Official number of attempts to address my challenge of the science in Coulter’s book:
I seem to have drawn in one Coulter fan in the comments who can’t shut up, but he hasn’t got the guts to stand up for anything specific that she has said.
The National Academies or Royal Society web pages make a peep about it. It’s good news if it is confirmed, though!
This is why I should read the other science blogs before posting: Afarensis has the official statement.
Hank Fox reports that a pair of administrators who wasted the school’s time and money on Intelligent Design creationism are losing their jobs:
The Wilkes-Barre, Penn., Times-Leader reports that the Dover school board has “decided not to guarantee contract renewals for two top administrators who helped implement an intelligent-design policy that a federal judge overturned last year.”
“The Dover Area School Board voted Monday to open the jobs of Superintendent Richard Nilsen and Assistant Superintendent Michael Baksa to other applicants. Nilsen’s contract expires June 30, 2007, and Baksa’s contract expires July 1, 2007.”
Awww. Here’s the funny part, though.
Both men are allowed to reapply for their jobs, but Nilsen said after the board meeting that he is looking for another job and could leave before his contract expires. He said he had “no idea” why his contract was not being renewed.
The incompetent are often blissfully unaware of the reasons for their failure, that is true.
DaveScot is one of those genuinely deranged ID supporters, and I don’t like giving him any attention…but Richard Hughes just sent me a note mentioning this long defensive thread he has started at UncommonDescent, and he’s just done something so darned funny and stupid I can’t resist.
He’s arguing about gravity. At one point, he claims that “By the way, gravity is the strongest force in nature.” As you might guess, he’s jumped on for that, and so he rushes off to find some supporting evidence…and gets it, he says, from John G. Cramer, professor of physics. Here’s the part he quotes:
Curiously, in some ways gravity is also the strongest force in the universe. It always adds, never subtracts, and can build up until it overwhelms all other forces.
The hilarious bit here that is so characteristic of creationists is that this is a highly selective quote. He left out the first sentence of the article.
Gravity is the weakest force in the universe.
Doesn’t that just say everything about IDists approach to science?
A strange thing, after I clarified my Coulter challenge and requested that her fans get specific and tell me what they supported and why in her book…the e-mail from them all dried up. Pffft. Gone.
Maybe they just got bored with me, but it’s sad that no one has even tried to suggest a single good paragraph in all of Godlessssss. It’s as if they’re willing to play mindless cheerleader, but actually committing to thinking and supporting specifically a single thing she says…well, that’s just not going to happen.
I need some suggestions, so I’m asking for a little tactical brainstorming in the comments. This afternoon, August Berkshire mentioned that there would be an Intelligent Design advocate on KKMS Christian talk radio in the Twin Cities, and that they’d be interviewing a Dr. Don Bierle. I’d never heard of the guy, so I did a little digging; you can hear him at a talk at the MacLaurin Institute, for instance. His schtick is that he actually has a Ph.D. in biology from a credible school, although he doesn’t seem to have ever actually done any biology, and is just another minister as near as I can tell. He claims to be arguing from an evidence-based perspective for ID.
Here’s the problem. He’s as dopey and ignorant as your standard televangelist, and his arguments are pathetic. In that recorded talk, he actually goes on at length about the bombardier beetle. On the radio, he gives the usual uncritical acceptance of Behe’s and Dembski’s discredited claims. He argues that ID is sweeping through biology, and that more and more scientists are accepting it.
Basically, he’s lying up a storm, even though I’m sure he’s perfectly sincere and believes every dishonest claim he makes.
Now just how should we respond to such blatant BS? I thought about calling in, but since I really didn’t have a question for him and would only make a comment that he’s wrong, I didn’t bother. Here’s roughly what I was thinking of saying:
Dr Bierle, you said you were going to present the evidence for intelligent design. However, all you’ve given us is logical fallacies. You’ve continually presented this debate as a false dichotomy between design (your belief) and chance (your misrepresentation of evolution.) Evolution is not a theory that everything arose by chance.
Secondly, you’ve made the argument from personal incredulity. Specificity and complexity, no matter how wonderful and amazing and difficult for you to grasp, are not evidence of design. Evolutionary theory provides a mechanism for generating complexity and specificity that does not require the intervention of an intelligent agent.
Given that you haven’t given one reasonable argument for ID and that all your arguments against evolution depend on grossly mischaracterizing the theory, do you understand why the scientific community has not rushed to accept the idea? Despite claiming to base your argument on science, it is unpersuasive to scientists precisely because you have failed to address any scientific issues.
