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This blog has been looking into Ann Coulter's rejection of Darwinism. Currently a Google search for "Ann Coulter Darwin" shows this site as the second link. Articles here on the subject have been eliciting great comments from a number of readers.
In previous posts, I was seeking a response to Coulter from the scientific community. There has now been some. And its been marked by some very unscientific behavior.
Several articles have used the very unscientific method of name-calling to respond to Coulter. From P.Z. Myers:
Ann Coulter's awful, ghastly, ignorant book ... shameless fraud ...
From the York Daily Record, via The Panda's Thumb, a leading Darwinist blog:
...the vitriol, idiocy, slander, vileness, ignorance, stupidity and simply breathtaking inanity that passes for the contribution to the public discourse of an alleged carbon-based life-form that goes by the name of Ann Coulter.
Of course, you've heard about this vile life-support system for a mane of blonde hair. She's been all over the media, spreading her poison, the vaguely human counterpart of a Gila monster, except with colder blood.
These insults are unjustified in light of the fact that 600 scientists around the world have expressed their own doubts about Darwinian evolution:
“I signed the Scientific Dissent From Darwinism statement, because I am absolutely convinced of the lack of true scientific evidence in favour of Darwinian dogma,” said Raul Leguizamon, M. D., Pathologist, and a professor of medicine at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara, Mexico.
“Nobody in the biological sciences, medicine included, needs Darwinism at all,” added Leguizamon. “Darwinism is certainly needed, however, in order to pose as a philosopher, since it is primarily a worldview. And an awful one, as Bernard Shaw used to say. The hold it has in academic circles is not at all due to the empirical evidence that allegedly supports it, but to its philosophical presuppositions and implications, the political correctness of the Darwinian paradigm and the intellectual inertia of academia in general. "
...Prominent signatories include U.S. National Academy of Sciences member Philip Skell; American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow Lyle Jensen; evolutionary biologist and textbook author Stanley Salthe; Smithsonian Institution evolutionary biologist and a researcher at the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Biotechnology Information Richard von Sternberg; Editor of Rivista di Biologia / Biology Forum --the oldest still published biology journal in the world-- Giuseppe Sermonti; and Russian Academy of Natural Sciences embryologist Lev Beloussov.
Does Mr. Myers wish to explain to these 600 scientists that they are also "awful, ghastly, ignorant" ?
There is no place for insults in a scientific debate. What does it mean, when insults are used as part of such arguments?
The answer is rather shocking to someone such as myself who believed, all my life, that Darwin as a mechanism for the origin of species was an established fact. In short, Darwin as a means of the origin of species has not been proven at this time, and all leading Darwinists know it and tacitly admit it. This may explain the use of insults when that fact is pointed out to some of them. They can't prove their position and they know it.
One of the most powerful arguments against Darwin as a means of speciation (that is, as a means of the origin of new species), is that one would expect to see a massive amount of fossils of transitional species, and while there are a number of possible candidates for transitional species, the expected massive amount of such fossils does not appear in the fossil record.
Here's how the American Museum of Natural History tacitly admits that while there is evidence in favor of Darwin as a means of speciation, there is not yet proof:
Evolution Today: How Do New Species Evolve?
Separate groups of organisms belonging to the same species may adapt in different ways to better exploit diverse environments or resources. They also may evolve varied characteristics for attracting mates. That is, different groups evolve in different directions. Over time, these groups or populations may become so different that they can no longer breed together-separate species are formed.
Note the repeated use of the word, "may." The Museum doesn't say this is how species do evolve. It says this is how species may evolve.
Here's how the Natural History Museum in London tacitly admits the absence of the expected fossils in the fossil record:
There are countless species that live in environments such as jungles and mountaintops, where the bodies of dead animals are more likely to be eaten or broken up than preserved. Therefore, palaeontologists are faced with a daunting challenge: to construct the history of life on our planet with knowledge of only a tiny fraction of the creatures that once lived here.
In fact, the Natural History Museum in London has a whole wing devoted to evidence of Darwin - yet, absent from the wing, is evidence of Darwin as a means of speciation. From Dr. Gerald Schroeder's 1997 book, The Science of God, page 31:
The magnificent Natural History Museum in London devotes an entire wing to demonstrating the fact of evolution. They show how pink daisies can evolve into blue daisies, how gray moths change into black moths, how over a mere few thousand years, a wide variety of cichlid fish species evolved in Lake Victoria. It is all impressive.
Impressive, until you walk out and reflect upon that which they were able to document. Daisies remained daisies, moths remained moths, and cichlid fish remained cichlid fish. These changes are referred to as micro-evolution. In this exhibit, the museum's staff did not demonstrate a single unequivocal case in which life underwent a major gradual morphological change.
