No, I don’t have Ann Coulter’s book yet (it is so annoying to want something cheap and easily accessible, yet have to refuse to actually pay for it on general principles), but since she’s hammering the talk show circuit heavily, we’re getting dribs and drabs of her amazing knowledge of biology.
John Hawkins: If you were to pick three concepts, facts, or ideas that most undercut the theory of evolution, what would they be?
Ann Coulter: 1. It’s illogical. 2. There’s no physical evidence for it. 3. There’s physical evidence that directly contradicts it. Apart from those three concerns I’d say it’s a pretty solid theory.
1) Darwinian logic is quite simple and clear. Here’s a short summary:
- If heritable variation exists, (which, of course, it does)
- if excess reproduction occurs, (also obviously true, or we’d be up to our ears in mice)
- if variants differ in their likelihood of survival and reproduction, (a little trickier, but still fairly obvious)
- then the relative frequencies of the variants must change.
There’s also the greater point that evolution, not just Darwinian selection, was derived entirely from observation and experiment. There’s a kind of empirical logic running throughout it.
Note that Coulter doesn’t say what is illogical about it.
2) The claim that there is no evidence for evolution is both absurd and dishonest. For a short summary of the physical evidence, see 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent (“short”, of course, being a relative term. That page is huge, but it is dwarfed by all the new data pouring in every month in the scientific journals.)
3) The existence of evidence that contradicts evolution is a hard one to address when the critic can’t even bother to specify any. There are lots of instances of creationists claiming to have evidence contradicting evolution, but usually what we get is evidence contradicting their ignorant caricature of evolution. For instance, many argue that the Cambrian explosion is evidence against evolution—of course, it isn’t, but is simply an unusual and interesting phenomenon within the long history of common descent. It’s like saying that the Industrial Revolution is evidence against the facts of European history because it was a period of rapid technological change.
You know, when someone like Coulter has to flaunt their ignorance and lie to defend their thesis, you know there’s something wrong with it.
no point in responding to C as if there was content there.
she just makes it up.
yes, the words connect to make sentences.
that is about all.
all she wants/needs is the attention.
ignoring her is best solution.
Have I misunderstood a concept here? I thought excess reproduction was when parents produce more offspring than there are parents, resulting in population increase under favourable conditions, e.g. rabbits breed like rabbits; bacteria can split more than once.
You know, when someone like Coulter has to flaunt their ignorance and lie to defend their thesis, you know there’s something wrong with it.
But, but… That’s her entire schtick. If you were “someone like Coulter” this would have to be your MO. There’s a circularity here.
Anyhow, insert pygmies + dwarfs comment here.
All Coulter shows is that she’s mastered some rhetorical tricks. Her “objections” come as a list of three, and then she follows it up with a sarcastic dismissal “other than that” (similar to this quote from Norman Schwarzkopf from Gulf War I http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/n/normanschw145299.html). What we’re looking at is not an argument, but Stand Up Comedy 101.
Rather than dignify her statement with a careful rebuttal, I wish somebody in the media would call her on it. The only reasonable response would be something like “Ms. Coulter, you’ve made three separate unsupported assertions. We have lots of time in this half hour interview, so how about you give us the supporting arguments for each one of these surprising claims.”
Paul wrote:
“The claim that there is no evidence for evolution is both absurd and dishonest.”
Agreed.
There is still a lot of confusion between the PROCESS of evolution and the MECHANISM of evolution. Lay persons don’t understand the difference and biologists seem to be in no hurry to point it out. They are happy to continue the obfuscation that equates darwinism, (the notion that highly organised structures, processes and systems emerged as a result of mutation and selection), with evolution, the fact that change has occurred over time and all living forms are related and probably had a common origin.
That evolution has occurred is a fact. That mutation, selection, drift and chromosome duplication is the mechanism is unsupported speculation.
Science has provided a substantial amount of empirical evidence, both observational and experimental, that evolution has occurred. What they have failed to do is provide any such evidence that the trivial effects of mutation and selection are somehow linked to the emergence of highly organized structures, processes and systems.
