I posted this in a comment on Dean's blog as well, since he says he will not return here to see it. But I thought my readers might want to see it too. His comment can be found at the bottom of this post. Needless to say he is upset, but I don't think it should be with me. Dean wrote:
Yes, and you manage in that answer to be pedantic, condescending, and presumptuous all at once. A hat trick. Thanks for hosting that little "Dean Esmay and his wife are lunatics and stupid too" tete-a-tete, by the way.
Dean, I think you're reacting to a few of the people who responded to what I said, not to what I actually said. My response to what you wrote (all three of them) were calm, polite and well reasoned. Nowhere did I insult you or your wife. In fact, when the first person, who I do not know at all, popped up to call you a nut, this was my response:
Well, that wasn't really the point, and I certainly don't want this to turn into a place where those who don't like Dean call him names. I don't know Dean personally, but I do know several people that I respect a lot who also respect him a lot, and that was more than enough to give him the benefit of the doubt, take his question seriously, and attempt to give it the well-reasoned response that it deserved.
Now, it is hardly reasonable to portray what I wrote as calling you "irrational" or that I "wrote an essay on how crazy you are", as you claimed above. I wrote nothing of the sort. What I wrote is a very detailed and thorough answer to your question. Now let me answer the comment you left on my blog, since you said you would not be returning there to see any response.
Well thank you very much for starting the "why Dean Esmay is a bad person" thread.
Again, I didn't. In fact, I specifically disavowed that sort of thing, but I can't control what others might say or think. I'm sure there are a lot of folks out there who think I'm an asshole too, but they are responsible for their opinion, not someone else. I'll snip out the stuff about your wife's thing about nuking cities and ebonics, since I made no comment on them and don't really care about them (nor do I even know the people who did comment on them).
Ed: I find your own assertions about me rather insulting. Pardon me if I loosely compare holocaust deniers with Nazis, but you're being pedantic if you think that's an unreasonable comparison.
I do think it's an unreasonable comparison, especially in light of the fact that ID advocates have, literally dozens of times over the last few years, directly compared folks like me to the Nazis themselves, as well as to Stalinists. As many people have pointed out, ID opponents have often compared the IDers to holocaust deniers in terms of the tactics they use, but this is not at all the same thing as "comparing them to Nazis". For that comparison, you have to go to the very people making the accusation. And my point was simply that you swallowed that bit of propaganda from them whole and "couldn't stop yourself" from linking to it, but you didn't bother to check out whether it was true, and you didn't portray the situation accurately. Now, perhaps you might think you had no obligation to do so, and perhaps you'd be right, but it certainly is fair game for someone like me, who has been compared to a Nazi by these people, to point out the difference between reality and what you passed along, isn't it? At the very least, it's absurd to consider it "insulting" that I pointed out that what you said was not accurate or balanced.
You are also being terribly presumptuous. You presume that just because you wrote a response to me, in a thread where I received multiple trackbacks and countless comments, you say that I "was informed" of your response. Well fine and dandy--did you presume I had time to read it before you went off on this lengthy jeremiad about how ill-informed and unreasonable I am and began hosting a lengthy thread about how stupid and evil I am?
Actually, I didn't leave a comment because for several hours it kept telling me that my account had not been created yet. And I didn't rely on a trackback ping to inform you of it. I informed you of it directly, through the "contact the author" link on your main page. Now it's obviously possible that you didn't see it, or saw it and were too busy to do anything with it at the time. I was just noting that while there was an entirely calm and reasoned response to your question (a question I took seriously and gave a serious and compelling answer to), rather than taking it seriously and having a reasoned discussion about it, you had decided instead just to throw out the post you did yesterday, filled with the same inflated and insulting rhetoric ("take a valium, drink a beer and get a life" or "you are the book banners") that had been seen prior to that. And that led me to wonder if perhaps you really weren't interested in having a civilized discussion about it.
And frankly, the emotional overreaction to my follow up on the subject makes me wonder even more. Behind all of this furor over the insults you have mistakenly projected from others on to me as though I had said them are some interesting substantive issues that I took the time to address in response to you. And the primary reason why I did so in that format and with the very calm tone that I did was because I know people who hold you in very high esteem as both a thinker and a person and I assumed there must be a good reason why. And that's still a dialogue that I think is important and educational, which is why I have bothered with this whole conversation.
Oh and as for the bit about mutation: did it occur to you that I may have simply misspoken or been careless in what I said or what I meant? Did you think to ask?
My honest answer is that I have a hard time imagining what you said as merely misspeaking or being careless. What you said wasn't a little bit off, it was a complete reversal of reality. I can't imagine what you might have meant to say that would have been any closer to reality. There is simply nothing in the research that you cited that is even the slightest problem for evolutionary theory, yet you declared that it "flies in the face" of that theory. The truth is that it is precisely the type of research that flows from and continues to provide support for evolution. I think the far more likely conclusion is that you just don't understand what evolutionary theory really says, and I said so. Now, that's not an insult. I didn't jump up and down and say, "god, what an idiot". There are a thousand different subjects that I don't understand either, and pointing that out, while I may not like it, is not tantamount to calling me names. But when you offer up public statements about a subject, and those public statements are completely and verifiably wrong, and especially when you have publicly invited the attention of those who oppose your view by repeatedly portraying us as horrible censors and irrational people who need to "get a life", you certainly cannot be surprised when they point out that those statements are wrong and betray a fundamental misunderstanding of evolutionary theory.
