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.

One more thing!

I almost forgot: there was another comment in the Karen Armstrong interview that I found irksome…but my complaint is mainly with the interviewer. Here’s one question he asked her, and her answer.

But certainly there are a lot of people — both scientists and religious people — who speculate about whether there’s some cosmic order. For the evolutionary biologists, the question is whether there’s some natural progression to evolution.

Who knows?

Her answer is a kind of weak cop-out, but it’s acceptable…avoiding a question on which you are ignorant is not a problem. The question, though…jebus.

For evolutionary biologists, that isn’t the question at all. We have a darned good mechanism that doesn’t involve teleology, and while some may speculate, there’s no supporting evidence for any kind of purpose or progress (in the sense of change towards a goal) in evolution. Biologists don’t even ask that kind of question.

Note that this is not the same as saying we avoid the issue: it’s that there hasn’t been any reason to invoke teleology in evolution. Explanations are thought up to explain observations, not the other way around, and there aren’t any observations yet that require purpose in an explanation. All I can imagine here is that the interviewer has some weak and muddled view of the Intelligent Design creationists having some legitimacy, and that kind of dribbled out into his question.

“Here in the North there is no such thing as monkeys.”

OK, Canadians, ‘fess up. I know you guys are so danged nice and polite…this is just an attempt to make your Southern neighbor feel less uniquely stupid, isn’t it? You put up some obliging Québécois Inuit Pentecostals to pretend to be as dumb as a Kansas preacher, didn’t you?

“If the town complains and says no, the committee can ask the principal or the director of teachers to approach the teacher and say, ‘Look, this is not the subject to be taught here in this town, or in this place, because we know we have been humans from the beginning, ‘” said Molly Tayara.

“I don’t personally accept my children being taught that they came from some species from Africa somewhere.

“Here in the North there is no such thing as monkeys.”

(via Josh)