steviez314 - September 2, 2010 | 9:57 am · Link

Isn’t a bonobo a chimp that writes a column for the New York Times?

burnspbesq - September 2, 2010 | 10:02 am · Link

I think we’ve established that McArdle is unworthy of being taken seriously. This is at the point where we are beating the memorial plaque that says a horse once died here.

We can haz fresh meat plz?

cleek - September 2, 2010 | 10:02 am · Link

ok, since mistermix’s version of this just disappeared, i’ll put my comment on this one:

why, oh why, do people keep talking about McArdle ?

ed - September 2, 2010 | 10:04 am · Link

I believe that was the great Chris Washburn who claimed to be amphibious, although a lot of jocks have made similar errors over the years. Yogi Berra reputedly said something to that effect.

QDC - September 2, 2010 | 10:05 am · Link

Stand back, because you’re likely to get wine in your eye as they sputter and spray their indignation.

I love this guy!

General Stuck - September 2, 2010 | 10:07 am · Link

Ot

Deep Thought

What is wrong with this story?

McClatchy turned Onion?

Frank Chow - September 2, 2010 | 10:11 am · Link

Wait humans aren’t like a pair of lightweight chinos? http://www.bonobos.com/ Very interesting indeed.

dmsilev - September 2, 2010 | 10:13 am · Link

Really, you missed the prize quote at the end:

I’m not familiar with Ms. McArdle’s work, but if she’s got a gig at The Atlantic, which is one of the most respected magazines in the country, presumably this is far below her usual intellectual standard.

Sadly, no. This is her usual intellectual standard.

dms

jacy - September 2, 2010 | 10:14 am · Link

@burnspbesq:

While it was good for a chuckle to read the author’s takedown of McMegan, I agree with you. Can’t we just dispatch her to the blogospheric dustbin?

Really, if we keep whacking her, are we ever going to get candy?

Randy P - September 2, 2010 | 10:19 am · Link

I’ve been fond of reading about bonobos ever since learning that they use sex as a negotiating tool for intertribal conflicts. And that they have sex for fun.

Around our house we’re also very fond of studies of bower birds, who get their mate by building little bowers and trying to do a better job of interior decorating than their competitors. If the researchers leave pretty little plastic things around, they’ll incorporate that in the decoration.

Matt M - September 2, 2010 | 10:20 am · Link

From the table at the end of the article, reprinted from “Sex at Dawn”—methinks this sentence could use a rewrite:

Bonobos and humans often gaze into each other’s eyes when copulating and kiss each other deeply.

calling all toasters - September 2, 2010 | 10:27 am · Link

I’m guessing Mr. McMegan has already contracted Wandering Eye Disease, hence her bluster. The stupidity, of course, predates her relationship.

Viva BrisVegas - September 2, 2010 | 10:28 am · Link

@Matt M:

Bonobos and humans often gaze into each other’s eyes when copulating and kiss each other deeply.

Once you go Bonobo you never go back.

Xenocrates - September 2, 2010 | 10:33 am · Link

• “It reads like horsefeathers . . . like an undergraduate thesis,”
• “breathless rather than scientific”
• “cherry-picked evidence stretched far out of shape to support their theory,”
• “they don’t even attempt to paper over the enormous holes in their theory.”

funny, these are MY exact thoughts when reading the bilge produced by Ms. McArdle’s keyboard eructions….

mr. whipple - September 2, 2010 | 10:35 am · Link

I’m sure if Sully weren’t on vacation, he’d link to McMegan’s analysis and call it “interesting.”

Yup. I understand the need to be civil with people you work with, but she’s a freaking moron.

NonyNony - September 2, 2010 | 10:38 am · Link

@jacy:

Can’t we just dispatch her to the blogospheric dustbin?

Why? She’s an endless source of humor because she’s so blissfully unaware of her own ignorance and so screechingly defensive of it at the same time. The only frustrating part is that people take “Jane Galt” seriously at all – though if she were widely acknowledged to be a corporate shill who writes whatever her masters pay her to write then she’d be slightly less fun to mock. But only slightly because she’d still insist on pointing at the turds she passes and asking to be called a genius for it.