You want a discussion with me? This isn't the way to start it.
Well, I thought my initial response to the question you posed was a very good way to start it. I took your question seriously, I composed a very detailed and polite answer, and I sent you a message pointing you to it so you could read it. There was nothing in that response that was in any way insulting, and in fact my message to you was, if anything, overly gracious, noting that I hoped you would find that I've given a worthy answer to your question.
My second response to you was also not insulting, though I can understand why you might not have liked it. And my third, while again I can understand why you might not like it, was entirely reasonable. I pointed out that you are engaging in exactly the kind of overheated rhetoric that you accuse others of doing. And I would point out now that, while you're taking offense at things I did not say and falsely claiming that I have called you "crazy" and "irrational", your rhetoric toward me and my colleagues who work diligently against the insertion of ID into science classrooms has been far more insulting than anything I have written, and it's not even a close comparison. I could have responded in kind and used the same tone (believe me, I do it often with those I don't think deserve my respect), but I have chosen not to. And that makes your highly emotional response all the more unwarranted, at least toward me.
I can certainly understand you being mad at the guy who commented (again, someone I do not know at all) and called you an unbalanced nut. But it's not reasonable to project that on to me and claim that I started a "Dean Esmay sucks" club when I specifically went out of my way to tell that person that that was not the point of the post at all and that I didn't have any interest in seeing it turn into that. I have attempted at every turn to have this be a civilized and polite discussion on the substantive issues. I had hoped that you might make the same attempt, but that seems increasingly unlikely at this point.
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As Ed said, the comment on the previous post was mine, not Ed's. If the comment hurt Ed's attempt at reasonable discussion with Dean, I apologize to Ed.
But as I think Ed is finding out, my comment was on the money. I just wanted to spare Ed the trouble of futilely engaging the cantankerous Dean, because I think a person of Ed's caliber shouldn't have to stoop to discussion with bottom feeders.
As for Dean, he's probably a good guy and is often interesting, but only God can make him admit he's wrong.
I admit to being wrong on a regular basis. But thank you, Jeff, for illustrating my point so well.
Argh. Because you still choose to hash these out as public arguments on your front page, here is my response:
Ed: As much as I dislike use of bits of cut-and-paste "fisking" style responses, it's the fastest way to aswer you so I'll do it:
Dean, I think you're reacting to a few of the people who responded to what I said, not to what I actually said.
I was reacting to exactly three things:
1) That you would PRESUME that such lack of response says something about my character rather than my lack of time.
2) Your publicly speculating about my my character in such a way solely because I did not respond just to your very own special self, and
3) The fact that by doing so as a public article on the front page of your web site, you practically invited a bunch of pathetic assholes who have nothing better to do but take cheap potshots at me to have at me (and my wife!) on your blog, and,
4) Your weak-sister response to such vile comments directed at me and my family. Oh, you wouldn't want this to turn into an attack-thread on Dean? So why post it that way, and why allow these people to continue with their vile comments?
Note that if someone did this to you in my comments I would either delete the posts, publicly castigate those doing it, or write you a note immediately to let you know people were slandering you. Or all three at once. I would consider failure to do so on my part to be an endorsement of those vile comments, unless it was just something I managed to miss.
The very few times I have allowed commenters to bash a person not present on my own blog, it has been becuase I view that person with deep contempt. Although occasionally I might just miss something--have a look at how many comments I get a week and you'll excuse me if one of your pathetic little trolls points to some instance where I missed something. (I really do try not to.)
Take a hard look at how many comments and trackbacks I get in a week, Ed. I can't say I don't try to read everything but I'm not able to. Kindly refrain in the future from speculating about my motives. If you thought your response was that much above the fray and contained points that you badly wanted me to respond to, a far more effective way of doing it would be to drop me a polite note saying so. Not merely, "I responded to you here," since I'd already gotten a lot of responses (obvious to anyone who looked) but more along the lines of, "Hey Dean, I'd really like to read any response you have to this here essay I wrote about what you said, do you have time to give it a look?"
Either in the comments or as an email.
As for whether my response to all this is "emotion": You're damned right it is. Did I ever claim to be a Vulcan?
My response to what you wrote (all three of them) were calm, polite and well reasoned.
I find condescending speculation about my character and my motives on the front page of someone's weblog, particularly someone I've never heard of, to be more than a little impolite, no matter how calm or well-reasoned.
If it helps you to understand my position, I have been at this weblogging game for a good long time, and if you look at those pathetic cretins posting in your comments about me and my wife, it should give you an inkling of what I see on a regular basis. I get several trackbacks a week from people who write snotty things about me and things I've said. It's incredibly tiresome, but I don't even bothere deleting most of them anymore. One of the reasons I have comment registration is precisely so I can show such fuckwits the door.
