It is no secret that John Derbyshire is a friend of mine. I am sure most SB readers would find such a connection abhorrent, nevertheless, any man who picks up Mark Ridley's Evolution at my recommendation is a friend :) The goddess of evolution should not just be admired and given due respect, one should strive to understand her. In any case, it is easy to stand by Darwin's legacy amongst fellow travellers, but over the past year Derb has been defending the scientific consensus over at NRO in the face of a wall of reader hostility and relative neutrality from his colleagues. With this, I point you to A Frigid and Pitiless Dogma, Derb's review of Ramesh Ponnuru's Party of Death. Here is a sampler:
The philosophical passages strictly follow the Golden Rule of religious apologetics, which is: The conclusion is known in advance, and the task of the intellectual is to erect supporting arguments. It would be an astounding thing, just from a statistical point of view, if, after conducting a rigorous open-ended inquiry from philosophical first principles, our author came to conclusions precisely congruent with the dogmas of the church in which he himself is a communicant. Yet that is the case, very nearly, with Party of Death. Remarkable! What if, after all that intellectual work, all that propositional algebra, all those elegant syllogisms, the author had come to the conclusion that abortion was not such a bad thing after all? I suppose he would have been plunged into severe psychic distress. Fortunately there was never the slightest chance of this happening.
This isn't a standard production from either Left or Right that will make anyone happy. Though the piece implies that Ramesh Ponnuru is in a cult and hints that it is he who has a necro-fixation it is not totally unsympathetic either.
