It only took five years. Remember, my Coulter Challenge was for someone to take any of Coulter’s paragraphs about evolution from her book Godless, and cogently defend its accuracy. It’s been surprising how few takers there have been: lots of wingnuts have praised the book and said it is wonderful, but no one has been willing to get specific and actually support any of its direct claims. Until now.

It takes that special combination of arrogance and ignorance to think anything Coulter said is defensible, so I suppose it’s not a huge surprise that our brave foolhardy contestant is Michael Egnor.

After professing his deep and entirely uncritical love of Ann Coulter and everything she has ever said, Egnor chooses the very first paragraph of the first chapter on evolution. He might as well, he thinks she’s “right about everything”.

Liberals’ creation myth is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which is about one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor. It’s a make-believe story, based on a theory that is a tautology, with no proof in the scientist’s laboratory or the fossil record–and that’s after 150 years of very determined looking. We wouldn’t still be talking about it but for the fact that liberals think evolution disproves God.

One thing about my Coulter Challenge is that I specifically wanted just one paragraph, one idea, because the typical creationist tactic is to throw out a hundred cursory accusations in a confused mess, so that the poor scientist has to pick through a curdled puddle of logical vomit to find one addressable nugget…and then, of course, once that’s been shown to be fallacious, the creationist can stand over the incoherent crapola he’s spewed forth and demand that we clean everything up, or he’ll declare victory.

Egnor is no exception. He can’t possibly make a simple point lucidly, but has to throw out a lot of frenzied chum to distract and give him an escape hatch: so he babbles about evolution being a religion, atheists, obnoxious Darwinists, Scientology, falsifiability, yadda yadda yadda. It’s badly written, sloppy thinking, and I give him a D on form alone. Any other people taking the challenge, learn from this: try to write something coherent and on point. I’m asking for a scalpel, and when you yank out the kitchen silverware drawer and turn it upside down making a noisy clatter, you aren’t answering the request.

So I picked through the puke and found one chunk from Egnor that seems relevant to Coulter’s claim, so I’ll address that. I’m going to ignore the rest — it’s all a distraction, in which he wants to suck up my time writing an encyclopedia for him, which he will reject anyway.

The most difficult theoretical hurtle [sic] Darwinism has had to face is not, as some have asserted, the problem of building the New Synthesis from Mendelian genetics and Darwin’s (Lamarckian) theory. The most difficult theoretical hurtle [sic] Darwinists faced is disguising ‘stuff changes and survivors survive’ so that its utter banality isn’t obvious. Neologisms don’t just happen by themselves (unlike life). They need to be created. So Darwinists gave us natural selection, sexual selection, kin selection, group selection, reciprocal altruism, disruptive selection, diversifying selection, selective sweeps, background selection, adaptive radiation, punctuated equilibrium. All Darwinian ‘selections’ reduce to: ‘living things vary heritably and survivors survive’. Of course, ‘survivors survive’ is more precisely: ‘relatively more effective replicators relatively more effectively replicate’, but succinctness is a virtue. The great challenge for Darwinian theorists since the 1860’s has been to make Darwin’s banality/tautology (stuff changes and survivors survive) seem like a scientific theory. Slather on the lipstick. You gotta dress up the banality (and the contradictions) with science-sounding stuff.

Coulter and Egnor have dredged up a hoary old creationist argument, long disposed of, that the definition of natural selection is tautological. It’s not. I could just cite the excellent analyses from John Wilkins and Jason Rosenhouse, but I’ll give it a whirl myself — one thing I know about creationists is they don’t read citations, anyway.

First of all, it is a significant advance to recognize that species are not fixed and do change over time. There was a time when this hypothesis was flatly rejected, and it’s a sign of progress that even the creationists nowadays are forced to recognize evidence of patterns of change in species — they just usually try to impose artificial, unsupported claims of barriers that limit change. This is the fact of evolution: life has changed significantly over long ages, and we are all related to all other forms on earth.

Darwin did not come up with that, though. Darwin’s contribution was an explanation for how that change occurred through differential reproductive success of variants in populations. Egnor has distorted that principle through a fallacious reduction to “survivors survive”. That is not what scientists study. We do not go to a field area for a few years, notice that each generation of birds is the progeny of the living individuals of the previous generation, and declare victory; that would be a tautology. (The alternative, that the birds were spawned by the dead zombie corpses of the failed members of the previous generation, would be rather interesting though. Hasn’t happened yet.)

Let’s fix Egnor’s erroneous reduction. “living things vary heritably and survivors survive” doesn’t reduce to l“survivors survive”. More accurately, it should be “living things vary heritably and better adapted variants survive and increase their frequency in the next generation”. That is not a tautology. We can assess degrees of adaptation to local conditions independently of simple survival.