Per Wikipedia, "Dr. Gerald Schroeder is a former professor of nuclear physics at MIT
and former member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. He holds
doctorates both in Earth Science and Nuclear Physics."
It may be that this museum has added to the wing since the publication of Schroeder's book. The absence of even any evidence, from such a prestigious museum, shows the absence of proof for Darwin as a means of speciation.
Perhaps we humans can't bear not yet knowing how we got to be here on Earth. Nature abhors a vacuum, so into the vacuum of our lack of information about this, we put the best available theory. Darwin is the best available theory at this time, but it isn't proven, and there is a powerful argument that while it may be part of the answer, it is very far from being the whole answer.
(Thanks to Olah Chadasha, of the Greetings from the French Hill weblog, for bringing Dr. Schroeder's book to my attention.)
There's a very strange sort of coincidence going on this week. On multiple fronts, independently, many of those on the wrong side of history have gone one step too far, and inflicted a tremendous amount of damage on themselves.
Is it just a coincidence? Or is it an indication that they are finding themselves backed into a corner, and are lashing out recklessly?
Today's LA Times has an article by the editor of the paper, titled "Why we ran the bank story." It contains this howler:
We sometimes withhold information when we believe that reporting it would threaten a life. In this case, we believed, based on our talks with many people in the government and on our own reporting, that the information on the Treasury Department's program did not pose that threat.
The program tracked money being sent to terrorists who use it to kill people. Does the Times pretend to think that terrorists are using the financing for some peaceful purpose?
From Variety:
"An Inconvenient Truth" started off marching bigger than the penguins, but now it's looking more like "Bowling for Columbine."
Paramount Vantage's global-warming doc bowed Memorial Day weekend to a boffo $367,311 at just four theaters, giving it a three-day average of $70,333 per play, the highest ever for a documentary.
But after expanding successfully to the top 10 and 25 markets in its second and third frame, keeping its average take at $17,615 and $12,334, respectively, doc has slowed down significantly as it opened in smaller cities and suburban markets.
From Human Events:
Before the Bush tax cuts, asset values were dropping. But since 2002, the year before the Bush tax cuts took full effect, the assets of American households have surged from $47 trillion to $66 trillion. That is an increase of almost $19 trillion-or an average of roughly $10 million per minute!
Similar increases in American wealth followed the Kennedy tax cuts in the 1960s, the Reagan tax cuts in the 1980s, and even the tax cuts that a Republican Congress forced on President Clinton in the 1990s. When business taxes go down, after-tax profit goes up. Stock market values are based on anticipated future profits. When taxes on investors (like dividends and capital gains taxes) are cut, their assets automatically increase in value. Investments in homes and stocks and bonds become less risky, capital floods back into markets, and asset values explode.
That's the theory, and, so it appears, the reality as well.
And from AlphaPatriot:
Wonder of wonders, voodoo economics is working:
When President Bush pledged in 2004 to cut the deficit in half by 2009, critics guffawed. The Boston Globe headlined a story, "Bush's plan to halve federal deficit seen as unlikely; higher spending, lower taxes don't mix, analysts say." "Fanciful," "laughable" and "all spin," said the critics.
Well, it turns out that 2009 might be coming early this year. ... This year, the deficit could go as low as $300 billion, right around the 2009 goal of 2.5 percent of GDP.
As Rich Lowry goes on to explain, pro-growth works:
The deficit climbed unexpectedly in the early Bush years and is declining unexpectedly now, not because the projections for economic growth were wildly off, but because the kind of people who pay the most taxes took a bath early in the decade and are recovering now. Almost 47 percent of income taxes are paid by those making more than $200,000 a year, and they are thriving again. A chunk of the current revenue surge is also from corporate income taxes, which are up 30 percent over last year.
...But the bottom line is that cutting taxes worked for Reagan, and even though George W. inherited the Clinton Recession, it worked for him too.
See also these previous posts:
The GWB Tax Cuts Worked: More Great News on the Economy
The Tax Cuts Worked-Economic Expansion: Year Five
The Bush Tax Cuts Have Resulted in Higher Tax Revenue
Lower Taxes Make the Economy Stronger
Lower Tax Rates Are Resulting In Higher Tax Revenue
A Myth Debunked: Bush Tax Cuts Did Not Favor the Rich
Tax Cuts Work: Government Forecasting Incorrectly Thought Tax Costs Would Reduce Tax Revenue
What does the average person make of a headline like this, from the Arizona Daily Star?
