Commentary on the so-called Creation/Evolution/Intelligent Design Debate and Right-Wing nuttery in general - and please ignore the typos (I make lots!)

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Weird - why do some folks refer to themselves in the third person?

Some may recall the Seinfeld episode in which the gang encounters 'Jimmy' at the gym, who refers to himself as 'Jimmy' when talking about himself. Jerry and the gang are rightly confused and find it all a bit odd.

So, consider this:

Excuse me? ReMine's paper was peer-reviewed by evolutionary geneticists (including James Crow and Warren Ewens) who acknowledge it is correct. You have
no reason to brush that aside. 4.158.231.1 07:00, 26 August 2006 (UTC) WalterR


WalterR is Walter ReMine, the ReMine that ReMine refers to as ReMine.

I have read that doing this is a sign of megalomania, which, considering the source of the above quote, makes perfect sense.

As an aside - ReMine and his cronies are conflating issues, as usual - yes, his submitted manuscript was reviewed by the people he refers to and at least one other person. His manuscript was rejected for a couple of reasons, and none of them were what ReMine and his cheerleaders want us to think they were. Among the reasons were the unoriginality of the conclusion - ReMine comes to the same conclusion that Haldane did (re: cost of substitution), he just derived it in a different manner, another was the non-academic, non-scientific style of the paper. His original submitted version (which, I understand, has been 'cleaned up' for "publication" in a creationist venu) contained a number of dismissive statements and some self-aggrandizing, which is frowned on in scientific publications. ReMine did not attempt to re-submit nor did he attempt to submit his manuscript anywhere else. Anyone who has had a scientific paper published knows that a huge proportion of manuscripts are turned down initially. Typically, an author will make corrections, take advice from the reviewers, etc., and resubmit or will try to have the paper published elsewhere. ReMine did not do this - his original manuscript was rejected and he decided to engage in a multi-year martydom-fest.

Anyway, the conflation is this - even if ReMine's reformulation of Haldane's model is 100% absolutely correct, it is not in any way support for his application of Haldane's model to human evolution, which is ReMine's bread-and-butter argument.

But this simple fact will never deter the militant anti-evolution faction of the creationist crowd. Being honest and factual comes in a distant second when it comes to spreading rhetorically attractive yet irrelevant claims.

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