For scientists to continue to conflate evolution with darwinism and to suggest that since evolution is strongly supported that darwinism is likewise supported, is nothing less than disingenuous.
Creationists and Intelligent Design (TM) pinheads couldn’t have picked a better messenger for their dishonest and ill conceived babbling.
How about this:
Ms Coulter, you say, of evolution: 1. It’s illogical. 2. There’s no physical evidence for it. 3. There’s physical evidence that directly contradicts it.
Your statement (1) is untrue – and qoute this blog and PZ.
We know it is untrue – now what?
Your statement (2) is a striaght lie – why are you deliberately lying in public, Ms Coulter?
Your statement (3) requires evidence – produce it, or shut up (please)
Kind of like how exploding gases in a chamber propelling a lead projectile forward into the victim’s body is an unsupported speculation.
Andrew: I think that “excess reproduction” here means “more reproduction than the ecosystem can support.” It’s assuming that the “favourable conditions” you note do not exist. The excess refers to those that die as a result of this. If they weren’t “excess” by this definition, then they wouldn’t be dying, and we’d be up to our ears in ’em.
It’s hard for me to believe people think Coulter is serious. She says obviously hysterical things, people react like she’s serious, this gives her huge exposure, and she rakes in the royalties.
I think if people knew more about the behind-the-scenes of political talk shows, they’d be a little less naive about the sincerity of people like Coulter. Hosts and guests take amped up positions, exaggerations of what they believe, all the time. They do it because it increases excitement. Agreement is boring, arguing is exciting. Coulter just takes it to a whole nother level.
I’m opposed to paying for this book on principle as well, but I’m not opposed to chipping in for a copy to send to PZ provided he agrees to tear it apart publically for us.
Anyone with me? Come on! If we can get 5 people, it’s less than five bucks a person.
Please ignore Charlie Wagner. He is just an attention troll with all 10 neurons firing overtime just to create that post.
I agree with some earlier posters on this point; makeing a careful rebuttal to Coulter’s “argument” is like wrestling a pig (you both get muddy, and only the pig enjoys it).
She is, by the way, no idiot; rather an underestimated genius in the mould of P.T.Barnum. Of course, as I like to tell people, Barnum’s famous quote is now out of date, since, as a result of global population growth, there’s actually now a sucker born every 20 seconds.
She has a carefully crafted schtick, targeted at a willing audience of rubes who will gladly fork over cash to read the most hateful, illogical, irrational bullshit just as long as she continues to provide them with the hate figures they have such a desperate desire for. Not only that, but the more outrageous she can be, the more attention she gets. And no matter what, the usual suspects still defend her.
Take the latest well publicised example of her attacks on a group of 9/11 widows. The result: on every single TV news channel, we have coverage of statements that she made in her new book “Godless”. Tell me Ann, how can you justify what you said in your new book “Godless”? Wow. That’s ridiculous, but thanks for talking to us. Did we mention she has a new book out?
Product placement like that would cost millions of dollars on the ad market. And it doesn’t matter that what she said in response made no sense; her target market are not people sensitive to reason. Her target market is a group of people who just want to hear somebody, anybody, say something which allows them to rationalize their predjudices.
Surely it’ll be available used soon. Someone will get it as a sad, sick joke, or buy it seriously and then dump it. There must already be some reviewer copies floating around. I cannot think of any good reason Coulter should get a dime. There are public libraries too, obviously, and some might be keeping it out of circulation since it’s new; if you have the time, you could read it there.
It’s kind of ironic in this context that I recently read someone refer to Coulter as the rightwing’s answer to Abbie Hoffman. Well, almost, since she’s not advocating that anyone steal her book.
Charlie said:
Charlie, all of the mechanisms of evolution have been observed in action, in real time, producing the change from one species to another. It is only reasonable to assume that, since we have observed water coming down the Niagara River, it has flowed that way for a long time. It is only reasonable to assume that, since we have observed mutation, selection, drift, and chromosome duplication work as the triggers for producing new species, that it has worked that way in the past.
To use another example, that no third party watched to confirm the act of your conception does not mean that you were never conceived, Charlie. In fact, it canNOT mean that.