For example, look to the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant in the Galapagos (hey, look, we even have online exercises in which you can analyze the data!). They examined, for instance, the effects of a major drought on their study island; they did not simply say, “some birds will die, some will live, survivors will survive”, but instead made specific predictions that variants that were better able to exploit difficult or marginal resources in this time of starvation would be better able to survive. And that is what they saw: larger beaked birds that were able to crack the spiny, hard-shelled Tribulus seeds were better able to live through the drought, while the smaller beaked birds that couldn’t eat Tribulus seeds at all died off in large numbers. And in the next generation, what they saw was a genetic and morphological shift in that beaks were on average significantly larger.

“Survivors survive” may be tautological, but “large beaked birds survive” is not.

Neither Coulter nor Egnor seem to have the slightest clue about what evolutionary biologists actually do, and their proud ignorance invalidates what they claim to understand as the subject of study in evolution. Every study of evolution is built around specific hypotheses about mechanisms, not dumb blind counts of nothing but the living and the dead, but measures of differential reproductive success against some detailed parameter of their genetics. All those terms Egnor cluelessly throws around — “natural selection, sexual selection, kin selection, group selection, reciprocal altruism, disruptive selection, diversifying selection, selective sweeps, background selection, adaptive radiation, punctuated equilibrium” — have specific, different meanings, and do not reduce to merely “survival”.

As expected, the outcome of the first Coulter Challenge is that one fool, Coulter, is multiplied into two publicly exposed fools, Coulter and Egnor. I like this game, let’s play some more. Next?

(Also on FtB)

So Bryan Fischer came out swinging like a lunkhead, and now Ann Coulter scurries out to try and get in a sucker punch. Neither are very effective.

Roughly one-third of my 2006 No. 1 New York Times best-seller, “Godless: The Church of Liberalism,” is an attack on liberals’ creation myth, Darwinian evolution. I presented the arguments of all the luminaries in the field, from the retarded Richard Dawkins to the brilliant Francis Crick, and disputed them.

But apparently liberals didn’t want to argue back.

I do, I do! I read Godless — it was appallingly bad, packed full of very poor rants made in complete ignorance of the science. I even challenged Coulter fans to pick out their favorite paragraph for me to dissect…and none stepped forward. Maybe there are no Coulter fans. Or maybe they’re smarter than she is.

She’s apparently going to do a series of columns exposing the weaknesses of evolution. This week, she holds her banner high for irreducible complexity.

Most devastating for the Darwiniacs were advances in microbiology since Darwin’s time, revealing infinitely complex mechanisms requiring hundreds of parts working together at once — complex cellular structures, DNA, blood-clotting mechanisms, molecules, and the cell’s tiny flagellum and cilium.

“Microbiology”?

“Microbiology”?!?!

It wasn’t microbiologists who worked out the structure of DNA. She apparently believes microbiology is the field that studies itty-bitty little things. It’s so cute to see someone so ignorant sit there and glibly type out such revealing nonsense. I’ve had students do that — it’s a sign that they deserve to fail.

Or how about this?

Thanks to advances in microscopes, thousands of such complex mechanisms have been found since Darwin’s day. He had to explain only simple devices, such as beaks and gills. If Darwin were able to come back today and peer through a modern microscope to see the inner workings of a cell, he would instantly abandon his own theory.

Bwahahahaha! How many of you molecular biologists do all your work by peering into a microscope? Oh, look, did you see that Notch molecule bind to Delta? Hey, there goes the cytoplasmic element, activating a transduction cascade! Do you also use your microscope to read off the sequence of nucleotides in the DNA coiled in the nucleus? Such a silly naif.

Aside from the ignorant gaffes, though, here’s the rotten heart of her argument.

It is a mathematical impossibility, for example, that all 30 to 40 parts of the cell’s flagellum — forget the 200 parts of the cilium! — could all arise at once by random mutation. According to most scientists, such an occurrence is considered even less likely than John Edwards marrying Rielle Hunter, the “ground zero” of the impossible.

Nor would each of the 30 to 40 parts individually make an organism more fit to survive and reproduce, which, you will recall, is the lynchpin of the whole contraption.

No one argues that they all arose instantly in a flash in full functioning order. Oh, wait, there are some who do: the creationists. No legitimate biologist is that stupid. Her claim that the individual components can contribute no incremental benefit is nothing but an assertion from a non-biologist with no knowledge of biology; I recommend Ian Musgrave’s article on the evolution of the flagellum that describes transitional forms and the combination of components involved, as well as refuting the simplistic notions of what a flagellum does that most creationists have.

Dembski has claimed that, as the eubacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex, he can eliminate explanations based on natural law for the origin of the flagellum. This conclusion is wrong for two reasons: (1) Being IC does not eliminate indirect evolutionary explanations, and flagella can evolve from simpler systems through a series of functional intermediates. Further, (2) eubacterial flagella are not the ” outboard motors” that Dembski envisages, but rather organelles that are involved in swimming, gliding motility, attachment, and secretion. They occupy one end of a range of secretion-based motility systems in bacteria of varying complexity, and several existing intermediate stages show how the flagellum could well have arisen by evolution and natural selection.