("Fuckwits" -- An emotional word? Why yes indeed it is!)
So while you may not yet be so fortunate as to have a coterie of people obsessing over you and your blog, regularly leaving you nasty comments or sending you trackbacks to say how stupid, evil, shallow, or dishonest you are, if you stay at this long enough it'll happen to you more and more and more.
Here's my suggestion for next time. I think it'll get you a lot farther not just with me but your fellow bloggers: A polite note along the lines of, "Hey I wrote something here addressing some important points, and I'd really like to hear your thoughts on them," with perhaps a polite followup with something along the lines of "Hey you know I didn't get a response, I understand if you're busy but I'd still like to read what you have to say" will get you a hell of a lot further than writing articles questioning my character, my integrity, my honesty, and so on.
I don't recall ever getting any letter from you. If I did, it zipped past me. And this leads you to speculate about my honesty, integrity, and motives? In a public article on the front page of your web site?
Get bent dude. Seriously.
Now, as it is I've just put in a half hour of my time writing all of this. Time I don't really have at the moment.
That said I am running out of time. But now to this business about mutation:
It has been my impression for some time now that the view of mutation as the primary driving force behind evolution was not in favor, that most viewed mutation as a secondary force driving most evolutionary change and that gradual change over time through natural selection was sufficient to explain most evolutionary change, and that mutation could only be a part of things over a very long period of time since most mutations are contra-survival. It was further my impression that these researchers (the original article is here had found a way to show how mutation could invoke evolutionary change much more quickly and over shorter periods of time than previously thought.
If I am wrong about all that, feel free to correct me. There's an easy way to do that, too. Instead of writing articles that start by speculating about whether I know anything about biology at all, why don't you try, "Hey Dean, actually mutation's long been viewed as more important than you seem to think."
Just a style tip there, Ed. I'm not a biologist, but I'm not a moron either.
Enough. You either udnerstand where I'm coming from or you don't.
----
Ugh. I see an error above. My three reasons?
"NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again."
I still can't understand why Ed wastes so much time and space dealing with this Dean Esmay character. Why should anyone care so much what this Dean Esmay character bloviates about. It strikes me that there are more than a few other issues that Ed's time would be better spent dealing with.
"If I am wrong about all that, feel free to correct me. "
Well I'm not Ed, but as a public service, I'll take a crack anyway. The problem is you're assuming that mutation and selection are two separate things that cause evolution independently. In reality, evolution requires both mutation and selection working together. All mutation can do is add diversity. It cannot cause adaptation all by itself. Selection, meanwhile, can cause adaptation by choosing among preexisting diversity, but without a source of new diversity, new adaptations cannot occur. So you have to have both. Darwinian evolution is not about natural selection alone, it's about mutation [i]plus[/i] natural selection.
So when biologists discover a new mechanism of mutation, it does not somehow reduce the importance of natural selection. You still have to have selection in order for evolution to occur. New mechanisms of mutation actually enhance the ability of selection because they provide additional diversity for selection to work on. So this is not in any way contrary to existing theory.
Steve -
Check out the linked article Dean gives above. It actually compares two different sorts of mutation; random point mutations verses mutations in tandem repeat sequences.
From the article:
Most scientists agree that over very long periods of time, mutations in the genetic code are responsible for driving evolutionary changes in species. One widely accepted hypothesis is that random, so-called single-point mutations - a change from one letter to another among the billions of letters contained in the code - minutely but inexorably change an organism's appearance.
UT Southwestern scientists, however, believe the single-point mutation process is much too slow and happens much too infrequently to account for the rapid rise of new species found in the fossil record, or for the rapid evolutionary changes occurring in species such as the domestic dog, whose various breeds have evolved relatively quickly from a not-too-distant common ancestor.
The scientists combined extensive genetic data from different dog breeds and data on the shapes of dog skulls with computer programs developed by study co-author Dr. John "Trey" Fondon, a research fellow in the Eugene McDermott Center for Human Growth and Development and biochemistry at UT Southwestern. The researchers found a correlation between the length and angle of the dogs' noses and specific regions in their genetic code that are prone to mutate often.
These genetic regions, called tandem repeat sequences ...
So, they're basically arguing that since mutations happen in these tandem repeats much more often than random point mutations (100,000X) they are a more likely source of new morphological variation in quickly evolving species.
Dave, I did read the article as well as the original research. I don't see how anything you wrote contradicts anything I wrote. The question was Dean's misunderstanding concerning this new finding being "contrary to accepted evolutionary theory". Look at his last comment and you'll see what my remarks were in response to.
Steve,
I could well be the one confused now. I wasn't disagreeing with what you said, but thought it wasn't exactly what Dean was looking for. But upon re-reading your second paragraph a bit more carefully, it's now clear you had it covered.
I do agree that this new finding, if correct, does not contradict accepted evolutionary theory. It merely suggests a partular mode of mutation may be relatively more important in rapid speciation than another mode.
Cheers.