Murtha says U.S. poses top threat to world peace
MIAMI - American presence in Iraq is more dangerous to world peace than nuclear threats from North Korea or Iran, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said to an audience of more than 200 in North Miami Saturday afternoon.
Perhaps at some time in the past, similar statements could be excused for being a bit over the top, as a way to get attention. But it's gotten to the point now when statements like this are just ludicrous. Surely many people read reports like this and think, A, The Dems are making no sense, and B, the Dems are no friends to America.
"War's Iraqi Death Toll Tops 50,000," shouts the front page of the LA Times today. In the very first paragraph, the Times lays this death toll at the door of the Bush administration:
BAGHDAD - At least 50,000 Iraqis have died violently since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to statistics from the Baghdad morgue, the Iraqi Health Ministry and other agencies - a toll 20,000 higher than previously acknowledged by the Bush administration.
You have to turn to page A29, and wade through 7 paragraphs, to find out that the death toll is overwhelmingly due to terrorists, not to our troops:
At the Baghdad morgue, the vast majority of bodies processed had been shot execution-style. Many showed signs of torture - drill holes, burns, missing eyes and limbs, officials said. Others had been strangled, beheaded, stabbed or beaten to death.
The morgue records show a predominantly civilian toll; the hospital records gathered by the Health Ministry do not distinguish between civilians, combatants and security forces.
But Health Ministry records do differentiate causes of death. Almost 75% of those who died violently were killed in "terrorist acts," typically bombings, the records show.
You'd never know from this article that there were a similar number of civilian deaths under Saddam - with no drive toward freedom and Democracy:
...under Saddam's rule, the death toll [included] 600,000 civilian executions recorded by the Documental Center for Human Rights, and the 100,000 Kurds killed during the Anfal operation. A violent day under the coalition would be just a routine day under Saddam.
The article is slanted as an attack on Bush, and you'd think from the article that if the U.S. left Iraq, the death count would cease. But the article shows that the vast majority of civilian deaths are due to terrorists. If the U.S. left Iraq it would leave the terrorists in place to assert their dominance via a bloodbath.
The only chance the Iraqi people have of putting an end to this death toll, is for the U.S. to stay in place and, with the Iraqi army, finish the job of eradicating the terrorists.
It is unacceptable for the LA Times to print such a slanted story, which tries to hide the fact that it's the terrorists who are responsible for all this killing, in the very month when U.S. operations have arrested or killed hundreds of those very terrorists.
I have little to add here to the fantastic analysis of the actions of the NY Times and LA Times in yet again revealing state secrets that were helping the U.S. fight the terrorists. Here's a list of links:
The courageous Dems will make sure America is safe and defended, as long as no one is shooting at any of our troops. If someone shoots at our troops, then the Dems believe the correct thing to do is to "redeploy" the troops to someplace else. That's a fair summary of what Dean said on the radio today:
In his party's weekly radio address Saturday, Howard Dean said the Republican plan of "stay the course" is not an option in the 3-year-old war and emphasized the Democratic call for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops to begin by year's end.
He also rejected the Republican criticism that Democrats want to "cut and run."
"Among the victims are brave American soldiers who are the targets of an insurgency because of failed political leadership and a lack of foresight and planning," Dean said. "We don't want another wall with 55,000 names of courageous Americans who were let down by their government."
...Dean rejected the "cut and run" moniker, saying Democrats "will defend America, but we will be tough and smart."
How much more pathetic can the Dems get? How does Dean expect to fight Al Qaeda without having Al Qaeda shooting at our troops?
It wasn't long ago that one of the mantras of the Dems, in criticizing the war, was that the war in Iraq had nothing to do with going after Al Qaeda. One of the responses was that Al Qaeda would be drawn into fighting our troops in Iraq. This was called the "flytrap" or "flypaper" strategy. In September of 2003, Andrew Sullivan had this remarkably prescient post:
Listen to U.S. Army Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq. He just opined on CNN that attacks against U.S. forces have increased in "sophistication, especially in the improvised explosive devices that they are using, and we're working to learn from that and to be able to counter them." He went on, critically: "This is what I would call a terrorist magnet, where America, being present here in Iraq, creates a target of opportunity... But this is exactly where we want to fight them. ...This will prevent the American people from having to go through their attacks back in the United States." You won't find a better description of the "flytrap" strategy anywhere - or from a more authoritative source.
The extra beauty of this strategy is that it creates a target for Islamist terrorists that is not Israel. A key objective of the current U.S. strategy is to show that Israel is not the fundamental cause of instability and mayhem in the Middle East - but a victim of the same kind of pathological religious extremism that has destroyed Iran, brutalized Afghanistan and blackmailed Saudi Arabia. Before the Iraq war, the U.S. could do little to counter these maniacs directly. Now they have a theater of war - and it isn't the West Bank.
