For Simon and Shuster. Interview here.
Q: What prompted you to write an essay describing yourself as a creationist?
I was frustrated with the way social science had stretched the logic of evolution to its breaking point. Evolutionary psychology especially, which has been plagued by research scandals, kept reversing its basic tenets.
Getting frustrated with evolutionary psychology is not evidence of being a creationist, it is evidence of a capacity to reject the utterly ridiculous…
Also:
Q: What adjectives would you use to describe the reaction?
Angry, defensive, fearful, histrionic, sometimes misogynistic, hazing. Something more than an academic argument about cosmology and consciousness was at stake.
In short, a cave of Darwin’s trolls emptied itself in her path. Happens.
I was surprised that former colleagues didn’t give me, a career-long journalist with an academic background whom some of them had worked with, the benefit of the doubt. I was also surprised that many hard scientists—as opposed to science writers—liked what I wrote. The experience left me hurt and embarrassed. I thought I must have miscalculated the tone of the essay to trigger so much fury.
Nope. Just the trolls doing their thing, in many cases at public expense.
She should get ready for another onslaught when her book is published. We can pretty much predict an assault on the Amazon listing and a spate of mad dog reviews.
See also:
Science writer who admits to doubting mindless evolution theories interviewed on CBC. (Network didn’t implode.)
Science writer trashed for saying she is “creationist” defended in New York Times (Doors didn’t close yet.)
Tech writer says she is a creationist—how long do you give her day job? (If her book takes off, she won’t need it.)
Trouble in the “belief enforcement” science world gets noticed even in the New York Times (Heffernan first hit our screen in 2010.)
Hat tip: Philip Cunningham