Ann Coulter, Apemen, and Evolution

In my post Why Ann Coulter Thinks Evolution is False, Part Nine, I was making the point that pseudo-scientific creationists like Ann Coulter are quick to leap to hoaxes such as Piltdown Man while ignoring the literal deluge of legitimate hominid fossils.  Gunner Sykes left a comment asking, “So, what evidence do you have that Australopithecine fossils are our ancestors?”

Let’s ask a couple questions in a similar vein.  What evidence do we have that the background microwave radiation in space is leftover from the Big Bang?  What evidence do we have that the time dilation observed in accelerated subatomic particles is the result of relativity?

You’re missing the forest for the trees, Gunner.  The theory of evolution says that man descended from apelike ancestors.  If that’s true, we should expect to find species that appear transitional between apelike creatures and man.  Behold, we find the many hominids of the Australopithecus and Homo genus.  Not only are they more human-like than apes, but they grow progressively more and more like modern humans as they get more recent.  If this is not evidence of transition, then what would be transitional between an ape and human?  This is exactly what evolution predicts should be found.  This is how theories are validated; this is the heart of science.  The theory makes predictions, the predictions are tested, and if they pan out, the theory reaches the rarefied air of relativity, quantum theory, and yes, evolution.

Of course, a theory as powerful as evolution is not built on a few anecdotal snippets like this.  A couple of fossils are not going to prove the theory incorrect or correct.  The presence of transitional species between man and apelike ancestors is one little piece of the story of human evolution.  If the theory of evolution is true, we should also find other sorts of evidence of man’s evolutionary past.

How about genetic evidence?  Chimpanzees (and our other primate relatives) have twenty-four pairs of chromosomes.  Humans have twenty-three.  If evolution is true and we share common ancestry with modern apes, this means that sometime in the history of Homo sapiens, two of our chromosomes must have combined (folded) together.  If this folded chromosome couldn’t be found, then the current idea of human evolution would be completely destroyed forever.  But it was found, exactly as was predicted by theory.

Or vestigial evidence?  Humans have a coccyx (the remnants of a tail), an appendix (useful for herbivores but not so much for the omnivores we’ve become), yolk sacs when we are embryos (empty yolk sacs since as placental mammals, we don’t need them) and muscles in our head that once were used to move our ears.  Human infants – like chimpanzee infants – have the grasp reflex.  We have wisdom teeth, which cause so many people trouble because they are left over from when our jaws were larger and used for grinding more plant matter.  We also have innate lower back and knee problems – indicative of a species that has only recently began walking upright.  Human childbirth is the most dangerous and painful of all the mammals because our cranial size has increased so quickly and our awkward narrow pelvises are needed for upright locomotion.  Hemorrhoids, a uniquely human experience and a consequence of walking upright, are another example of the shoddy “design” and tradeoffs the theory of evolution predicts.

The evidence is all there for anyone to see.  It’s not shoddy, it’s not iffy, and there is definitely not a lack of it.

Why Ann Coulter Thinks Evolution is False, Part Nine

In Ms. Coulter’s book Godless, she makes certain to remind us that people have perpetrated hoaxes to support the theory of evolution, such as Piltdown Man, the peppered moths, and aspects of recapitulation.  I’m not sure what the point of this is, but since this “argument” is fairly common, I think I should address it.

Yes, there have been hoaxes in the field of evolution.  People have deliberately tried to falsify evidence.  In the case of Piltdown Man, a pig jawbone was put on a chimpanzee skull to make it appear to be a hominid.  Drawings have been made exaggerating the likeness of embryos of different species to one another.  Peppered moths were subjected to spurious experimental methods.

Perhaps these types of things make biblical creationists like Ms. Coulter chortle with glee.  perhaps in their minds, hoaxes mean that the whole theory is a sham.  If this is the case, I would ask how many frauds, hoaxes, hucksters, cheats, pedophile priests, and whoring pastors it would take for them to conclude the same about a religious institution?  Should the hoax of the Shroud of Turn or a “piece of the Ark” dispel the existence of Jesus?  Should the horde of shady televangelists persuading their viewers to send them money undermine the notion of Christian morality?

