Here
are several pieces by our own estimable Jeff Lidz that fight the good fight
against the forces of darkness and ignorance. We need much more of this.
We need to get stuff into popular venues defending the work that we have done.[1]
The
most important is this
piece in Scientific American
rebutting the profoundly ignorant and pernicious piece by Ibbotson and
Tomasello (I&T). (see here
and
here and here
for longer discussion). Jeff does an excellent job of pointing out the issues
and debunking the “arguments” that I&T advance. It is amazing, IMO, that
T’s views on these issues still garner any attention. They no doubt arise from
the fact that he has done good work on non-linguistic topics. However, his
criticisms of GG are both of long-standing and very low quality and have been
so for as long as they have been standing.
So, it is good to see the Sci Am
has finally opened up its pages to those willing to call junk junk. Read it and
pass it around widely in your intellectual community.
Here
are two other pieces (here
and here). The
latter is a response to this. This all
appears in PNAS. The articles are
co-atuhored with Chung-hye Han and Julien Musolino. The discussion is an
accessible entry into the big issues GG broaches for the scientifically literate
non GGer. As such, excellent for publicity purposes.
So, read and disseminate widely. It is important to call out
the idiocy out there. It is even fun.
[1]
I have a piece in Current Affairs
with Nathan Robinson that I will link to when it is available on the web.