It’s a dismissal, not a real question, not a statement that would affect the god-bots of KKMS. In general, though, it does reflect my opinion of these frauds and fakes who misrepresent science to advance their theological dogma. Does anybody have a better strategy they can recommend for dealing with talk radio?
They’ve elected a new presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori. You have to look at her biography to see why I’m even mentioning a new religious leader:
As a scientist and an Episcopalian, I cherish the prayer that follows a baptism, that the newly baptized may receive “the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works.” I spent the early years of my adulthood as an oceanographer, studying squid and octopuses, including their evolutionary relationships. I have always found that God’s creation is “strange and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139). …
The vast preponderance of scientific evidence, including geology, paleontology, archaeology, genetics and natural history, indicates that Darwin was in large part correct in his original hypothesis.
I simply find it a rejection of the goodness of God’s gifts to say that all of this evidence is to be refused because it does not seem to accord with a literal reading of one of the stories in Genesis. Making any kind of faith decision is based on accumulating the best evidence one can find what one’s senses and reason indicate, what the rest of the community has believed over time, and what the community judges most accurate today.
It’s a good thing that article is loaded with Bible quotes and other religious nonsense, or I’d be tempted to become an Episcopalian. Oh, well, even with all the wacky mythological stuff, she still looks like one of the good ones. Congratulations, Dr Jefferts Schori! While I’m not about to join a church, you do exhibit the kind of sensible perspective on the real world I’d like to see much, much more of in religious leaders…although, looking at the comments here, some Christianists are less than thrilled with the election of a rationalist to head a church, while others seem to be enthusiastic.
(via Kynos)
Responses to my challenge at the end of this article are trickling in, but so far, none of them are filling the bill. Let me explain what is not an appropriate reply:
Here’s the simple summary. Ann Coulter has written this long book full of creationist gobbledygook. I can’t possibly take the whole thing apart, so I’m asking the Coulter fans to get specific in their support. Pick a paragraph that you agree with and that you believe makes a strong, supportable point about science—anything from chapters 8-11 will do. Don’t be vague, be specific. I’ll reply with details of my disagreement (or heck, maybe you’ll find some innocuous paragraph that I agree with—I’ll mention that here, too.)
Because the letters I am getting suggest that those fans have some comprehension problems, I’ll spell it out.
That’s not so hard now, is it? I’m finding that Coulter fans are fervent and enthusiastic and insistent, so asking them to take baby steps with me and show me the simplest first fragments that will lead to my comprehension of the wit and insight of the faboo Ms Coulter shouldn’t be too much to ask.
I promise to post any submissions that meet those criteria, with my reply, as long as I don’t get too many cut&paste jobs at once.
By the way, would Coulter critics please stop focusing on her appearance and dress, or speculating about her sexuality? I don’t find that any more appropriate than the guy who wrote to me about all those liberal women with armpit hair.
There are some great lines in Coulter’s Godless—great lines in the sense that you can scarcely believe someone was so stupid that they’d say them. Here’s one for the ladies and the life scientists here at scienceblogs.
I’ve now read all of the science-related (that’s applying the term “related” very generously) stuff in Ann Coulter’s awful, ghastly, ignorant book, Godless, and it’s a bit overwhelming. This far right-wing political pundit with no knowledge of science at all has written a lengthy tract that is wall-to-wall error: To cover it all would require a sentence-by-sentence dissection that would generate another book, ten times longer than Coulter’s, all merely to point out that her book is pure garbage. So I’m stumped. I’m not interested in writing such a lengthy rebuttal, and I’m sure this is exactly what Coulter is counting on—tell enough lazy lies, and no one in the world will have time enough to correct them conscientiously. She’s a shameless fraud.
What to do? Well, we can’t take apart the whole thing, but what we can do is focus on individual claims and show that Coulter is outrageously wrong—that she has written things that indicate an utter lack of knowledge of the subject. Some of us at the Panda’s Thumb are going to be doing just that—look there later for more—and what I’m going to do here is address one very broad claim that Coulter has made repeatedly, and that is also common to many creationists.
That claim is that there is no evidence for evolution. I know, to anybody who has even a passing acquaintance with biology, that sounds like a ridiculous statement, like declaring that people can live on nothing but air and sunlight, or that yeti are transdimensional UFO pilots. Yet Coulter baldly makes the absurd claim that “There’s no physical evidence for [evolution]”, and insists in chapter 8 of her new book that there is “no proof in the scientist’s laboratory or the fossil record.” This is like standing outside in a drenching rainstorm and declaring that there is no evidence that you are getting wet.
