Wattsup Pharyngula And Robbers Cave - Road to the Middle Class

IT’S a nip and tuck battle today between Watts Up With That, run by independent businessman Anthony Watts and Pharyngula, run by P.Z. Myers. They are finalists in the 2008 Weblogs Awards for Best Science Blog that ends today. But it looks as though WUWT will win.

There’s a big difference between the two blogs. Let Pharyngula proprietor P.Z. Myers tell why:

"I want my commenters to be uncivil. There is no virtue in politeness when confronted with ignorance, dishonesty, and delusion.”

Myers, by the way, advertises himself as “a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.”

One commenter on WUWT had this to say about Pharyngula:

I used to subscribe to Pharyngula, but unsubscribed from it due to the excessive frequency of posts and excessive percentage of political and anti-religious posts.

There’s a reason why WUWT is the “nice” site and Pharyngula is the “naughty” site. You can read all about the phenomenon at The Robber’s Cave Experiment performed on a group of boys back in 1954. The concept is simple. When you have two groups of guys in proximity they immediately form into warring gangs, and they immediately differentiate themselves to sharpen their differences. If one group likes to swear, the other group will decide not to swear.

If you want them to stop warring you have to get them to cooperate on a common project. That’s what they did with the two warring tribes at Robber’s Cave, and it worked.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.