There’s an old tradition in the screed business where the writer declares his interests before mounting his horse and riding around the page. I will do that here. I have never liked Fred Reed. By that, I mean his writing has never appealed to me. The main reason is I don’t like phonies. His corn-pone shtick – and it is a shtick – is a synthetic attempt to play on the vulnerability of his target audience.
His is not a unique act. I’ve met late middle-aged men doing this bit and it is always strikes me as a passive-aggressive way to avoid being challenged. In his case, it is an attempt to signal to a particular audience that he is one of them, without actually having to be one of them. It is intended to deceive and that’s something I find offensive.
That said, his latest posted on The Unz Review is very disappointing. By that I mean I’m surprised it was posted there at all. The Unz Review is one of the few places willing to post heterodox opinion on complicated and controversial issues. Steve Sailer is an obvious example. Razib Khan is another. Fred Reed’s thumbless and somewhat incoherent column covering very old objections to evolutionary theory from the flat earth perspective seems wildly out of place.
In fact, it looks like troll bait. Ron Unz is a gazillionaire so it is not like he needs the traffic to sell ad space. Maybe he has a soft spot for Fred Reed or is throwing the guy a bone out of pity. I don’t know and it is not all that important, but it is a thing that bugs me.
What really bugs me about this is the dishonesty of it. Take a look at the introductory paragraphs.
Over the years I have occasionally expressed doubts over the tenets of evolutionism which, perhaps wrongly, has seemed to me a sort of political correctness of science, or maybe a metaphysics somewhat related to science. As a consequence I have been severely reprimanded. The editor of a site devoted to genetic expression furiously began deleting any mention of me from his readers. Others, to include Mr. John Derbyshire of Taki’s Magazine, have expressed disdain, though disdaining to explain just why.
In all of this, my inability to get straight answers that do not shift has frustrated me. I decided to address my questions to an expert in the field, preferably one who loathed me and thus might produce his best arguments so as to stick it to me. To this end I have settled on Mr. Derbyshire.
He has the several advantages of being highly intelligent, an excellent writer, ardent of all things evolutionary and genetic, and well versed in them. I would profit by his instruction in things in which I am only an amateur—should he be so inclined. (He may well have other things to do.) To this end, I submit a few questions which have strained my admittedly paltry understanding for some time. They are not new questions, but could use answers. I agree in advance to accept his answers (if any be given) as canonical.
I’ll address the bold portion in order. Fred Reed is a fairly well known creationist crank. I’m not a regular reader, but I have seen him referenced as a creationist crank many times. It is a hobby horse for him. I put “fred reed creationism” in a nearby Google machine and I get 6,900,000 results.
The “crank” label derives from the first bolded sentence. There are libraries full of books with all the “straight answers that do not shift. ” What he lacks the courage to say or the honesty to admit, is he does not understand or accept the science. Instead, he disingenuously shifts the burden for his ignorance from his shoulders onto others.
The second bold section is an outright lie that he surely knows is a lie. He knows John Derbyshire well enough to know his CV so he has been reading the guy for a while. John has been writing about these topics for a couple of decades, at least.If I were to guess, I’d bet John has written about evolution more than any other topic. A close second is education followed by race.
John spent years debating these guys about intelligent design, young earth creationism and Darwin. If Fred Reed has yet to “profit from John’s instruction” by this point, he never will. Again, this is just an oleaginous attempt to present himself as something other than an ideologue looking for an argument. I’ll also note that again he places the burden to educate him on others. Therefore, if he continues to clutch at his superstitions, it is the fault of others.
The last bit is an outright lie wrapped in a falsehood. His questions have all been answered thousands of times by thousands of people over the last century. He has rejected all of those attempts so there is no reason to believe this one last try by his chosen bogeyman will do the trick.
He knows all of this, but he lacks the honestly and integrity to simply say he prefers his own voodoo. I can respect people who prefer their religious explanations for the natural world. I disagree with them, but if they are sincere and honest about the why and the what, I have no quarrel with them. That’s not Fred Reed.
The rest of the very poorly written piece is a recitation of the same old complaints from the creationist crowd. Done up in the phony-baloney corn-pone style Fred has cultivated over the years makes for painful reading. The only worthwhile take away is he seems to have the boohoos over Derb saying something mean about him. In addition to being a ridiculous phony, Fred Reed is a pussy, it seems.