I would never claim something so ridiculous.  This ignores the actual evidence at hand, which Ms. Coulter does so well in Godless.  Rather than trumpet about the hoax of Piltdown Man, perhaps Ms. Coulter could address the many legitimate species of hominids found in the fossil record, such as the Australopithecines (anamensis, afarensis, africanus, and ghari) or those of the Homo genus (rudolfensis, habilis, ergaster, and erectus).  When discussing recapitulation, she might ask herself why human embryos have a yolk sac – an empty yolk sac since as placental mammals, we no longer need them.

If Ms. Coulter is saying that the scientific frauds she mentioned in her book are somehow indicative of “how things work” in the field of evolution, I would ask her this: Who discovered those frauds?  Who exposed Piltdown Man and the truth of recapitulation and the peppered moths?  Was it a coalition of creationists?  A group of Christian investigators?  Parish members praying for inspiration?  A conservative ideologue famous for offensive sound bytes?

Sorry, but no.  Scientists discovered those frauds.  Men and women using the tool of reason and the power of the scientific method.  This is how science works, by holding everything to the standards of evidence, even the most well-accepted notions.  The institution of science operates not on authority, not on revealed knowledge, but on evidence.  Scientists do not attack theism to make a case for evolution; they simply present the evidence for evolution.

In contrast, the sole argument for the creationists, their only life raft, is to try to poke holes in the theory of evolution.  They do this because they have no evidence to present supporting their case.  Ms. Coulter certainly presented none in Godless.

Why Ann Coulter Thinks Evolution is False, Part Eight

“Evolution is just a belief that atheists have.”

Many creationists suffer from a certain error in reasoning that I heard articulated best by Ann Coulter in her book Godless: She made the point that atheists need evolution correct, or else their entire worldview comes crashing down.  On the other hand, she stated, evolution being true wouldn’t hurt the Christian faith at all.

The latter part is correct.  The theory of evolution doesn’t disprove the existence of God, nor does it make any attempt to.  The theory of evolution need have nothing to do with atheism.  It’s simply an explanation of observable events in the natural world.  Plenty of Christians accept the evidence for evolution.  For a sterling example, I suggest Kenneth Miller’s absolutely essential book Finding Darwin’s God.

It is the first part of this creationist misconception that’s fatuous, the idea that atheists need evolution.  This is clearly subscribing to the either-or fallacy.  Why do creationists like Ms. Coulter assume that if evolution were proven false, we must automatically conclude that an intelligent designer is real?  Even the utter annihilation of the theory of evolution would not provide the first shred of evidence for intelligent design or a creator.  I’m sorry to break this to the creationists, but your “theory” must stand or fall on the evidence – the same standard you rightfully request from scientists.  One can still be an intellectually honest atheist without evolution.  Indeed, one can continue being an intellectually honest atheist until you creationists out there provide some evidence for your position.  Compelling evidence would be preferred, but any evidence whatsoever would be a good first step.

Ms. Coulter and those of her ilk make it sound as if atheists cling to the theory of evolution as a complete vindication of some belief they have.  Consider that the subtitle of Ms. Coulter’s book is The Church of Liberalism.  I think her use of the word “church” underscores the manner in which she views the issue.  If so, she’s missing the point: A sound scientific theory like evolution is an explanatory tool.  Those who accept it can do what they want with it; it doesn’t change the nature of the evidence that supports it.  Whatever anyone’s personal beliefs, whatever they conclude about the meaning of life, whatever ethical laws they subscribe to, whatever political views they have, they’re saying nothing about the theory.

Evolution is not a belief.  It’s not an ideology that is at odds with someone else’s ideology, and it’s certainly not a tenet of some “church” from Ann Coulter’s imagination.  Evolution is compelling because it has a plethora of evidence to support it, not because it has a plethora of followers who have faith in it.  Creationists would do well to consider the difference.

Why Ann Coulter Thinks Evolution is False, Part Seven

“Even the evolutionists themselves can’t agree on the facts.”

In her book Godless, Ms. Coulter makes the puerile error of misinterpreting punctuated equilibrium.  For anyone unfamiliar with the finer points of evolutionary debate within the scientific community, punctuated equilibrium (PE) is a theory proposed by Niles Eldredge and the late Stephen Jay Gould.  It posits that the evolutionary history of life is not as gradual as standard Darwinism implies; Gould and Eldredge point out that species often branch “suddenly” into new species, as well as go through long periods of stasis.

