Silly Little Country

P.Z. Myers and Mark Steyn - another unfortunate round

Myers asks this question about Mark Steyn:

Conservatives don't actually pay any attention to this guy, do they?

Well, yeah, I think so; many people consider me a conservative (I am not sure), and I must say Myers cured me of my enjoyment of Steyn's very slick glib wit - in a previous post I linked to the exchange that caused me to stop reading Steyn. And I have in fact stopped. So some conservatives (if I am one) actually no longer pay attention to him.

It is sad - he could be really funny. But he himself made it clear there was not a lot behind the humour with his comment about one look out the window being enough for him to come to a conclusion.

Go read Myers' post. Steyn really should not have got past his glib dismissals, which at least did not expose him to half the trouble Myers now creates for him. I think my favourite Myers paragraph was the following:

And really, the rest of his argument, besides being a sloppy hodge-podge, is just as fallacious. He points to the differences between organisms as somehow supporting his point of the intrinsic and unquestionable superiority of humankind. He doesn't seem to recognize the symmetry of the differences: if I am 1.5% different from a chimpanzee, the chimpanzee is also 1.5% different from me. All science can measure here is a difference, not whether one is "superior" to another…and if anything, since we're all equally children of a long history of evolution, we'd have to say that each are roughly equally fit to their role in nature.

It reminded me of an interview I recall hearing on the CBC's Sunday Edition with Stephen Jay Gould, where the interviewer got all excited about how some possible disaster could wipe out life on earth, and Gould pointed out that perhaps human life could be wiped out, but it would be pretty hard to knock off all life. And a lot of the non-human stuff looks pretty persistent to me!

Myers also has a little fun with some further Steyn twittiness:

There's a peculiar notion, the idea that mooning about over an afterlife that doesn't exist is by definition more efficient than a secular society. How? Why should I believe that? Does Steyn also believe that a planned central economy is more efficient by definition than capitalism, and does that mean it is more efficient in practice? Secularism has a history of working very, very well, as the United States and Canada and modern Europe show. Where is this highly efficient religious state that we should admire and model ourselves after?

It baffles me Steyn wants to pick this fight again. He is overmatched.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 6:30 PM