{"id":9205,"date":"2012-11-19T11:35:07","date_gmt":"2012-11-19T11:35:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/11\/19\/the-abysmally-ignorant-jerry-coyne\/"},"modified":"2012-11-19T11:35:07","modified_gmt":"2012-11-19T11:35:07","slug":"the-abysmally-ignorant-jerry-coyne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/11\/19\/the-abysmally-ignorant-jerry-coyne\/","title":{"rendered":"The Abysmally Ignorant Jerry Coyne"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jerry Coyne complains<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Another problem is that scientists like me are intimidated by philosophical jargon, and hence didn\u2019t interrupt the monologues to ask for clarification for fear of looking stupid. I therefore spent a fair amount of time Googling stuff like \u201cepistemology\u201d and \u201contology\u201d (I can never get those terms straight since I rarely use them).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is an amazing confession.  It shows that the man is abysmally ignorant outside his specialty.  He is not wondering about the distinction between de dicto<\/em> and de re<\/em>, but about a Philosophy 101 distinction.  It would be as if a philosopher couldn't distinguish between velocity and acceleration, or mass and weight, or a scalar and a vector, or thought that a light-year was a measure of time.  <\/span><\/p>\n

Despite his ignorance of the simplest distinctions, Coyne is not bashful about spouting off on topics he knows nothing about such as free will.  Lawrence Krauss is another of this scientistic crew.  And Dawkins.  And Hawking and Mlodinow<\/a>. And . . . .  Their arrogance stands in inverse relation to their ignorance.   A whole generation of culturally-backward and half-educated scientists does not bode well for the future. <\/span><\/p>\n

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