You need to hang with a better crowd. Bass is about 20 years older than I am and a pure academic type; I'm more of a generalist. The only real similarity you're noticing is that both of us write intelligently.
No, there's a certain crackpot intensity, with zany colloquial strawmanisms and compulsive parentheticals:
Bass:
G&E faked the punk-eek diagram to look something like a bush by postulating that there are hidden horizontal jumps [shown in dotted lines] which connect the vertical straight lines! In other words, the creature goes off stage to some unseen anteroom where a Goldschmidt-Schindewolf ("hopeful monster") macro-mutation takes place. (G&S admitted that an intellectually honest student of the fossil record can only postulate that "one day a reptile egg cracked open and a bird walked out.")That last bit: I wouldn't have been surprised if he continued with, ". . . and what does that bird mate with?" Really. This guy is a distinguished academic?