@Comrade Javamanphil:

She should stick to only writing about what she knows but I suspect the world isn’t ready for a blog whos eonly content is about how awesome it is to be Megan McArdle.

Let’s be fair here. She can comfortably blog about what it’s like to be born on third base and think she’s hit a triple all by herself without even the need of a pitcher. Just like any other overprivileged schmuck that lacks self awareness and was born into an upper middle class family. So she’s a completely replaceable cog at The Atlantic and we have to assume she’s kept around writing about stuff she knows nothing about because her bosses like what she writes.

Chew on that, and then think about how much ya wanna support The Atlantic.

Stillwater - September 2, 2010 | 10:40 am · Link

McArdle paradigmatically instantiates an antiquated epistemological weltanschauung in which a priori ratiocination is presumed sufficient for descriptively accurate analyses of empirical subject matter.

Wait, what?

Scuffletuffle - September 2, 2010 | 10:43 am · Link

@steviez314: Where would you like your internets delivered?

Scuffletuffle - September 2, 2010 | 10:47 am · Link

@Matt M: Why, what’s wrong with it? ... Oh, you mean…uh.

Howlin Wolfe - September 2, 2010 | 10:52 am · Link

@cleek:

why, oh why, do people keep talking about McArdle ?

Because it’s entertaining to ridicule people like her. Totally mean, but I have to get my tribal hate out somewherez so I can think clearly when necessary. I dunno; it’s funny, too.

I also want to keep track of people like McArgle-bargle sort of like an indicator of how far the cultural decadence has progressed in this country. Did McA-b pen an utterly ridiculous piece? Check. Is she still enjoy her sinecure at the Atlantic? Nero still fiddling by the flames? Check.

Punchy - September 2, 2010 | 11:01 am · Link

I’m not familiar with Ms. McArdle’s work, but if she’s got a gig at The Atlantic, which is one of the most respected magazines in the country, presumably this is far below her usual intellectual standard.

Holy effin’ shit this is funneh. Because it’s sooooooooo wrong.

Chuck - September 2, 2010 | 11:07 am · Link

I just hope that Sully has the good sense not to fire one up on the beach on this vacation.

p.a. - September 2, 2010 | 11:09 am · Link

why, oh why, do people keep talking about McArdle ?

It’s really not fucking funny. It’s not a major problem in the big picture of what’s going on in the world, but in its own small way by keeping this incompetent hack employed someone more deserving, who may add something positive to the public discourse, is being deprived of a public forum and what I assume is a pretty good living as a a writer.

Chad N Freude - September 2, 2010 | 11:16 am · Link

@Stillwater:

McArdle paradigmatically instantiates an antiquated epistemological weltanschauung in which a priori ratiocination is presumed sufficient for descriptively accurate analyses of empirical subject matter.

Best sentence evah posted on the Internet. But it contains an error: There is no “a priori ratiocination” in McArdle’s commentary, but rather “a priori assumption without ratiocination”.
— The Drive-By Pedant

Mnemosyne - September 2, 2010 | 11:18 am · Link

@General Stuck:

The fact that the writer doesn’t even mention that the tax cuts expire automatically, so writing breathlessly about how Reid will somehow lose the vote that will “let” them expire is so wrong-headed that it makes him look like this guy?

jacy - September 2, 2010 | 11:20 am · Link

@Zandar:

McMegan wouldn’t recognize science even if it was covered in pink Himalayan sea salt and carrying a copy of The Fountainhead under its arm.

gex - September 2, 2010 | 11:25 am · Link

@Chuck: I wonder if he will put two and two together and notice his affluent, white maleness means he was treated differently by the system than those poor black men (whom Sully is convinced may just naturally be in that position because they are predisposed to have lower IQs).

Nah. Or else, how could he be a conservative?

TomG - September 2, 2010 | 11:33 am · Link

Once in a while I will read someone at The Atlantic besides Andrew Sullivan, but McArdle has never been someone I read daily. So far, I can’t see that I’m missing much.

