> my sly critics avoided any direct response to what I’d written. They wouldn’t even quote what I said. In fact, they scrupulously avoided quoting my article. Instead they distorted and spun my words like I was a candidate for office and they were a squad of rival political operatives. By the time they were done they had attributed ridiculous, idiotic opinions to me—views with no resemblance in the least to what I had written or believe.

Some even openly admit it. In Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett of Tufts University writes:

I don’t challenge the critics’ motives or even their tactics; if I encountered people conveying a message I thought was so dangerous that I could not risk giving it a fair hearing, I would be at least strongly tempted to misrepresent it, to caricature it for the public good. I’d want to make up some good epithets, such as genetic determinist or reductionist or Darwinian Fundamentalist, and then flail those straw men as hard as I could. As the saying goes, it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.