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I was challenging your original claim that EVERY RESPECTABLE economist was a fervent Marxist who didn't allow dissent.

Let me get this straight: you're whole point was based on some sort of hyper-pedantic reading of my original post because I didn't say "almost every"? You'll notice that the point is independent of the precise percentage of individuals involved: you know, it may have been 90%, maybe 95, maybe 98.2%. I'm not quite sure.

This sort of pedantic silliness is a complete red herring.

Why is it that evolutionists on this board can never (note, this is an exaggeration: never is not intended to be taken absolutely literally!!!) seem to address the substance of the arguments being made but nearly always have to go after side issues?

The original argument was that Marx, Freud, and Darwin were embraced by very much the same types of people at about the same time for very much the same reason, in very much the same way. As it turns out, Marx and Freud have since been completely discredited. Does this mean Darwin, by association, was wrong? No. Perhaps there was something fundamentally different about Darwin. But for just about everything Darwinists would say today about how great Darwin , you can replace "Darwin" with "Marx" or "Freud" and find the exact same things said historically about those 2 folks.

It's really not that hard an argument to understand. Care to respond to it, or do you want to parse words and bandy semantics?

"Let me get this straight: you're whole point was based on some sort of hyper-pedantic reading of my original post because I didn't say "almost every"?

Not only did you not say almost every, you said every. And when I challenged you, you repeated the claim.

"You'll notice that the point is independent of the precise percentage of individuals involved: you know, it may have been 90%, maybe 95, maybe 98.2%. I'm not quite sure."

Those are very high numbers too; where is your evidence? I don't just mean socialist, or left-wing, I mean Marxist.

" This sort of pedantic silliness is a complete red herring."

The red herring was your bringing up how many people believed a certain theory. It has nothing to do with the veracity of evolution.

"The original argument was that Marx, Freud, and Darwin were embraced by very much the same types of people at about the same time for very much the same reason, in very much the same way."

And this is clearly wrong. Darwin is accepted because of the overwhelming evidence. Common descent is a fact, and the ToE is the best explanation for the diversity of life we see.

Your argument is that since two hypotheses that were once widely held to be true are now discredited, evolution can have the same thing happen to it. While technically true, it's a meaningless analogy. You can say that about ANY theory in science. They are ALL tentative. That doesn't mean we can't have any confidence in their validity. Knowledge can and does get better. Science CAN advance. Some ideas ARE better supported than others.

...But for just about everything Darwinists would say today about how great Darwin , you can replace "Darwin" with "Marx" or "Freud" ...

Except for the empirical evidence thingy...and the true predictions about what would be found when genomes were sequenced, as opposed to the false predictions of Marx, and the non-predictions of Freud.