"Such a reaction is natural enough—when someone insists a thing has to be true and you are a jerk, a reactionary, a traitor to the species, and worse for not seeing its truth right away, you tend to back off, to put it mildly. But the reaction is in some ways unfortunate. The truth of an idea is not a function of its proponents’ manners. In all fairness, an idea should be evaluated solely on the twin bases of the evidence pertaining to it and its usefulness in uncovering further truths (a theory need not be true to be valuable—it need only lead to truth)."