Coulter has a BA in history and a law degree. She hasn’t even done any research on the biology she’s critiquing; she only parrots creationist sources. Liberals aren’t afraid to argue evolution with her, but instead see her as an unqualified, clueless twit who isn’t even capable of addressing the actual substance of an argument.

(Also on FtB)

I’m getting too old for this. The idiots keep making the same arguments, over and over again, and they just get dumber with every iteration. Bryan Fischer makes me want to stick an icepick in my brain just to stop the stupidity coming out of his mouth.

His latest article is Defeating Darwin in four steps…and I read the title and instantly predicted what his four objections would be before I even looked at the first sentence — I’d apply for Randi’s million dollar challenge, except reading the mind of a droning cretin isn’t much of a challenge.

You really need to listen to Fischer’s awful radio show, just for the schlocky thrill of his sing-songy chant of “First Law, Second Law, Fossils, Genes”. It’s a high quality, potent emetic.

Here are his four magic arguments:

1. First Law of Thermodynamics. This law (note: not a theory but a scientific law) teaches us that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. In other words, an honest scientist will tell you that there is nothing in the observable universe that can explain either the origin of energy or matter. By logical extension, then, matter and energy had to come into being by some force outside the universe.

   What this means, then, is that science simply has no explanation for the most basic question that could possibly be asked: why is there something rather than nothing?

   Actually, I didn’t guess this one exactly right — I thought he’d say something about abiogenesis, that we don’t know how life started. Unfortunately, Fischer was even more idiotic than I thought he’d be: the origin of the universe is a physics problem, and is not a matter explained at all by biological evolution, so this is completely irrelevant.

   This is a common creationist claim, though, that the Big Bang violates the first law of thermodynamics. These gomers don’t understand thermodynamics so it’s silly for them to rely on it. Ask a physicist; the Big Bang doesn’t violate thermodynamics.

   This negative gravitational potential energy exactly cancels out the positive energy of the universe. As Stephen Hawking says in his book A Brief History of Time (quoted by Victor Stenger, Has Science Found God?, p. 148): “In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero.” In other words, it is not the case that something came out of nothing. It is that we have always had zero energy.

2. Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law (note: not a theory but a law) teaches us that in every chemical or heat reaction, there is a loss of energy that never again is available for another heat reaction. This is why things break down if left to themselves, and why scientists tell us that the universe is headed toward a heat death.

   This law teaches us, then, that the universe is headed toward increasing randomness and decay.

   But what does the theory of evolution teach us? The exact opposite, that the universe is headed toward increasing complexity and order. You put up a scientific theory against my scientific law, I’m going to settle for the law every time, thank you very much.

   I knew this one was coming. Again, creationists don’t understand thermodynamics at all, and this is a beautiful example. Nothing violates the second law. Every gain in complexity in biology is matched by an even greater increase in entropy. I was once a tiny single cell, and I have increased in complexity and bulk over the years by chowing down on a mountain of high-energy food and turning it into a mountain of low-energy poop. It’s the same story with the bigger scale of evolution: it’s ultimately been driven by immense masses of hydrogen fusing in the heart of our star. Far more energy was burned by the sun than was harvested and used in all the history of life, so there is no net gain in the energy of the whole system.

3. Fossils. Realize that the fossil record is the only tangible, physical evidence for the theory of evolution that exists. The fossil record is it. There is absolutely nothing else Darwinians have they can show you.

   As Yale University’s Carl Dunbar says, “Fossils provide the only historical, documentary evidence that life has evolved from simpler to more and more complex forms.”

   But if Darwin’s theory is correct, that increasingly complex life forms developed in tiny little incremental and transitional steps, then the fossil record should by littered with an enormous number of transitional fossils.

   Another predictable and stupid claim. We’ve got lots of transitional fossils. We look in the fossil record, and find entire ecosystems that no longer exist and have changed in radical ways. This is Fischer just sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting “la la la la”.

   The quote from Carl Dunbar is revealing. If you’re like me, you’re asking “who the heck is Carl Dunbar, and why should I care?” This one is a double-whammy against the creationists, though: Carl Dunbar was born in 1891, so once again they’re desperately scrambling to find some authority, any authority, to back up their claims. The other problem for the creationists, though, is the quote itself. Read it. Does this actually say there’s a problem with the fossil record? No, it does not. Dunbar was a well-known invertebrate paleontologist 50 years ago, who published many papers illustrating the pattern of transitions in the stratigraphic record.

   He’s probably be very surprised to hear that creationists now cite his work vaguely and with no comprehension as evidence against evolution. I guarantee you, too, that Fischer knows nothing about Dunbar’s work, and only cites him because he found other creationist sites that quote-mined him.

