PZ: The Technical Adult

That's a headline I saw on Synlogos and, trying to process it quickly, I figured it must be a reference to PZ Myers, one of the lesser lights of early-2000s Nu-Atheism, who wasn't quite cool enough to be considered one of the "four horsemen" but was still somewhat prominent back when debating evolution on the Internet was a thing. "Technical adult," then, would be a reference to his perpetual adolescence despite having technically been an adult for some decades. (He was a dick even by Internet atheist standards. I was firmly on team fedora at the time and read lots of Dawkins and Dennett, but even I couldn't stand PZ Myers.)

Thinking a retrospective evisceration of old PZ might be mildly amusing, I clicked.

I had misread the headline. The final word was actually audit, not adult. PZ refers not to Myers but to Probability Zero, an anti-Darwinian book Vox Day wrote together with a fake intelligence, and the "audit" is a dumpster fire consisting of other fake intelligences rating it in comparison to other evolution books, including one by Dawkins. Slop feeding on slop.

So the coincidence is that, even though I had completely misinterpreted the headline, the article still ended up involving the evolution debate and a Nu-Atheist author, and Vox is certainly giving PZ a run for his money in the cringe department.