You have to take the word “suddenly” in context.  What Ms. Coulter and her intellectual peers do is interpret this to mean saltation; that is, the abrupt appearance of a radically different organism, perhaps in a single generation.  They make jokes about a cow giving birth to a beaver or similar nonsense.  In Godless, Ms. Coulter said that the rapid species hopping supposedly predicted by PE is the equivalent of a “nontheological miracle.”

Soon after proposing PE, Gould and Eldredge were disconcerted by the number of creationists and media figures who took the theory out of context.  Not only does this mean Darwinism is on shaky ground, the creationists proclaimed, it also supports the idea of creation events.  (It’s humorous that they try to use the arguments posed by Gould, who was one of the leading opponents of Intelligent Design, to support their claim!  Why not take that Gould position and run with it, if they put so much stock in the man’s arguments?)

But this is simply a case of misunderstanding the theory.  What I don’t know is why otherwise intelligent people like Ms. Coulter are still doing so.

Number one, when Gould and Eldredge speak of rapid speciation events, they mean “rapid” compared to the time frames associated with the geological ages common in paleontology.  The speciation events they describe are tens or hundred of thousands of years long.  What’s more, these speciation events still operate on the basic principle of Darwinism: small insensible changes over that period of time.  Creationists like Ms. Coulter have used their limited imaginations to seize upon this idea as consistent with creationism, but the issue is nothing more than a matter of degree.  Even strict punctuation looks like Darwinian gradualism when you view it on a tighter timeline.

To be sure, punctuated equilibrium is a radical viewpoint.  Perhaps it has more validity than its main opponents (such as Richard Dawkins) think.  Or perhaps not.  This type of debate is what happens in science.  It’s vital, it’s required.  It’s how progress is made.  It’s how mistakes are found.  Science is always open to debate, it’s always a bit “unsettled.”

Debate within the scientific community is normal.  It doesn’t mean the theory of evolution is in trouble.  It doesn’t mean the precepts of natural selection are in doubt, it doesn’t mean fifty percent of scientists think evolution isn’t true, and it certainly doesn’t mean that scientists are “coming around” to creationism.  More evidence supporting evolution exists now certainly doesn’t mean that scientists are “coming around” to creationism.  More evidence supporting evolution exists now than has ever existed.  Wait a decade, and this will be true then, as well.  And you can be certain that there’ll also be creationists grasping for attention, trying to enforce their “science” in courtrooms, and coming up with new ways of stating the same ineffectual arguments in lieu of any evidence – as they’ve been doing for centuries.

Why Ann Coulter Thinks Evolution is False, Part VI

“Natural selection is a tautology.”

For those who don’t understand Ms. Coulter’s tactic of pointing out the tautological nature of a phrase like “survival of the fittest,” it is this: Natural selection is a pointless repetition that collapses upon itself.  It becomes a truism that can’t be falsified, which means it is not science.  It’s like saying, “The fittest organisms are the ones that pass on their genes, and they are passing on their genes because they are the fittest.”  It says nothing about the world, it’s meaningless.  You might as well say the color red is red because it has the properties of being red.

Upon first hearing this nonsens you might frown and ask, “So what?”  This is a foolish word game, a smirking bit of charlatanry, a philosophical trick to divert attention from the fact that the creationist has no empirical data to present.

All of us – including Ms. Coulter – know that natural selection works.  Even the staunchest creationists don’t deny that it can at least make small changes like alter the shape of a bird’s beak, or bring the sickle-cell trait to humans in malaria-ridden parts of the world.  Indeed, creationists often hijack natural selection to try to add scientific legitimacy to their Great Flood myth.  In order to get around the logistical problems of fitting so many animals on a ship, they say that Noah took only one “kind” of each animal.  For instance, only one feline pair was aboard the Ark, and after the flood was over, every modern feline, from tigers to tabbies, “adapted” from that one founding pair.

The only problem creationists have with natural selection is that they can’t accept it can make bigalterations, like changing one species into another.  They admit natural selection works, they just imagine some evanescent roadblock that prevents many small changes adding up to bigger ones.  In Ms. Coulter’s book Godless, she makes her position clear by demoting natural selection to only being able to make small changes within a species.

