June 16, 2006

A Review of the Darwin Chapters from Ann Coulter’s New Book

As you may have heard, Ann Coulter's new book, Godless, rejects Darwinism. When I first found out about this from an early review of the book, I fully expected this to prove an embarrassment to Ann. Even as I read the book, as I began those chapters (chapters 8 - 10), I expected them to be specious.

But in the storm of criticism of the book so far, there has not yet been one word from the scientific community, objecting to Ann's views (at least that I have seen). How is this possible?

The astonishing answer is that Coulter has founded all of her views on the published work of prominent scientific experts, and presented them in a very compelling and persuasive manner. In short, it appears possible that she may be right.

She begins by discussing the Darwinian assumption that the intricate structures of an organism evolved gradually, via one random mutation at a time:

[Lehigh University biochemist Michael] Behe produced various "irreducibly complex" mechanisms, of which there are thousand -- complex cellular structures, blood-clotting mechanisms, and the eye, among others. A bacterial motor, called a flagellum, depends on the coordinated interaction of 30-40 complex protein parts. The absence of almost any one of the parts would render the flagellum useless. An animal cell's whiplike oar, called a cilium, is composed of about 200 protein parts. Behe compared these cell parts to a simple mousetrap, with far fewer necessary components than a cilium or flagellum. Though there are only a few parts to a mousetrap, all of them have to be working together at one time for the contraption to serve any function whatsoever. If one of the parts i s missing, Behe says, you don't get a mousetrap that catches only half as many mice: you don't get a mousetrap at all. Behe then demonstrated that it is a mathematical impossibility for all 30 pats of the flagellum (or 200 parts of the cilium) to have been brought together by the "numerous, successive, slight modifications" of natural selection. Life at the molecular level, he concluded, "is a loud, clear piercing cry of design."

Coulter goes through the responses from the scientific community to Behe's work, and notes that while many said that "more research is needed," no one even attempted to disprove it.

The evolutionist's answer is Assume that each one of the hundreds of mutations necessary to create the final product is itself "fit" in ways we don't understand but must accept on faith because it's Holy Scripture.

...Evolutionists believe -- purely as a matter of faith -- that individual, unrelated mutations facilitated the production of all 200 necessary parts, completely by chance, and thus created the flagellum. And then they tell us they want to keep "faith" out of the classroom. Okay.

Coulter then details something I did not know about -- and I suspect most of those reading this did not either -- namely that there is no evidence in the fossil record to support the theory of the slow transformation of species into other species. Such evidence would be expected based on Darwin's classic work, "The Origin of Species."

It was a nice yarn Darwin had spun, but there was absolutely nothing in the fossil record to support it. Far from showing gradual change with one species slowly giving way to another, as Darwin hypothesized, the fossil record showed vast numbers of new species suddenly appearing out of nowhere, remaining largely unchanged for millions of years, and then disappearing (almost like there was a big flood or something.)

Coulter quotes David Raup, a geologist at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, who wrote in 1979:

[W]e are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of he fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwin's time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information -- what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic.

Coulter comments:

Darwin's disciples simply assert that evolution led from this species to that by the process of random mutation -- with cruel nature striking down th genetic losers -- and to hell with the fossil record's showing nothing of the sort. At some point, it's not even pseudo-science anymore, it's just a crazy religious cult.

Coulter provides a massive amount of facts, examples, and evidence along these lines.

I've got a lifelong interest in the advances of science, and a couple of Master's Degrees (although neither is in science), and I'd never heard about this in my life. Coulter gives many examples of why this might be. Schools which attempt to discuss these facts in class are sued by the ACLU; scholars who attempt to publish on these items have been fired.

At this point, I can only consider this mind-blowing. It's too far-reaching for me even to feel comfortable stating at this instant that I am convinced Coulter is right (although I'm mighty close being convinced.) I have to hear the response from the scientific community.

Which makes the silence to date from that community, deafening.

Can it possibly be, that we are in the exact same state as our ancestors, who condemned Galileo for saying the Earth traveled around the sun? Can we be as ignorant as they were, punishing anyone who disagrees with an official view of the world which is without basis in fact?

We know that we as humans can find "the unknown" to be frightening; can it possibly be that we are still so far from understanding enough about how we can have come into existence on this earth, that we must use lawsuits and firings to prevent people from discussing that lack of understanding, out of an inability to face that (irrational) fear?
 

Update: See this follow-up post, Follow-Up on Ann Coulter and Darwin: Scientists Admit There is No Proof of Darwin.