4. Genes. The only mechanism — don’t miss this — the only mechanism evolutionists have to explain the development of increasingly complex life forms is genetic mutation. Mutations alter DNA, and these alterations can be passed on to descendants.

   The problem: naturally occurring genetic mutations are invariably harmful if not fatal to the organism. Rather than improve an organism’s capacity to survive, they invariably weaken it. That’s why the phrase we most often use to refer to genetic mutations is “birth defects.”

   Bryan Fischer is completely wrong here: he’s stating as a fact that mutations are invariably deleterious, and this is simply not true. Most are neutral. Some are advantageous, and all it takes is one counterexample to show that his absolutist statements are wrong. I’d say he’s lying, but I know what a lot of people would say: “he’s not literally lying, he’s just ignorant”. But this is something we need a better word for: he’s stating as a certainty a false ‘fact’, acting as an authority in a field he actually knows nothing about, and is intentionally promoting a counterfactual to advance an ideology. He’s a disinformation agent, sowing propaganda: it’s worse than lying.

That’s enough inanity. I’m done. I really hope, though, that someday someone comes up to me chanting “First Law, Second Law, Fossils, Genes” just like Bryan Fischer so I can kick their dumb ass.

(Also on FtB)

I told you all the batty creationists were crawling out of the woodwork to crow over Xiaotingia‘s redefinition of Archaeopteryx‘s status as a victory for their ideology, when it really isn’t. Now another has joined the fray: Vox Day, creationist and right-wing lunatic. He makes a lot of crazy, ignorant claims in this short passage that I’ll answer one by one.

Precisely when has any evolutionist reconsidered either a) the basic hypothesis that species evolve into different species through natural selection¹ or b) the corollary and requisite hypothesis that life evolved from non-life², as a result of the falsity of one, ten, or even a hundred predictions that relied upon one or both of them? If it weren’t for DNA, which was not discovered or developed with any assistance from evolutionary theory³, evolutionary biology would already be openly recognized by every intelligent, rational, science-literate individual as being about as useful as phrenology and astrology.⁴

Darwinian biologists are very much like Keynesian economists. It doesn’t matter how many times their predictions fail⁵. It doesn’t matter how often their models are proven to be wildly wrong⁶. It doesn’t matter how many times they have been wrong in the past even with the benefit of margins of error consisting of millions of years⁷. They continue to insist that their position is based on evidence even when the evidence demonstrates precisely the opposite of what they have been claiming⁸.

First, the details:

¹Of course biologists have considered alternate mechanisms! Coyne argues for selection as a mechanism of speciation (by pleiotropic side effects of genes that are selected for other functions), and Futuyma argues for speciation by drift.

²Similarly, mechanisms of abiogenesis have been proposed that suggest selection, but also chance or as a necessary outcome of the physico-chemical properties.

³The structure of DNA was analyzed by its chemistry, not it’s evolutionary history, obviously, but as this paragraph even concedes, the consequences of DNA biochemistry were profoundly important in their effects on evolution.

⁴Nope. Structure of DNA was determined in 1953; the neo-Darwinian synthesis occurred in the 1930s-1940s with the integration of genetics into evolutionary biology. It was genetics (especially population genetics) that established evolution as the only reasonable explanation for the history of life on earth.

⁵The precise taxonomic status of Archaeopteryx was not a specific prediction of evolutionary theory. Finding more data in the form of more fossils of feathered dinosaurs strengthens the idea of avian descent from dinosaurs.

⁶If you examine the family tree of Archaeopteryx and Xiaotingia, what you should see is that the taxonomic re-evaluation of Archeopteryx merely moves it from the Paraves branch to the nearby Deinonychosaurian branch…hardly a “wildly wrong” model.

⁷Vox Day has not described anything yet which shows evolution being wrong. Adjusting the precise timing of evolutionary events by millions of years is a reasonable response to new data which does not falsify the underlying hypotheses of relatedness.

⁸Again, this discovery does not demonstrate the opposite of what evolutionary biologists have been claiming, and actually makes for a better fit with other data about ancient bird ancestors; moving Archaeopteryx from a first cousin to a second cousin of the ancestor of modern birds isn’t a radical idea that invalidates evolutionary biology.

The big picture is even more damning for Vox Day. Of course we have huge volumes of information supporting the theory of evolution, that suite of mechanisms and principles that describe the broad course of evolutionary history, including common descent and descent with modification. And also there are a multitude of details that aren’t completely known — we have millions of species on this planet, and only a fraction have been studied in depth. The theory of evolution does not hang on the exact lineage of any two species out of those millions…it hangs on the fact that there is a lineage.

Vox Day is quite the poseur — he pretends to know better than real scientists, when he can’t even tell the difference between hypothesis and data.