BAD ASTRONOMY VERSUS VOX DAY

Hey, it's my own version of 'Celebrity Death Match'! (I'm working on the claymation)

The frequently-inflammatory Vox Day asks me a question in passing while savaging a post of Phil Plait's. Phil has a nice blog called Bad Astronomy which enjoys a pretty fair following. Here's the post that got Vox's dander up, and here's Vox's reply, in which he invites me to comment.

Here's the reply I put on Vox's site, which I've cross-posted to Phil's site as a courtesy:

In brief, I think that Phil's comments were intemperate and, taken literally, pretty much impossible to defend. He's on pretty solid ground when he's talking about the existence of dark matter and dark energy, but his brief on evolutionary biology runs far afield.

I would say that evolutionary biology provides a conceptual framework to evaluate the degree to which ethical principles/cultural mores etc. are consonant with or (more controversially) derived from our biology. It's a valid research program within evolutionary biology, but to claim that the reigning model in which the program is nested 'explains' ethical concepts in and of itself is a rhetorical overreach, likely prompted by his own beliefs.

Anyway, Phil, Vox, I invite interested partisans from both blogs to rip me a new one in the comments.