I’ve tried Fred on Everything several times, but I never kept it on my Favorites list. I think it’s more his site design than the writing, for me, though. I can’t say anything about a persona he uses in his blog, really, because I use one, too. I try to make my “private” stuff like I’m talking BS after a bunch of beers with my old friends, some of whom I knew in Nam. In other words, bursts of extremely foul language and talk of, uh, impolite stuff is only a paragraph away. But I don’t want to inflict that… Read more »
JD, there’s a difference between being polite and being a gold-plated phony. My office manager is a flaming moonbat, but I’m polite to her, even when she is singing those damned Obama songs at lunch. Fred is a phony.
Fred wrote a column a couple of months ago about comparative intelligence and Mexicans (he lives in Mexico with his Mexican wife). His effort to prove that Mexicans in general were as capable as anyone was incoherent. I got to thinking that if I were Mexican I would not want this guy defending my intelligence, except that in my experience Mestizos themselves do not believe themselves to be particularly intelligent–and are not in the least distressed by that state self-awareness, a state which is otherwise forbidden in the US.
Looks like disqus put all my comments in auto-spam. We’re living in an era of censorship by people with easily hurt feelings
His police articles are better. The problem may be he’s talking about subjects outside of his expertise
Whatever else Fred is or isn’t, he isn’t a phoney. He’s always been upfront about his life. Fred comes from a mildly prominent Virginia family, but he was born in the coal mining town of Crumpler, West Virginia and spent a lot of his youth in rural West Virgina and Northern Alabama. He has a high regard for the people in the parts of Appalachia where he grew up. The ‘down home’ writing style he sometimes adopts is simply a literary device, used by people such as Joel Chandler Harris and many others. Fred has an excellent command of the… Read more »
There’s a big dif between having one’s questions answered and having them answered satisfactorily. That Fred is still asking is not necessarily evidence that he has ignored the “libraries full of books,” but may only be telling us that the books give unsatisfactory answers. I have my own unanswered questions about evolution, but the real lazy wusses in my view are the ones who get defensive when I ask. After reading Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box I thought it best to let him ask the hard questions, I would stick with the easy ones. I have read many answers to… Read more »
Debating with creationists is like debating with progressives. They always lie. They always argue in bad faith. They don’t give a damn about the truth. They care about apologetics, not truth. They are defenders of the faith. They insist on learning biology only from ignorant theologians and random comment threads on blogs, and then complain about the quality of the education they’ve gotten. That’s not the act of a man arguing in good faith. Buy and read a used copy of “Climbing Mount Improbable”. It’s a good layman’s introduction written by somebody who actually understands the field — unfortunately, his… Read more »
Marc, this is the defensiveness I’m talking about. I said I have unanswered questions about evolution. You mean you don’t have any? Think about what that makes you if you don’t. Thanks for the book info; looking forward to giving it a go. I suppose Richard Dawkins felt a little like Martin Luther in his later years when the Jews summarily rejected his systematic theology of grace. All he could do after that was to persecute the blind idiots. Your frustration with those who keep asking questions may have less to do with their obtuseness and more to do with… Read more »
The second law of thermodynamics puts the lie to evolution. Evolution is atheistic dogma dressed up as science, nothing more. Psalm 14:1 “The fool says in his heart, There is no God.” The vituperation coming out of Pisco shows Fred hit a nerve. Read, In The Beginning by Walt Brown.
@fodderwing Such passive aggressive childishness. You have “unanswered questions” because you refuse to learn about the subject you insist on discussing. You put on a conventional and deeply disingenuous schtick that creationists always use. I’ve seen it before, endlessly. I know what comes next. I have zero reason to believe that you’re the one who, finally, after all these years, honestly DOES want the answers he pretends to ask for. I tried like hell to give you the benefit of the doubt, but you can’t sanely expect people to have a lot of patience with that act. I have unanswered… Read more »
@marc pisco Dale Carnegie, Dude, it’ll help you keep your cool and show you how name-calling is not helpful. Passivee/agressive. Childish. Disingenuous. Insane expectations. Drama Queen. Gee, wonder why people don’t listen to you? Just make your case, fella, and let people decide. Some folks take longer to convince about things. I found Darwin’s Black Box to be a fascinating read. The main point of the book (Behe is not a “creationist”) is that the story of evolution should have changed dramatically with the advent of the electron microscope, but the story we get is the same old drummers beating… Read more »
I would love to have more confidence in the science-reason crowd than the six thousand year old earth crowd, but experience shows me the science-reason crowd does more damage. And anyone who would equate science with reason is doing damage to good science.