BDeevDad - September 2, 2010 | 11:34 am · Link

@mistermix: I love how McMegan tries to change the meaning of her words by insisting in her comments that the chapter is terrible and doesn’t count.

timb - September 2, 2010 | 11:37 am · Link

@Alwhite: THIS +1

Joey Maloney in paradise - September 2, 2010 | 11:41 am · Link

I suspect the link to TFA sent some Juicers over there to post in comments because my goodness there certainly is some fine McArglebargle shredding and it really kind of sticks out among all the posts that are actually about the book.

timb - September 2, 2010 | 11:44 am · Link

@Mnemosyne: I think the underlying issue is “can Reid win the vote to extend the tax cuts to the middle class when Republicans and “Republicans” (like Bayh, curse his evil soul) will just refuse to pass anything. In doing so, they hope to hold the rest of us hostage, so Harry will cave.

Does anyone really doubt he will?

Randy P - September 2, 2010 | 11:45 am · Link

@BDeevDad: Thanks for scrolling through the comments. I wouldn’t have the patience. Your link also led me, a few comments down, to the following exchange with Ms. M, where she doubles down on “they aren’t like us because they just aren’t!”

Comment:

Megan, just saying bonobos and humans are unalike isn’t a very illuminating critique. I’m not a primatologist or evolutionary biologist, but I’m guessing that if you wanted to make a case against using a specific primate as a model you’d need to (1) declare what you’re trying to test, and (2) discuss which model system would bring more benefits and fewer drawbacks within the context of the tests you want to do.

Response:

I don’t think that’s right. I think that if someone wants to convince me that bonobos are a good model for human ev psych, then they have to, um, convince me that bonobos are a good model.

chester - September 2, 2010 | 11:53 am · Link

@LarsThorwald: i’m on board, though i prefer it comma-less.

i mean come on.

ed - September 2, 2010 | 12:04 pm · Link

Would you fix the damn quote already? It was Chris Washburn, not Charles Shackleford, who said that.

Apologies for picking nits.

Brachiator - September 2, 2010 | 12:14 pm · Link

@Randy P:
RE: Thanks for scrolling through the comments. I wouldn’t have the patience. Your link also led me, a few comments down, to the following exchange with Ms. M, where she doubles down on “they aren’t like us because they just aren’t!”

Response: I don’t think that’s right. I think that if someone wants to convince me that bonobos are a good model for human ev psych, then they have to, um, convince me that bonobos are a good model.

Holy Mother of Darwin, this woman is all kinds of stupid. There are all kinds of easily explainable, scientific, reasons why caution should be used when trying to compare humans and bonobos, but McMegan is not remotely aware of any of them. For example, although some people like to talk about how humans and bonobos are nearly identical genetically, humans and chimps split from the common ancestor about 7 million years ago, while current studies suggest that bonobos split from chimps less than 1 million years ago. This difference in lineage may be more important than mere percentage of DNA might suggest. Then there are issues of bonobo morphology, which may influence behavior.

But the more Megan puts out junk, the more one wonders why somebody just doesn’t pull the plug on her nonsense. She is just hopeless.

J.W. Hamner - September 2, 2010 | 12:17 pm · Link

From the critique:

In the discussion of her article, she flatly states that chimps are genetically more closely related to humans than bonobos are, which is not only just plain wrong, it’s something we explain very early in the book (along with a graph, no less, on p. 62).

Ha! Libertarians luuuuuuuuurv to compare us to chimps… why? Because chimps occasionally make war on other groups. Stronger chimps will take things from weaker members of their own group. They have a pretty strict social hierarchy. Basically, chimps can be used (ignorantly) to justify Social Darwinism. So great, an evolutionary expanation as to why “I got mine, so f-u!”

So what happens when you bring up bonobos? They flip out.

arguingwithsignposts - September 2, 2010 | 12:27 pm · Link

I’ll just add to the “Why do we keep talking about McMegan” thinking and say that her pious, ill-informed glibertarianism is heard quite frequently on APM’s “Marketplace,” along with that hack David Frum.

She wouldn’t be spreading her bullshit on NPR stations if it weren’t for her gig at the Atlantic. So anything that can be done to relentlessly pound home the fact that she is a hack who knows next to nothing about what she’s talking about is for the good of the order.

