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.