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- Money and Methods in Cancer Research
- Report Details How Climate Change Will Spark Heat Waves, Increase the Spread of Disease, and Erode Coastal Economies
- FDA Looks to Open Up the Medicine Cabinet
- NIH Funding is Good for Your Health, and It’s Good for the Economy
- Progressive Science Values
- Climate Change Will Not Be Kind to American Water and Agriculture
- Less Philosophy, More Policy: Obama Disbands Council on Bioethics and Will Create New One
- The Digital Textbook Case
- The Worn Grooves of Disciplinary Research
- NIH By the Numbers: Challenge Grants, Stem Cell Comments, and Conflict of Interest Rules
- States Are Looking to Grow Their Biotech Sectors
Argumentum ad Mitochondrium
An ad hominem argument is an attack on the person rather than their argument. Hence it’s a fallacy. “That bridge you want the American taxpayer to pay for doesn’t lead anywhere,” says Senator A. “Yeah, well,” replies Senator B, “you have horrible taste in ties so your views on bridge-building are wrong.”
Granted that this fantasized exchange is both silly and perhaps too close to legislative reality, it does illustrate the fallacy. Now a Turkish opposition leader has gone one better, accusing President Abdullah Gül of secret Armenian ancestry as the reason for his failure to reject a campaign to apologize for Turkey’s genocidal war against Armenians in the early 20th century. Republican People’s Party Deputy Canan Aritman thinks she’s nailed it. The acid test: Aritman wants Gül to take a DNA test to prove his pure Turkish origins, or disprove his impure Armenian ones.
Whether President Gül is a genetic Armenian or not (whatever that could mean), the notion that such a question is relevant to political discourse evokes ugly associations with National Socialist eugenics. One would think that any Turkish political leader seeking to distance Turks from a holocaust would want to avoid racial biology as an explanation for anything. And that is no ad hominen argument.
Comments on this article
Very reminiscent of the racist stuff Barrack Obama had to deal with during the recent U.S. elections. No, he’s not Muslim, but so what if he was?
January 7th, 2009 at 10:32 am