Will this strategy work? Its obvious disadvantage is that it's tough to fight an escalating terrorist war in the same country you're trying simultaneously to nudge toward civil order and democracy. Terrorism undermines civil society even in countries with very advanced traditions of democracy, let alone a country like Iraq. Certainly, that internal contradiction helps explain why the U.S. is now desperate for more help in pacifying Iraq as well as waging war within it. One possibility is that better and more aggressive policing in urban areas (by Iraqis and foreign troops) will enable U.S. soldiers to leave the cities and fight a guerrilla war against al Qaeda and Hezbollah in the Iraqi hinterland, putting extra pressure on Iran and Syria at the same time. That would be an elegant solution. But at the moment it's a somewhat optimistic one.
At some point, I'd argue, the president therefore has to make this strategy more formal. He has to tell the American people that more violence in Iraq may not in some circumstances be a bad thing. It may be a sign that we are flushing out terror and confronting it, rather than passively waiting for it to attack again. He has to remind people that this war is far from over, that the mission is still very much unaccomplished, and that this is not Vietnam.
The flytrap strategy worked. We're capturing and killing Al Qaeda terrorists literally by the hundreds:
The US says coalition forces in Iraq have carried out more than 450 raids since the death last week of al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The US said 104 insurgents were killed and 759 "anti-Iraqi elements" captured.
Iraq says documents seized after the killing of Zarqawi yielded vital leads and that this may be the "beginning of the end" of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
So what do the Dems want to do now that the Iraq war has proven to be a powerful way of destroying the perpetrators of 9-11? They want to run away. The Dems want to get our troops out of a place where they are "targets," just as if Al Qaeda had arrived in Iraq and driven us out. Oh, the Dems are all for using the military to keep America safe -- just as long as nobody shoots at any of the troops.
And the Dems are all for going after Al Qaeda -- as long as Al Qaeda doesn't shoot back.
At a time when we are capturing and killing Al Qaeda terrorists by the hundreds, the Dems want to cut and run. It is one of the most pathetic things I've ever witnessed in politics.
Just a few days ago, in Reason magazine, Jesse Walker opined that home-grown Islamic terrorism in America was a dud:
It hardly matters whether isolated murderers are driven by their interpretation of the Koran, by some deficiency in their brains, or by any other explanation for their deeds. You can deal with them the way you deal with any other solitary criminals. There is real danger in an organized network of terrorists, and there is real danger in a substantial subculture willing to engage in unorganized terror. But attacks like the hit-and-run in North Carolina, the airport shootings in L.A., and this maybe-Muslim murder fit neither category. Bloody and evil as they are, their chief effect is to make jihad seem mundane.
Today we have news of a thwarted terrorist attack based in Miami:
MIAMI (AP) - Seven people were arrested Thursday in connection with the early stages of a plot to attack Chicago's Sears Tower and other buildings in the U.S., including the FBI office here, a federal law enforcement official said.
As part of the raids tied to the arrests, FBI agents swarmed a warehouse in Miami's Liberty City area, using a blowtorch to take off a metal door. One neighbor said the suspects had been sleeping in the warehouse while running what seemed to be a "military boot camp."
The official told The Associated Press the alleged plotters were mainly Americans with no apparent ties to al-Qaida or other foreign terrorist organizations.
...The men slept in the warehouse, said Tashawn Rose, 29. "They would come out late at night and exercise. It seemed like a military boot camp that they were working on there. They would come out and stand guard."
She talked to one of the men about a month ago: "They seemed brainwashed. They said they had given their lives to Allah."
Walker's way of thinking is doubtless what the French told themselves while letting radical Islamists immigrate in vast numbers, leading to the recent riots there; it was doubtless what the British told themselves, leading to last year's terrorist bombings in London; it was doubtless what the Canadians told themselves, leading to the recently thwarted terrorist attacks there. And here, it's what Jesse Walker and others would like us to believe -- leading to these just-thwarted terrorist attacks based in Miami.
Why would Walker think that a pattern he can see in every other nation that's permitted immigration of radical Islamists, wouldn't be repeated here? In any case, his logic appears to have been utterly disproven.
What mosques were these men going to, that taught them to kill Americans? Such mosques could reasonably be identified and shut down.
From Ramirez:
Despite last week's defeat in Congress of a similar measure, Kerry and Feingold are sponsoring yet another cut-and-run-from-Iraq bill. As usual, these Dems want to reward the less successful (the evil, failed terrorists our troops are fighting) and punish the successful (the thriving U.S.)