You can call evolution a theory, you can call it a fact, you can say natural selection is tautology – none of that matters.  The manner in which human beings label something doesn’t alter reality.  There is empirical evidence that natural selection is a real force that works changes in the real world.  You can go look at it.  There’s nothing esoteric about it, and no amount of creationist word-finagling is going to change the fact that we can all watch it happen with our own eyes.

Regardless, if Ms. Coulter wants to play this game, I can accommodate her.  Yes, it is a fact that every creature in nature cannot survive and pass on its genes.  There is a struggles for resources and mates.  Some creatures die while others live on.  This is a truism, but it’s not a tautology.  If, for instance, every creature was identical, loved for the same length of time, and asexually reproduced one identical offspring, then Darwinism would be wrong.  It could not be applies to the real world.

Evolutionary theory makes testable predictions about adaptations, about group selection, about sexual selection, and even about whether certain traits are adaptations at all.  Natural selection, or “survival of the fittest,” is not a tautology at all.  It is testable scientific theory – which means it can be falsified.

I suggest an actual tautology for Ms. Coulter to consider, the creationist staple knows as the cosmological argument for the existence of God: “There must be a first cause because everything has a cause.”

Why Ann Coulter Thinks Evolution is False V

“The evidence found in nature supports creationism.”

Here’s how creationists like Ms. Coulter seem to prove that their deity exists: “Since there are gaps in the fossil record, unanswered questions about the evolutionary history of life, and debate in the scientific community, evolution must be wrong – which of course means that creationism is correct.”

For once, I’d like to see them stop trying to attack something that doesn’t fit their creation myth and instead come up with some evidence of their own.  You can’t prove God exists by trying to poke holes in the theory of evolution; this is applying the either-or logic fallacy.  The creationists are saying that either Hypothesis A is correct or Hypothesis B is correct.  Oh really, why is that?  Can there not be a Hypothesis C?  But this is how they operate.  If they find any question about evolution that a scientist can’t answer, they crow triumphantly: “Ha-ha! We will by default.”

This tactic is the best they can come up with.  They do it because they have no case.  They can produce no evidence whatsoever, and their only explanation is that divine magic explains every tough question.  Imagine Einstein trying to prove relativity merely by trying to poke holes in Newton’s theory.  Moreaptly yet, imagine if Charles Darwin had tried the creationist method rather than actual science: “There are things you creationists don’t know about God?  Very well, we automatically win.  God must not be real, and a natural process must have created life.  No, we can’t explain how this process works, and we don’t even have to because Nature works in mysterious ways, but obviously it’s true because you can’t answer every question about God.”  Absurdities are more humorous when they’re close to the truth.

Leaping to “God did it,” is not only intellectually torpid, it also fails as a reasonable replacement.  Why did God spend two billion years of history watching only microbial life before He decided to make something more complex?  Why did He wait 570 million years after His Cambrian “creation event” before creating humans?  Ninety-nine percent of all the species that have ever existed are extinct.  Did God create all the uncountable species that have ever lived, including all the unsuccessful ones, each at different points throughout billions of years?  If so, why does it appear as if He tried out some species, allowed them to go extinct, then moved on to other species that appear more like the modern ones we see today?  Why did He create dozens of species of elephant-like creatures, each progressively more like modern elephants, and allow all but two to go extinct?  Why did God put so much junk in our DNA that just happens to look like detritus from an evolutionary past?  Why did God give chimpanzees twenty-four chromosomes, then fold two of the human chromosomes together to give us twenty-three?  In tracking mitochondrial DNA, why haven’t geneticists found a bottleneck that would indicate when and where God created the first man and woman?  Why did God give whales nonfunctional hipbones and femurs?  Why did God give give us wisdom teeth, flawed spines and knees, and an appendix?  Why did He create so many intermediary species between aquatic creatures and four-limbed walking creatures?  Between reptiles and mammals?

In her book Godless, Ms. Coulter never goes any further than trying to discredit evolution.  She doesn’t present an alternate theory to answer any of these questions.  Even if we take away the theory of evolution, she can’t even begin to explain how the geological record and life’s history supports the idea of a creator, let alone the anthorpocentric interventionist deity from her particular fairy tale.  She never presents on shred of evidence that points to the existence of a creator.  The only so-called argument she makes is this: “My opinion is that the evidence for evolution is inconclusive, so therefore (my) god exists and designed everything.”

