Scott Adams Says Fossil Evidence is Bullshit, But He Believes in Evolution
By Daniel Miessler on September 3rd, 2007: Tagged as Blogging | Debate | Evolution
Scott Adams has posted another highly inflammatory post — this time claiming that popular evidence for evolution is bullshit. I’m no longer surprised by these pieces of his, but I have figured something out. He’s playing games with his readers by creating incendiary titles that don’t match his post content.
His post is titled, “Fossils — Still Bullshit”. Ok, now he’s got our attention. Then he goes on to say that he’s NOT claiming any of the following:
- Evolution isn’t a scientific fact.
- All evidence for evolution is false.
- God created the earth.
His game is simple — create a title that will rile people up because it indicates an extraordinarily weak argument is going to follow, and then proceed to point out how that’s not actually what he was saying.
It’s a win-win for him. When someone comes back and says, “Eh, fossils are real, the evidence is real, you’re wrong.”, he just says, “You’re stupid. I already pointed out that my title was incorrect within my post.”
Great. You win again, Scott. You tricked people into believing for a second that you didn’t believe in evolution. But all you actually said was that scientific evidence for evolution (which you admit is completely strong) is so complex that it’s difficult to dumb down for laymen, and that in an attempt to reduce its complexity it gets mangled.
I think it’s a great point, but must he package it as an anti-evolution argument in order to make people react so strongly? I’m aware of the whole “tainment” concept, but at some point the style can become too similar to trolling. Scott is unbelievably awesome without having to resort to such tactics.: