Now, the important questions to ask are:
- Which of these general errors is more common? That is to say, of the two events: [Person refuting scientific theory via silly, uneducated thought-experiment], and [Person refuting moral theory via silly, uneducated scientific data], which occurs more often? And,
- Which web-comic has a higher readership, and which one will thus continue to exert more influence on the population in general?
There could never be a more satisfying and simultaneously more depressing portrait of today's smug, self-aggrandizing, anti-philosophical, "scientific" intellectual than the XKCD comic. On the one hand, it's just a comic. On the other hand, the converse error (portrayed in the Chaospet comic) isn't just common, it's embodied in dozens of best-selling books, articles and television specials, all of which purport to tell us that the behaviour of animals is directly, even
crucially relevant to human ethical ideas. The error portrayed in the XKCD comic is rarely committed, and rarely taken seriously.
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