Why Ann Coulter Thinks Evolution is False IV

“There are no transitional species in the fossil record.”

A pervasive theme throughout Ann Coulter’s criticism of evolution in her book Godless is the supposed rarity of transitional species in the fossil record.  This is perhaps the most common creationist argument against evolution and – like most of them – it is driven not by the facts but by a spiritual need to deny something that makes them uncomfortable.

Fossilization is a rare event.  Animals don’t just fall on the ground and become fossils.  Most of them are eaten by predators and scavengers, then broken down by parasites and bacteria.  Fossilization requires organisms dying in particular ways, sedimentation being distributed correctly, and preservation for millions or hundreds of millions of years.  Even when fossils are laid down, time periods of ten million years or less are generally too small in the fossil record to be viewed by paleontologists, so transition fossils between species in these time frames are rarer than not.  The fossil record has many gaps.

This is unfortunate, but these are facts, not excuses.  Another fact is that transitional species are abundant in the fossil record, especially between large groups of animals.  Creationists do not acknowledge them for a very simple reason that I’ll return to in a moment.  Here are three prime examples that immediately come to mind.  Archaeopteryx is a fossil transition between reptiles and birds.  It has feathered wings like a bird, but teeth and a tail like a reptile.  No modern bird has teeth.  Tiktaalik is a 375-million-year-old fist with the precursor structures for shoulders, elbows, and even fingers.  Acanthostega is an amphibian-like creature with legs and full gills, a transitional species between fish and amphibians.

I chose these for the creationists because they present clear structures that are precisely the definition of “transitional.”  I could go on, pointing out the many species of hominids such as Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy’s species) and Homo habilis; the transitions between reptiles and mammals like the therapsids and cynodonts; the clear transitional history of the elephant, horse, and rhinoceros; transitional species between land mammals and whales like Ambulocetus natans; and fossil portraits of ancient shellfish and crustaceans.  None of it will matter.  No amount of transitional data found in the fossil record will ever convince a diehard creationist.  To every such example, Ms. Coulter and those of her ilk say, “That’s just a separate species.  It was a dead end.  It’s not transitional.”

Yes, but based upon what evidence?  Your creation story?  Your discomfort at the possibility of not being the crowing achievement of a designer?  The fact that you must deny each and every one?

Here’s a question:  What exactly would qualify as “transitional,” Ms. Coulter?  For example, the transitional fossils between fishlike creatures and the first tetrapods (four-limbed walking animals) are numerous and quite demonstrable.  The earliest of them still had tail fins like a fish.  The first limbs to show up in the fossil record look like modified fins.  The first jaws in the fossil record appear to be modified gill arches.  Creatures like Acanthostega walked around on four legs and still had gills.  Later amphibians in the fossil record look much more like modern amphibians than fish.  Even today there are fish that gulp oxygen from the air and walk on land and climb trees with their fins.

If this is not transitional, what exactly wouldt ransitions between aquatic creatures and tetrapods look like?  How many examples must be shown before Coulter and her intellectual peers consider them transitional?

My guess would be that no amount of evidence will ever be sufficient.  Some creationists will continue to say “separate species” until the end of time, denying that these examples are exactly what evolution predicts will be found, denying even the possibility that they are evidence for common ancestry.  And why?

In the words of Jim Carrey in the movie Liar Liar: “Because it’s devastating to my case!”

Why Ann Coulter Thinks Evolution is False III

“Evolutionists can’t explain the Cambrian Explosion.”

This is another claim from Ann Coulter’s best-selling book Godless: The Church of Liberalism.  It includes a criticism of some warped version of Darwinism that Ms. Coulter appears to have gleaned from watching the movie Waterworld (in which Kevin Costner’s character had evolved gills and webbed feet).  I can only hope that her readers understand that the application of her otherwise impressive acumen does not extend to the theory of evolution.

In this, however, Ms. Coulter finally makes an honest point.  She infers from it the wrong conclusion, but the point is valid.  About 570 million years ago, there is a place in the fossil record where something like forty different phyla (major groups of animals based body plan) seem to arrive suddenly.  Before this time, there were only a couple of major phyla.  Then, boom – an amazing diversity seemingly overnight.