The Dems used to claim that Iraq had nothing to do with terrorists. Now that it's unmistakable that we are fighting Al Qaeda and other terrorists in Iraq, how can Kerry and Feingold possibly want to cut and run from that fight?
There's a reason why that baggy-pants look seems so dumb.
Last week I posted a review of the Darwin chapters of Coulter's new book. One of the most telling points Ann makes, is that Darwin as a mechanism for the origin of species, appears to be disproved by the fossil record. If new species arise via Darwinian evolution, there should be a massive amount of fossil records of species mutating into new species. But there is not.
The comment thread for that post was started by several knowledgeable readers, who favored Darwin. In that thread, I asked:
How do you explain the absence in the fossil record of the massive amount of fossil evidence of random mutation of one species into another, which would appear to be required if Darwinian evolution is the mechanism for the origin of species?
So far, none of the pro-Darwin commenters have responded.
I just did a search of Google Groups for "evolution coulter." There are lots of discussions in many groups -- but no discussions yet in the scientific groups, at least in the first 7 pages of results. It appears that the scientific community may be trying to avoid discussing the questions Coulter is raising.
I really want to get a serious response from the scientific community on this important question.
My review of the Darwin chapters in Ann Coulter's new book is getting a lot of pageviews. At the moment, a Google search for "Ann Coulter Darwin" lists this site as the second entry.
And the comments posted with the review are fascinating. Here's one, from Doc Duke:
I received my Bachelor and PhD degrees from MIT and Princeton, respectively, and am familiar with these arguments, having read the sources some years ago. Ann has done her readers a great service by presenting succinct, humorous, well-documented prose for her readers, of which there are happily very many. I agree with her, and think you have well summarized her arguments (and those in her cited literature), Vik.
I have two children in a public High School, and spend a considerable amount of time evenings and weekends making sure (1) that they know the other side if I don't trust what they are being taught, and (2) ensuring that they know to keep their mouths shut so that this knowledge does not have a negative impact on their grade-point averages.
You will seldom hear from (employed) scientists on this subject, because they to not wish to follow, even in a small way, the path of Natan Sharansky in Russia. Consult his "The Case for Democracy" to see where we could be headed without effective voices such as yours, Vik.
Doc, thanks very much for the good words.
What I can't get over is that not only does Doc have to check what his kids are being taught and personally give them the alternative view when necessary -- since the schools aren't doing so -- but he also has to tell them not to let on at school, that this is happening. This looks to me as though free expression at school is not only not permitted, it's actually being punished. There's the state-approved view of things, and discussing of alternative views is punished. Even thinking about alternative views is dangerous if discovered. This is showing some of the characteristics of a state that lacks freedom of speech.
This exposes why the current judicial reading of the Constitution, as forbidding the government from showing support for the Judeo-Christian tradition, is dangerously wrong. That judicial reading imposes a preposterous state-approved view of things in which it is forbidden to say anything favorable about any religion in our own schools. This, in a nation that was founded on the principals of freedom of speech and expression!
Michael J. Gaynor provides detail on why this judicial reading is wrong:
Did the United States Constitution really require complete separation of church and state, prevent the United States government from acknowledging God and supporting religion generally, and compel the United States government and state governments to be strictly neutral as between religion and "irreligion"?
The answer is no.
The contrary claims are secular extremist myths that need to be exposed.
In 1947, in Everson v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court disregarded history and misconstrued the Constitution at the urging of the secular extremist minority and the expense of the overhwehelming religious majority in ruling that neither federal nor state governments "can pass laws which aid all religions."
In so ruling, the Court presumptuously substituted its personal view for the views of those who founded the United States, wrote and ratified the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, and adopted the First Amendment and misued a much-quoted letter in which Thomas Jefferson had described the First Amendment as "building a wall of separation between church and state."
The First Amendment did not create a wall between church and state. It prohibited Congress from making a law "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
The kind of separation that was intended is suggested by Pierre L'Enfant's plan for a national cathedral. In 1791, Congress selected the site to be the capital of the United States. George Washington, previously President of the Constitutional Convention and then President of the United States, then commissioned L'Enfant to design an overall plan for the future seat of government. That plan included a church "intended for national purposes, such as public prayer, thanksgiving, funeral orations, etc., and assigned to the special use of no particular Sect of denomination, but equally open to all." The Founders and Framers favored governmental neutrality among denominations, but they never expected government to be barred from supporting religion generally to please a tiny Godless minority.
The judicial reading is wrong and is corroding free speech in America.
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.