I’ve read the ‘science’ chapters, if you’ll pardon the expression. I won’t say how I got them. Yes, they’re every bit as moronic as you’d expect; but it’s not just evolution. She tells stupid lies about DDT, about AIDS; she gets general relativity backwards; she butchers Karl Popper; she unquestioningly reproduces Berlinski’s version of the eye evolution paper of Nillson and Pelger, without happening to mention the bitchslapping (can I say that here?) Berlinski got from almost everybody for his hatchet job. She thinks evolution states that whales are descended from bears that fell in the ocean. And yes, there is the usual repetition of the ‘no transitional fossil’ mantra, the ‘Ions of Evolution greatest hits’, etc.
And I really do think it’s best to ignore this piece of excrement, except perhaps to transmit the meme that the only people who take Ann Coulter seriously are those who rode the short bus to school, and they can only handle one chapter at a time because their lips get tired. PZ was right. There is no way you can read this book and not feel a little stupider.
And that’s from a conservative.
BTW, Coulter’s interviewer, John Hawkins of Rightwing News, denies global warming and has refused to respond to my repeated challenge to bet over it. They’re a perfect couple.
Millimeter Wave wrote:
Ah yes, the vaunted “free market” we keep hearing so much about!
Please! Stop insulting the kids on the short bus by associating them with Coulter and Dembski!
Kids on the short bus are kind and honest to the level that they understand the world.
Coulter and Debmski are neither.
Hopefully, someone, somewhere, will buy one copy of the book and then post the whole chapter online where it can be dismantled piece by piece. In the meantime, quotes from the book are already surfacing on other forums, such as this one:
http://www.rightwingnews.com/quotes/godless.php
Coulter’s formulaic schtick seems to turn her strawman opponents’ arguments on themselves. For what it’s worth, none of the “arguments” I’ve heard from this book so far are anything we haven’t already heard before… it all comes off as an attention-getting ploy by a media troll out to make a quick buck.
I can only imagine that being Ann Coulter is like living in some kind of solipsist fantasy similar to a lucid dream that doesn’t end. I think she’s just trying to figure out how crazy she can be before she’s held to account for it in any way. I mean, this is somebody who in effect called for a new crusade in a column after 9/11 (kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity), has gone to heroic efforts to rehabilitate Sen. Joe McCarthy in the public eye, and is now blathering on in contradiction to over a century of established science.
I don’t think she believes much of what she says. I also don’t think that makes her less dangerous or that she should be ignored any more than you’d ignore some other crazy person hurling threats at you (no, Virginia, it does not cause them to disappear in a puff of smoke). But it must be incredible to live in a world where you just have to ratchet up the batshit lunacy because nobody, ever, ever, calls you on it, and they just keep inviting you back to cushy talkshow gigs. I don’t know if Coulter has to laugh herself silly every morning after she gets up to cope with it, or if she secretly wonders when it all will end. But the sheer lack of any critical discipline applied to her statements must be kind of drug to her by now–she has to say something nuttier than the day before just to get back to feeling normal.
Gerard Harbison wrote:
of course, none of the above matters in the slightest. Her target audience has no means to detect errors such as these, however gross.
Her target audience has the means, just not the inclination. Or is everyone here but me a biology grad posting from a research library? It isn’t hard to find good info about evolution, but you have to take an honest interest in science and be willing to learn. Those aren’t characteristics of AC’s audience.
If you were to pick three concepts, facts, or ideas that most undercut the (so-called) theory of intelligent design, what would they be?
1. It’s illogical.
2. There’s no physical evidence for it.
3. There’s physical evidence that directly contradicts it.
Apart from those three concerns I’d say it’s a pretty solid theory.
If the science behind intelligent design doesn’t stand-up, why do you think so many people who should know better so fervently do not believe in evolution?
Centuries of brain-washing combined with a desperate need to believe in a deity.
– Hey, this is easy!
I did some calculations; if 65 million people voted for GWB, and we assume they were born over the course of 62 years, (average lifespan is 80 years, 18 to vote) then we know that a sucker is born at least every 30 seconds, just in the USA.