Of course, the “overnight” is in geological terms, which in this case means ten to fifteen million years.  To be sure, that is still a relatively short period of time to explain all the various body types that appeared, but let’s keep the record straight.  When Ms. Coulter and her peers state that the animals of the Cambrian era appeared “suddenly as if placed there by a designer,” remember that their goal is to take any unanswered question in science and use it to validate their creation story.

No, scientists haven’t been able to explain the relative abruptness of the Cambrian Explosion.  So what?  No one has yet explained how quantum theory can encapsulate gravitation, or why most of the matter in the universe is “dark.”  Should this invalidate all the evidence for quantum theory, gravitation, and modern cosmology?  I hate to break this to creationists like Ms. Coulter, but here it is: Scientists don’t have all the answers.  Indeed, they’ve never made any such claim.  Their only claim is that they try.

Conversely, it is the creationists who seem to suffer from a lack of humility.  They have the answer to everything – if you can call it an answer.  “God did it” is their solution to everything that hasn’t been explained yet.  They used to say it when a volcano erupted or when people got sick; now they search for “irreducible” complexity in parts of cells that somehow keep getting less and less complex.

Perhaps the notion of increasing oxygen levels in Cambrian times spurring rapid evolution has a ring of truth.  Perhaps there was no real “explosion,” and the answer is simple that most of the Precambrian ancestors didn’t fossilize.  This probably has some validity since many had soft bodies that usually don’t fossilize well.  Try this, Ms. Coulter:  There are whole groups of Cambrian creatures that are totally absent from the fossil record after the so-called explosion – does that mean we should stop looking for them and say God whisked them all out of existence?  Who gets to decide which questions are deserving of more study, and which should be abandoned for the notion that “God did it?”  Should we assume that a magic spell is the answer for every difficult question about the natural world, or only the ones that directly challenge the biblical creation myth?

This type of Dark-Ages thinking thwarts discovery and human progress.  Imagine of Crick and Watson, for example, had scratched their heads and said, “Well, I just can’t see how this double-helix thing could work.  It’s never going to be solved.  Since we can’t understand it, there must not be a natural explanation.  Let’s just say an intelligent designer is required and scrap the whole project.”  Unexplained does not mean inexplicable, Ms. Coulter.

Science makes provisional claims and allows for constant testing and revision.  It is an ongoing process that answers more questions as we progress – but we only progress because we continue to try rather than towel and attribute every tough question to God waving His magic wand.

Why Ann Coulter Thinks Evolution is False II

“If evolution were true, there should be humans with eyes on their feet and fish that mutated fur in the fossil record.”

Ann Coulter has garnered fame and wealth using the gimmick of controversial statements.  I will take the above claim, paraphrased from her best-selling book Godless, in a general sense.  What she seems to be saying is that since natural selection is unguided and operates upon random genetic changes, there should be fish with fur, humans with eyes on their feet, and all sorts of aberrations and missteps in that vein.  I can assume that Ms. Coulter believes that evolution progresses that way: by throwing out a wide variety of large mutations and keeping certain ones.

At least she has the right idea.  It is the scale that she’s misinterpreting.  The idea that huge leaps of that sort (called saltations) contribute appreciably to evolution has never been taken very seriously.  Darwinism operates with small, insensible changes – each one somehow advantageous to the organism – that are passed down to descendants because those particular organisms survive where others do not.  No evolutionary biologist subscribes to the notion that complex biological parts like eyes or fur were evolved in single leaps as Ms. Coulter is suggesting.  This is one of the great and extremely common fallacies creationists use to try to make natural selection appear silly.

Perhaps it is possible for a control gene to mutate and produce an entire eye on a human’s foot, some facsimile of fur on a fish, or any other freakish anomaly we can imagine.  We all know mutations of that degree, while rare, do occur, but that doesn’t mean thy have any measurable effect on evolution.  More specifically, that doesn’t mean they would lead to a species of monsters that might leave examples behind in the fossil record.

The rarity of such saltations is reason enough, but something Ms. Coulter seems to be forgetting is that natural selection only operates if the genetic alteration is somehow beneficial to the organism.  The majority of mutations are deleterious to an organism’s survivability; this is far more pronounced for large mutations.  Her mutant genes for fish fur and podiatric eyes would have to be inherited from parents who manage to survive and mate with other such genetic monsters.  If Ms. Coulter can make a valid argument for how fur on fish or eyes on human feet will help the organism pass on its genes (and not hinder it), I’m sure the scientific community would like to hear it.

