Footnote

Massimo Pigliucci is a professional philosopher with some scientific credentials, so he's not as stupidly dismissive of philosophy as his fellows in pro and semi-pro pseudo-skepticism.  That only means that, as is often the case outside of the English language science field, he's informed about philosophy and so he knows how stupid it is when his fellow materialist-atheist believers in scientism dismiss philosophy.  That stupid scientific bigotry is something that English language scientists from the level of Stephen Hawking down to Neil deGrasse Tyson and down to the dregs of Richard Dawkins have endorsed.  I think it's an artifact of the kind of vulgar Brit pragmatic dismissal of things that are inconvenient for the upper-classes. The question of profitability and commerce enter into it, as well.  That is among things which infests the United States through being influenced by British intellectual culture. That's why I said Pigliucci wasn't as bad as the typical atheist-materialist-bigots who mostly populate his ideological community.

I think his philosophical knowledge allows him to go beyond the typical bigotries allowable within his ideological community, allowing him to realize that the vulgar, fundamentalist Darwinism that is typical of current uninformed culture was legitimately criticized by other members of organized and semi-organized atheism, such as Stephen Jay Gould.  And that Dawkins' style Darwinian fundamentalism can't keep up with the evidence.  But he won't go any farther than Gould et al would have in admitting the nature of Darwinism as an ideology imposed on biology instead of a well-supported scientific theory.   An ideological framing that was born in, adopted for and maintained for its support of the class interests of those who controlled and control biology and who adopted it for its use to atheist-materialist hegemony in academia and the wider culture.  I think that's one of the reasons that even such relatively open minded people such as Gould could never get to the root of that. 

As I've pointed out, Marx noticed it after he'd first written to Engels that Darwinism would be useful for their ideological campaign, he reconsidered and saw that it was just Darwin twisting Malthusian economics to impose the structure of the British class system on all of nature.

Pigliucci does, otherwise, share in all of the same bigotries of his ideological side.   I can't say I respect him or consider him honest.   I see him as being a typical product of atheist-Roman anti-clericalism.  If that's unfair of me, it's certainly not as unfair as his dismissal of the reviewed, published research into parapsychology which far surpasses in quality and critical review much of the science he accepts as valid.