Of course, it’s never done a damned bit of good with any of the other hacks who keep pumping out their drivel (Bobo, Chunky Bobo, The Mustache of Understanding, Kraphammer, etc.), so …

aimai - September 2, 2010 | 12:31 pm · Link

Well, but McMegan’s only attacking one version of evo psych with another—the evo psych of megan’s feelings. Her argument boils down to “me and a bunch of other people I claim to know are sexually jealous all the time so…everyone else must always have been too.”

I’m permanently banned over there so couldn’t post my mini rebuttal of one of her fakier fake points:

Megan, you know there are people out there reading your stuff (heaven knows why) who are actual anthropologists, sociologists, and even archaeologists and historians. You may be the english department’s favorite economist, and the econ department’s favorite english major, but to the rest of us you are just astonishingly and almost immorally badly educated. Uh, no, “hunter gatherer tribes” aren’t “frequently extremely violent” and we, of course, don’t know much about the original early hunter gatherer humans. The ones you (may) be talking about, if you aren’t simply making things up, are groups of people who have been forced to the margins economically and socially through the destruction of their habitat and ecology and through incursions by the modern world. We can’t say whether original human hunter gatherer societies were violent or not violent. And we certainly can’t say much about the social and sexual arrangements.

But if people were giving out points for hysterical, undergrad level attempts to pretend to some knowledge you’d definitely get some for matrilineage is not equal to matriarchy. But no one is giving out those points except you.

aimai

Howlin Wolfe - September 2, 2010 | 1:06 pm · Link

@NobodySpecial: Maybe you’re nobody special because of your mediocre intellect that can’t get off a talking point: “We’re a center-right nation! How do I know? er, uh, some pundit or other said so! Poll? I don’t need a stinkin’ poll! We’re a center-right nation!”

Remember November - September 2, 2010 | 1:43 pm · Link

@neill: Splitter!

Kiril - September 2, 2010 | 1:58 pm · Link

I’m sure there are editors at The Atlantic who think that whatever we think of McArdle and Goldberg, we all still know the long-form articles are still top-rate pieces of journalism.

Just as I’m sure the news editors at the WaPo think it doesn’t matter what’s on the opinion page because the news section is separate.

DougJ - September 2, 2010 | 2:29 pm · Link

@Mark S.:

Well said.

Mark S. - September 2, 2010 | 2:54 pm · Link

@DougJ:

Aw thanks!

maus - September 2, 2010 | 4:11 pm · Link

I wonder if she’s using the argument because she read Dan Savage’s obsessive tongue-baths of the book on human sexuality and bonobos, and how we should all be polygamous or at the very least with open-relationships.

Anoniminous - September 2, 2010 | 4:27 pm · Link

@Stillwater:

McArdle paradigmatically instantiates an antiquated epistemological weltanschauung in which a priori ratiocination is presumed sufficient for descriptively accurate analyses of empirical subject matter.

I hate to say this …

I understood that.

:-)

Moreover ... you’re right.

(LOL)

Manidest - September 2, 2010 | 4:49 pm · Link

On the advice of a friend I have stopped acknowledging the existence of McMegan. I nearly had an aneurysm last time she was a guest on Marketplace. This led to a discussion over beverages that ended ended with “Why do you even bother listening to what this person has to say”. I realized I was more bothered that she existed. Not her as a person, but her place in society, how she ended up where she is now…perfect reminder that whatever a meritocracy is, we are the opposite of that.
Anyway, just easier to pretend she doesn’t exist.

John Bird - September 2, 2010 | 7:01 pm · Link

Can I thank you once again for not going easy on Andrew Sullivan? I mean, it’s great that the guy who was calling war opponents fifth columnists in 2002 no longer believes that the Iraq war was “the conservative thing to do”, but he doesn’t seem any more motivated to base his opinions on facts now than he did then. He seems utterly driven by whim, by his fan base, and completely untrustworthy.

Phoebe - September 3, 2010 | 9:27 am · Link

Somebody just got married. Somebody who is insecure and defensive and rigid. End of story.