"Why choose any examples at all? The only point of the comparisons is to make an emotional argument, which has no foundations in logic whatsoever."

The only point? I think not.

One other point which Crichton makes explicitly is "The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale." Bad science can be very expensive, people mouthing bad science can do extremely nasty things in its name. I think he hammers on this point too much in the essay. It seems to me that most people are already predisposed to believe that policies based in bad science can be really bad: bandwidth is cheap, but why waste it on flogging this dead horse when it could be better used for porn about flogging dead horses? I also think bringing in Lysenkoism is a bad idea because even though it is a valid illustration of bad science being expensive, it comes with the non-parallel of being enforced by world-class murderous repression of dissent, which is too much of a distraction. But whether or not my criticisms are valid, I think it's clearly a point.

Another point which I don't think Crichton makes explicitly, but which seems to motivate various of his examples, is illustrating that a form of argument could be used to justify horrid and stupid eugenic claims and policies. That's both a vivid way of making the point that that form of argument is logically invalid style, and a way of demonstrating that that form of argument dangerous in political practice, and shouldn't be taken lightly.

Look at martythemaniak's post...

"I really don't have the ego to claim I magically know better than thousands of scientists and decades of research, ..." Adjust that for the smaller 1920 scientific population, s/thousands/hundreds/ perhaps, and you have a right-thinking person wisely avoiding being branded as a eugenics denier.

AGW advocates like martythemaniak delight in comparing themselves to Darwinists and their critics to creationists. Very well, then: why stoop to use arguments which were used to defend Sanger? Think of valid arguments like the ones which worked to defend Darwin but not Sanger, and use them in preference to flaky arguments which can be used to defend any old garbage. Especially, Darwin and his followers found all sorts of extensive patterns of species and population which, to the best of my knowledge, defy explanation any other way. So why not use arguments like that? They can be extremely convincing.

bad example 2: "the fact that CO2 Levels are higher today than anytime in the last 800000 years, or the fact of the 40% increase since the 1800s, my conclusion is pretty obvious." s/CO2/non-Aryan/, s/the last 800000 years/our nation's history/.

Unfortunately, banging on one superficial correlation and declaring victory is a classic pro-Sanger style of argument, not the kind of characteristically pro-Darwin argument that I was referring to. It might seem like good clean fun if you are a true believer and haven't thought about it, but think about it now. Or, if you still don't realize how dysfunctional it is, start by imagining trying to dissuade someone who thinks he has found revealed inconvenient truth in "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really."

After that, feel free to copy the Darwinists by blasting away with all those independent detailed observed patterns which match AGW. Or pick some other style of argument which worked for Darwin and not for Sanger, and use that.

Or, alternatively, perhaps no such arguments exist, and instead the comparison to Darwinists is self-flattery on such a cosmic scale that AGW does have enormous explanatory power --- in that the gravitational effect of the vast self-flattery cloud explains what the cosmologists call "dark matter". That's roughly my opinion: possibly the Gore/IPCC version of AGW (only very small non-CO2-driven global climate fluctuations, and large positive feedback in climate response to CO2) is correct, but certainly it is not a glaringly obvious truth about the world like Darwin's natural selection. Instead it's like the Philips Curve question I wrote about elsewhere: the answer should become clearer over time, and you can make valid arguments now about what it will turn out to be, but it's not a routine matter to convince an honest skeptic by direct appeals to observation. Darwinists could sample a near-endless supply of independent ecosystems to determine whether a pattern holds or not, and they delighted in charging into the details. AGWists start with a naturally data-poor problem like the Philips Curve arguers, and then many of them make it poorer by retreating from the details, refusing to commit themselves to anything sharper than decadal averages over the entire globe.