If we factor in all the other suckers, your figure looks a bit to low.
Note that Coulter doesn’t say what is illogical about it.
Typical. When she complained that the losses of the 9/11 widows inhibited Coulter from criticizing them, she somehow never specified what terrible thing those women did or said to warrant her criticism in the first place.
The implication is that we’ve all missed some brilliant political insight because poor little Annie Coulter was too ladylike to express it.
That would doubtless include something along the lines of calling the 9/11 widows “hippie pie-wagons,” restating for the 9,465,473rd time how very much she dislikes the Left, and the highlights of some research she laboriously and meticulously pulled right out of her own saggy ass.
I know all of us are sadder for this loss.
PZ, your particular faults are in fine relief on this topic. Others above, in different ways, explained effective ways of beginning the long process of detoxifying the present atmosphere (there is no real “debate” possible in Bu–sh–‘s “America”), which has allowed such useless, yet dangerous, demagogues as Coulter the opportunity to profit from shieking hatred, and you seem very much to see it as much as the chance to indulge in your hobby of arguing.
Your devotion to engaging such an obviously UNimportant and obviously absurd blog as StopTheACLU still puzzles me, and can have no purpose other than allowing a sort of indulgence in one’s own correctness and intelligence.
Lies must be engaged and refuted, but there is no point in wrestling with the tar baby that is the religious right.
Note that Coulter doesn’t say what is illogical about it.
Don’t be surprised if an entire chapter of her book is devoted to “In survival of the fittest, fitness is defined as those who survive; it’s a tautology!” or words to that effect.
Nice how the flap over the 9/11 widows has totally obscured the fact that the rest of her book is about how liberalism is anti-God (and, implicitly, that being anti-God is bad).
Engaging stoptheaclu? I had to dig around to remind myself of what that was. Somebody made a comment about that site, and I replied to the comment here…and that was it. Seriously? That’s all it takes for me to be accused of getting enmired in irrelevancy?
Not at all. You’re mired in irrelevancy for a host of other, completely valid reasons. StopTheACLU is just a passing fancy.
PZ, when I was writing the Hitler or Coulter quiz I faced the same dilemma.
I just went to Barnes and Noble with my laptop, read the book, and transcribed the necessary quotes. I sure as hell wasn’t going to pay for that tripe.
Keep it up.
Perhaps the advertising for this book could be along the lines of:
For all of you on an intalekchual diet – this book is content free.
You’re clearly confusing PZ with Ed Brayton.
I got 9 right on the Coulter-Hitler quiz.
I got all 14 right on the Coulter-Hitler quiz. But then I didn’t try to distinguish the ideology (a hopeless endeavour) but just went with the principle that even Hitler was more literate than Coulter. And it worked like a charm.
PZ,
I think goddogit is mistaking you for Ed Brayton: he often blogs about “Stop the ACLU.”
I only missed two on the Hitler/Coulter quiz, and I`ve never even actually read anything by Coulter (except in excerpts). Hitler and Coulter are both very similarly bugf*ck crazy, but the real difference between the who that came through in that quiz was that Hitler was in a whole different league when it came to the quality of writing and how compelling and grand it sounds. In this, as in all other things, Coulter is just a sad, second-rate hack, pathetically aping her betters… Even when her betters are some of the most certifiably lunatic humans ever to disgrace the planet.
Why is it that every time you turn a coulter a charliewagner appears in the dirt?
I wish someone could explain this thing with intellectual pygmies and microcephalic dwarfs some day.
I see I’m not the only one who aced the Hitler/Coulter quiz by using complex thought as the major criterion.
Alas, Carlin didn’t get a chance to rake her over the coals on the Tonight Show.
Complaining about Ann Coulter’s arguments from the standpoint of logic is like complaining about a circus geek who bites the heads off live chickens from the standpoint of cuisine. Coulter says whatever will sell more books to her know-nothing fan base. If they reward her for saying bizarre and insupportable things, she’ll say more of them. She’s a human feedback loop.
She’s also a skilled attorney who evaluates her arguments based on their ability to score points with the jury box, not on any intrinsic merits.
