influential as he is makes a sad commentary on our national discourse. But at least he’s not deliberately vicious.

  73. 73.

    Nicole

    I’m a fan of horse racing, which is a sport entirely based on individual animals’ willingness to ignore their instincts and do what a tiny predator seated on their back tells them to do.

  74. 74.

    Mr. Longform

    I am a scientific idiot, and not particularly smart in any non-sciencey way, either. When people started arguing about global warming years ago (by “started” I mean, started talking about it in such a way that regular folks started paying attention) it seemed like some sort of real debate. People referred to charts and studies and numbers, and those of us in the ignorant masses who don’t know from shit about that kind of thing thought there was some kind of actual dispute. My point is that people in my category (which is most of us — sorry geniuses!) need to rely on authorities to tell us what to think. And how do you choose which authorities to listen to? My criteria are: favor the smart-sounding over the dumb-sounding; favor the disinterested over those who have a financial stake in the answer; favor experts over amateurs (that can be tricky, but universities still mostly seem to hire experts and think tanks don’t); favor the rational-sounding over those who sound like they are in a cult, or at least who seem to be seeing lots of conspiracies. With all this in mind, climate change hasn’t been that hard of a call to make. Sullivan should adopt my method for assessing stuff he doesn’t know about, which is a lot.

  75. 75.

    Tim F.

    @Nicole: not sure I can agree with that. Horses that breeders select to run want to race each other almost as soon as they can stand. A lot of selective breeding goes into making animals with an irrepressible instinct to run and compete. The guy on the back is there to work with the horse and channel its instincts. If you fight a horse’s instincts he will either screw up or try very hard to throw you.

  76. 76.

    NobodySpecial

    By fifth column, I meant simply their ambivalence about the outcome of a war on which I believe the future of liberty hangs. Again, I retract nothing. But I am sorry that one sentence was not written more clearly to dispel any and all such doubts about its meaning. Writing 6,000 words under deadline in the heat of war can lead to occasional sentences whose meaning is open to misinterpretation.

    Ah, yes, the ‘apology’ to anyone who ‘took offense at what I said badly’ non-apology.

    Fuck Sullivan. And why the fuck do you keep circling back to him, Tim? Does he have pics of you in bed with a dead woman or a live child?

  78. 78.

    drkrick

    @patroclus:

    He [Sullivan] writes well, but his best stuff is when he is walking back some idiotic thing or idea that he embraced in the past.

    Well of course, he’s had so much practice.

  79. 79.

    Inquirer

    @Captain Comrade:
    The physics of CO2 and heat retention has been established by both theory and experiment beyond any rational doubt. There can be a fair amount of variability in the results over a short time scale for a variety of reasons, but in the long run there is nowhere to hide.

    Finding ways to doubt this requires wishful thinking on an epic scale, but evidently many are capable of it. Although it’s true that cherry-picking evidence with a ferocity born of desperation helps.

  80. 80.

    David Lloyd-Jones

    @Mnemosyne (iPhone):

    Killing the ants in your office doesn’t solve the problem, because they’re only part of your problem. The rest of it is the ants still out there, as, ahem, the whole Wilson thesis should have made clear to you.

    The solution to them is to trace back the pheromone trail they are all following to wherever you want to mark as the edge of your territory. (You do this by following the line of incoming ants back.) Wash the floor there, preferably with something smelly or ammonia-based. Mr. Clean of any kind would be a reasonably choice. If you really want to gild the lily and follow Nature’s Path, you can urinate on the floor there, but the ammonia should do it.

    -dlj.

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