Ms. Coulter’s tactic is to make people chuckle with incredulity.  Her criticism of evolution can be summated to: “You’d have to be a godless, immoral idiot to believe the wacky things these evolutionists claim.”  She then proceeds to name absurdities that have nothing to do with Darwinism and are instead characteristic of juvenile misconceptions.  There are honest arguments to be made against evolution and good questions to be asked, but in her book Godless, Ms. Coulter is so hampered by faith-based certitude and illiteracy in the subject that she fails to reach any level of intellectual seriousness.

No, Ms. Coulter, there most definitely should notbe fish with fur, humans with eyes on their feet, or any similar foolishness from your imagination in the fossil record.  In which study or book did you read the evidence for that – or is it merely based on your personal opinion of evolution?  You repeatedly referred to the biologist Michael Behe as a source – I would enjoy hearing him publicly admit that this point of yours is valid.  Can you produce one serious scientist who agrees with your argument?  Better yet: Can you produce one serious scientist who would not be moved to pity if they heard such blatant ignorance from a person trying to argue against evolution?

I would refer Ms. Coulter to Mark Twain: “Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”

Why Ann Coulter Thinks Evolution is False I

“Earthworms should have evolved bigger brains by now.”

This statement was taken from Ms. Coulter’s book Godless: The Church of Liberalism.  As a college-educated person who claims to have studied the subject, her illiteracy is stunning – but I’m not setting up a straw target here.  Her book is a national bestseller, purchased by millions of people who now have an impressive array of completely bogus arguments against evolution.  Misinformed drivel like this is why so much anti-intellectualism suffuses the American public’s understanding of evolution, so my opinion is that Ms. Coulter’s outlandish claims should not go unchallenged.

The assertion that earthworms or anything else should have evolved intelligence by now is loaded with the implication that evolving intelligence is an intrinsic part of evolution.  Ms. Coulter is stating a version of a very common point, a tired rehash of the misconception that there is a goal in nature to build microbes into men, and that human beings are somehow more evolved than everything else.  Her question is: “If evolution is true, why haven’t earthworms evolved bigger brains yet?”

The short answer would be: “Because they are under no compulsion to do so.”  Natural selection doesn’t build complexity or intelligence automatically or on purpose.  Complexity or intelligence are not even necessarily advantages.  Consider how something as relatively simple as a virus (which is nothing but a DNA or RNA copying program surrounded by protein) can slaughter millions of “higher” animals like human beings and alter the history of our species.  The world has been blanketed by microbial life for billions of years because they are extremely successful at propagating themselves, and they don’t need an inkling of intelligence to pull it off.

From an evolutionary standpoint, all that matters to earthworms (or any other creature) is propagating their species.  Yes, certainly some creatures could increase their chance of passing on their genes if they evolved higher intelligence.  The same could also be said for flight, and sonar, and being able to run seventy miles per hour, and having bony armor plating and sharp claws.  Us humans could increase our odds of passing on our genes if we were all born looking like movie stars.  Also, for that matter, if we were born immune to cancer.  So what?  This point is completely irrelevant.  Natural selection can’t look ahead and determine what might be advantageous to an organism, then decide to start building that mechanism.  It can’t look ahead at all.  Ms. Coulter should know better.

Just because we can imagine something would be advantageous to an organism doesn’t automatically mean natural selection can or will pull it off.  Elephants will never fly, no matter how much appropriate selective pressure is put on them.  This is because any possible intermediate stages leading to elephantine flight would not be advantageous to the creature (due to constraints of weight, aerodynamics, etc.).  Elephants have drifted too far in one direction, and natural selection is incapable of starting over from scratch; it must act upon variation that is already there.  Similarly, whales and dolphins have not evolved gills, though that might seem like a logical step to us, considering their environment.  They have instead developed alterations (efficient lungs, blowholes, and better diving skills) on what already exists.

This matter is indicative of a pervasive delusion that must be put to rest forever.  In asserting that “earthworms should be more intelligent by now,” “crocodiles should have opposable thumbs,” or anything along that line of thought, creationists like Ms. Coulter should realize that they’re not making a case against natural selection.  They’re not even talking about natural selection.  What they’re doing is attributing some goal and purpose to nature – which means they’re arguing with themselves.