No quarter. Don’t ask.

Lots of people have been telling me to ignore Ann Coulter: that she says outrageous things to get attention, that addressing her antics is exactly what she wants, that the best thing to do is to starve her of the publicity. I sympathize, I really do. It’s giving her and her kind far too much credit.

However, I’ve been hearing the same argument applied to creationists for about 25 years. “Ignore them and they’ll go away,” or “Serious scientists don’t pay attention to the lunatic fringe,” they say. We tend our little gardens, and we don’t worry about what the crackpot next door is growing in his. But hey, have you noticed something?

Neglect doesn’t work.

Here’s a counterargument: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil
is for good men to do nothing.” I’ve watched good people do nothing about creeping lunacy and anti-intellectualism for decades. I watched appalled when that senile fool Reagan was elected. I was even more appalled when George W. Bush, airhead extraordinaire and utterly unqualified ignoramus, became president. The citizenry howls to destroy the science standards in our public schools, or complacently votes to lower property taxes at the expense of our children’s minds. While we’ve quietly raised a rich crop in scattered little plots, we are about to be overwhelmed by the nightmarish weeds that overrun our neighbors’. We must stand up and shout, finally…and hope it’s not too late.

Now that doesn’t mean I’d give even a penny to Coulter for her hackwork. It doesn’t mean I would dignify her position by standing together in public with her. What it does mean is that at least some of us are obligated to stand against the tide of garbage and fight it. We have to be loud and we have to be vocal and we can’t afford to just shrug our shoulders and let it all pass. If we accept the idea that we’re wasting our time criticizing patent idiots, then we might as well retire silently with folded hands and let the liars and scoundrels and frauds and kooks continue their campaigns unhindered. It’s really worked well for us so far, hasn’t it?

And for those who think Coulter is a buffoon and clown and opportunist, it doesn’t matter how cynical she is, or whether she believes her own lies. Other people do. You don’t want to take her seriously? Too bad. They do.

The Compleat Coulter: the sum total of her argument against evolution

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.

I thank the Great Old Ones that I am not a lawyer

Because this letter from a lawyer complaining about the decision to have the anti-evolution sticker removed from textbooks makes my brain bleed. This was the sticker that said,

This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

That sticker was nothing but sneaky creationist propaganda—it strangely singles out evolution for critical thought, it implies an inappropriate meaning to the word “theory” (that it is the opposite of a fact), and it’s clearly an attempt to sow uncertainty and doubt in the minds of schoolchildren in an area where there shouldn’t be any. It was thrown out by a judge, but this creationist lawyer is now trying to say that decision was wrong.

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News from Dinosaur Adventure Land!

The mighty Kent Hovind has struck out.

On June 5th 2006, Hovind pled nolo contendere as
charged to three counts: constructing a building
without a permit, refusing to sign a citation and
violating the county building code. Hovind was ordered
to pay $225.00 per count. The plea brings to an end a
5-year battle over a $50.00 building permit. Hovind
estimates he spent $40,000 in legal expenses on this
case. Meanwhile, the property taxes for Dinosaur
Adventure Land are in arrears in an amount of
$10,338.36 ($4,955.23 for 2005 and 5,383.13 for 2003
and 2004).

In both criminal and civil trials in the United
States, a plea of “nolo contendere” means that the
defendant neither admits nor disputes the charge or no
contest. It literally means “I do not wish to
contend.” Spiro Agnew famously approximated it as “I
didn’t do it, but I’ll never do it again.” This plea
is only recognised in the U.S. No formal plea is
required in civil matters where paper pleadings are
used.

Ann Coulter fills me with anticipation

This new book by Ann Coulter is going to be full of delectable idiocy, isn’t it?

Coulter devotes the last 80 pages to her full-scale attack on the theory of evolution and the utter dishonesty of what she calls the “Darwiniacs” and their refusal to face the fact that evolution is a patent absurdity, according to Coulter, credible only to those who will find any reason to deny the existence of God.