I apologize in advance for this but after reading all the comments I still can’t stop laughing about Charlie’s comment:
I’m just wondering, then, Charlie, how is attributing all of evolution to the 3-billion-year roll-out of an engineered front-loaded genetic computer program purposely embedded in DNA not unsupported speculation?
What I’d really like to see is someone (Stephen Colbert, for example) outflanking Coulter on the right:
“Yes, well your little books are very nice, dearie, but isn’t there a kitchen you should be standing barefoot and pregnant in? Find yourself a husband and leave the science and politics to the menfolk.”
Coulter’s story on the bear falling in the water leading to the evolution of whales ends with the comment “…it’s no joke”. The really bad news is the Coulter fans I know actually beieve her. Though most interviewer’s softball her windows quotes, she needs a hardball query on evolution and science. Making fun of the religious right is soon going to be absolutely necessary if we are to maintain sciences the standards the made our country great. Her book is almost 100% creationist stuff. Many people died from PCB poisoning before it was banned, and who fought for NOT banning it? – the religious right. The point being that the religious right is EVIL, very EVIL. PCB was before her time, but she does support DDT. (see EVIL)
making fun = ridicule, lots of it
This is a “science blog”? Seems to me like a collection of people – the majority of whom didn’t read the book – hatefully bashing Ann Coulter for being… hateful. Hitler this, right-wing nut that. If you want to bash someone try not immitating the punchline to her jokes. It’s like flicking snot at someone who calls you a nose-picker then calling them gross and childish.
The only person who made a decent point here was 5th guy, Charlie Wagner, by distinguishing between evolution and Darwinian mutation/selection processes. Point well made, sir.
Molly quotes the original post, saying:
Note that Coulter doesn’t say what is illogical about it.
Then babbles:
“Typical. When she complained that the losses of the 9/11 widows inhibited Coulter from criticizing them, she somehow never specified what terrible thing those women did or said to warrant her criticism in the first place.”
Uh, yeah she did. She said (paraphrasing) that these Jersey Girls were nothing but a damn circus act demanding investigations, demanding government compensation increases, and blaming the Bush adminstration in a suspiciously one-sided manner all in cooperation with the main streem media who would have crucified anyone daring to publically criticize any of them.
Morons like Grumpy aren’t helping your cause either, people.
“Nice how the flap over the 9/11 widows has totally obscured the fact that the rest of her book is about how liberalism is anti-God (and, implicitly, that being anti-God is bad).”
This is just retarded. Being anti-God IS considered bad if you’re a Christian, as Coulter claims to be and as we all likely know, but that’s not her point. Regardless of their belief in God, Christians won’t put limits on your anti-Godness nor sue your school if those anti-God don’t want to pray, say the pledge, or meet together before or after school. Liberalism does do those things and more against Christianity. Therefore, Coulter’s whole point of the entire book is that liberalism IS A RELIGION. ONE WHICH SYSTEMATICALLY ATTEMPTS TO ELIMINATE AND/OR SILENCE ALL OTHER RELIGIONS, BEGINNING WITH CHRISTIANITY. How can anyone with the IQ to type a comment not catch that point?
PZ, to your original post, please show us all the sources you can find proving the stat 99% of scientists support evolution – Darwinian mutation/selection evolution. My guess is that’s only true if you define a scientist as “a Darwin-supporting scientist”, then have some math error that reduces the figure by .01.
What real “science” guys spend their time reviewing political books and making fact-less personal attacks? I’d say the origin of life is a little too high a goal here. How about just curing a few diseases like cancer that’s baffled you for decades. Hell, start small and get us all an accurate weather forecast for tomorrow.
This post was made in mid-June. In case you haven’t noticed, it is now early August. I’ve read the book, and I’ve made a challenge: pick any scientific claim that you personally think is valid from Coulter’s book, and I’ll evaluate it. Can you do so? Or will you just join the ranks of the whiners who make non-specific defenses of her book?
Project Steve troll.
Ahh so science hasn’t accomplished anything? Unlike religion huh? well tard the computer you are typing your drivel on was created by a science, so are the vaccines you use and most of the things you take for granted.