Reply From Virginia

ARTICLE

Commentary is arranged by numbers corresponding to the paragraphs of Sheila's Rebuttal.

1) It did not take me 21 pages to reply to her orig- inal article. It only took 10. The remaining pages were a separate article dealing with the embryolog- ical approach which set forth my own views about Nature rather than being a response to hers. In re- gard to "data"...when one is presented with "data" one cannot necessarily refute or attack it with other opposite "data". A positive "datum" which is pre- sented as true may not be amenable to dis-prove by another piece of "evidence". In other words it may be difficult sometimes to "prove" the truth but it is much more difficult to prove that something is not so when the subject matter is not such as to per- mit black and white experiments. Thus the only wea- pons one can use are words. One has to examine the probabilities involved and the relationship of the offered "data" to other known probable factors. This is what I did. Covering up inadequasies of a posi- tion by flinging accusations of verbosity and loqua- tiousness at one's opponent is like throwing sand in the reader's eyes--he will be unable to see well enough to determine the truth for himself.

As to being dogmatic--this is unfair since one position is as dogmatic as the other. We are simply examining the problem from two points of view. I made no mention of Freud but if Sheila means that the idea that the events in a person's history large-

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