Great. Virtually every biologist in the world must be an atheist, then. Good for us! I’m sure this is going to be a bit of a shock to the readers of this weblog who understand and accept the evidence for evolution, but think they’re also Christians. You can all stop going to church now!

“The fundamental difference between our religion and theirs is that theirs always tells them what they want to hear,” Coulter declares.

“Darwinism never disappoints the liberals. They never say ‘Well, I’d like to have cheap meaningless sex tonight, but that would violate Darwinism.’ They can’t even say ‘I’d like to have cheap meaningless sex tonight with a goat, but that would violate Darwinism.’

This is true. Neither does Coulter, though. She also doesn’t get to refuse to screw goats because it would violate Boyle’s gas law. Is this a surprise? Evolution doesn’t pretend to be a set of moral rules. It’s a description of how populations of organisms behave over time, not how individuals should behave.

Why, without Ohm’s Law to restrain her, what’s to prevent Ann Coulter from indulging her wanton, bestial lusts?

If you have an instinct to do it, it must be evolved adaptation.

What if we don’t have an instinct to do it? I note that I seem to be lacking the instinct to have sex with goats. Unlike Ann.

Liberals subscribe to Darwinism not because it’s science, which they hate…

<spit take>

What?

…but out of some wishful thinking. Darwinism lets them off the hook morally.”

Actually, I use the Nernst equation to justify my immoral behavior. I reserve Darwinism for those nights I need an excuse to go dancing.

As fun as this book looks, though, I’m not going to buy it unless I can find it used. I hope the pages aren’t going to be stuck together.

Creationist email: it’s all about OPINIONS

How about another sample of creationist nonsense from my mailbag? I wrote about Caroline Crocker back in February—she’s the Intelligent Design creationist who was released from her job teaching biology at George Mason University, and I said she had demonstrated incompetence in the discipline, and deserved to be let go. That article seems to elicit regular bursts of outrage from the creationists, who don’t seem to have been able to comprehend it.

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One Hundred and Fifty Years without Darwin are Enough

This story, if true, is rather sad. 2009 will be a major date for evolutionary biology, both the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, and the 150th of the publication of the Origin (note to self: must publish earth-shaking treatise on 50th birthday to make future commemorations simpler*.) Apparently, the political issues may mean that American scientific institutions will not mount any major celebrations. And of course, we have to get this news from a British publication.

Even more depressing, G.G. Simpson made this same complaint about the deficiencies of the American public’s education in basic biology 50 years ago, in his essay One Hundred Years without Darwin are Enough. Nothing has changed. The situation may be even worse than in Simpson’s time.

The editorial from The Independent is below the fold.

*100th birthday might work better…that’ll give me time to come up with something.

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Birdnow is back

I’d almost forgotten Timothy Birdnow. He’s the embarrassingly ignorant property manager who claimed to have refuted Darwin, but instead made a whole series of foolish blunders; I pinned him down on one point he’d made, and asked him to address it…which he answered even more foolishly. It was actually gut-bustingly funny: he got rather upset and accused me of “destabizing [his] blog’s formatting.” That’ll teach the creationists. Cross me, and I’ll give your blog the evil eye.

Anyway, Birdnow is babbling about Darwin again, as ignorantly as ever. I guess he likes to make up stories about history as well as science.

For those of you who are unaware, Darwin turned against Christianity after the death of his non-believing father and brother, calling it “a damnable doctrine“ because Christian dogma consigned them to hell. He then went on to create a purely mechanistic theory of evolution which could be used as a weapon against the Church.

I wouldn’t want to destablize his blog again, so this time I’ll let John Pieret do the honors. Every word of Birdnow’s claim is factually incorrect—he doesn’t even have the chronology of events right, an error which makes his argument temporally impossible.

Even funnier, Birdnow says he was thinking of writing up his dubious ideas for publication. It’s almost too bad Pieret has shredded them so thoroughly and so prematurely.