"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.
The red herring was your bringing up how many people believed a certain theory. It has nothing to do with the veracity of evolution., etc., etc., blah... That's odd: I'm frequently told that the great numbers of scientists who believe in evolution is some great important testament to its veracity. Hmm... nevermind, my mistake.
Anyway, as I said, the analogy does not in and of itself prove anything as some sort of logical argument, and that's not how it was presented. You can either view a mass belief system from the point of view of the people believing it, and analyze the evidence for and against, or you can step back and view it from a sort of mass psychological or sociological point of view.
Many people look at "religionists" using the latter lens. Similarly, you look at the historical obsession with Marxism and Freudianism either way: on the one hand you can ask yourself, what was the enormous evidence that led so many highly educated, intelligent, rational people to believe so fervently and dogmatically in such a pile of horse-cr@p? On the other hand, you can ask what sociological/psychological factors were in play that brought this about?
You see, I don't believe it was some massive weight of evidence that led all these people to believe in Marxism and Freudianism. I believe it was more presuppositional than evidential. Of course, the adherents would plead to the contrary until they were blue in the face. As have you.
And given the enormous historical crossover between belief in Marxism, Freudianism, and Darwinism, it behoves the curious traveler to ponder, if only fleetingly, if perhaps the latter belief system will follow the same trajectory as the former two.