Review of Godless -- (Centers on Evolution)

Godless: The Church of Liberalism by Ann Coulter Coultergeist A Review by Jerry Coyne

H. L. Mencken once responded to a question asked by many of his readers: "If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?" His answer was, "Why do men go to zoos?" Sadly, Mencken is not here to ogle the newest creature in the American Zoo: the Bleached Flamingo, otherwise known as Ann Coulter. This beast draws crowds by its frequent, raucous calls, eerily resembling a human voice, and its unearthly appearance, scrawny and pallid. (Wikipedia notes that "a white or pale flamingo ... is usually unhealthy or suffering from a lack of food.") The etiolated Coulter issued a piercing squawk this spring with her now-notorious book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism. Its thesis, harebrained even by her standards, is that liberals are an atheistic lot who have devised a substitute religion, replete with the sacraments of abortion, feminism, coddling of criminals, and -- you guessed it -- bestiality. Liberals also have their god, who, like Coulter's, is bearded and imposing. He is none other than Charles Darwin. But the left-wing god is malevolent, for Coulter sees Darwin as the root cause of every ill afflicting our society, not to mention being responsible for the historical atrocities of Hitler and Stalin.

The furor caused by her vicious remarks about the 9/11 widows ("I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much.") has distracted people from the main topic of her book: evolutionary biology, or rather the pathetic pseudoscientific arguments of its modern fundamentalist challenger, Intelligent Design (ID). This occupies four of Coulter's eleven chapters. Enamored of ID, and unable to fathom a scientific reason why biologists don't buy it, Coulter suggests that scientists are an evil sub-cabal of atheist liberals, a group so addicted to godlessness that they must hide at all costs the awful "truth" that evolution didn't happen. She accuses evolutionists of brainwashing children with phony fossils and made-up "evidence," turning the kids into "Darwiniacs" stripped of all moral (i.e., biblical) grounding and prone to become beasts and genocidal lunatics. To Coulter, biologists are folks who, when not playing with test tubes or warping children's minds, encourage people to have sex with dogs. (I am not making this up.)

Any sane person who starts reading Godless will soon ask, Does Coulter really believe this stuff? The answer is that it doesn't much matter. What's far more disturbing than Coulter herself (and she's plenty disturbing: On the cover photo she has the scariest eyes since Rasputin) is the fact that Americans are lapping up her latest prose like a pack of starved cats. The buyers cannot be political opponents who just want to enjoy her "humor"; like me, those people wouldn't enrich her by a dime. (I didn't pay for my copy.) Rather, a lot of folks apparently like her ravings -- suggesting that, on some level at least, they must agree with her. And this means that the hundreds of thousands of Americans who put Coulter at the top of the best-seller lists see evolution as a national menace.

Well, that's hardly news. We've known for years that nearly half of all Americans believe in the Genesis account of creation, and only about 10 percent want evolution taught in public schools without mentioning ID or other forms of creationism. But it's worth taking up the cudgels once again, if only to show that, contrary to Coulter's claim, accepting Darwinism is not tantamount to endorsing immorality and genocide.

First, one has to ask whether Coulter (who, by the way, attacks me in her book) really understands the Darwinism she rejects. The answer is a resounding No. According to the book's acknowledgments, Coulter was tutored in the "complex ideas" of evolution by David Berlinski, a science writer; Michael Behe, a third-rate biologist at Lehigh University (whose own department's website disowns his bizarre ideas); and William Dembski, a fairly bright theologian who went off the intellectual rails and now peddles creationism at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. These are the "giants" of the ID movement, which shows how retarded it really is. Learning biology from this lot is like learning elocution from George W. Bush.

As expected with such tutors, the Darwinism decried by Coulter is the usual distorted cardboard cut-out. All she does is parrot the ID line: There are no transitional fossils; natural selection can't create true novelty; some features of organisms could not have evolved and therefore must have been designed by an unspecified supernatural agent. And her "research" method consists of using quotes taken out of context, scouring biased secondary sources, and distorting what appears in the scientific literature. Judging by the shoddy documentation of the evolution section, I'm not convinced that the rest of the book isn't based on equally shoddy research. At any rate, I won't belabor the case that Coulter makes for ID, as I've already shown in TNR that her arguments are completely bogus.

What is especially striking is Coulter's failure to tell us what she really believes about how the earth's species got here. It's clear that she thinks God had a direct hand in it, but beyond that we remain unenlightened. IDers believe in limited amounts of evolution. Does Coulter think that mammals evolved from reptiles? If not, what are those curious mammal-like reptiles that appear exactly at the right time in the fossil record? Did humans evolve from ape-like primates, or did the Designer conjure us into existence all at once? How did all those annoying fossils get there, in remarkable evolutionary order?

And, when faced with the real evidence that shows how strongly evolution trumps ID, she clams up completely. What about the massive fossil evidence for human evolution -- what exactly were those creatures 2 million years ago that had human-like skeletons but ape-like brains? Did a race of Limbaughs walk the earth? And why did God -- sorry, the Intelligent Designer -- give whales a vestigial pelvis, and the flightless kiwi bird tiny, nonfunctional wings? Why do we carry around in our DNA useless genes that are functional in similar species? Did the Designer decide to make the world look as though life had evolved? What a joker! And the Designer doesn't seem all that intelligent, either. He must have been asleep at the wheel when he designed our appendix, back, and prostate gland.

There are none so blind as those who will not see, and Coulter knows that myopia about evolution is a lucrative game. After all, she is a millionaire, reveling in her status as a celebrity and stalked by ignorazzis. I have never seen anyone enjoy her own inanity so much.

But after ranting for nearly a hundred pages about evolution, Coulter finally gives away the game on page 277: "God exists whether or not archaeopteryx ever evolved into something better. If evolution is true, then God created evolution." Gee. Evolution might be true after all! But she's just spent a hundred pages telling us it isn't! What gives? As Tennessee Williams's Big Daddy said, there's a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room.

What's annoying about Coulter (note: there's more than one thing!) is that she insistently demands evidence for evolution (none of which she'll ever accept), but requires not a shred of evidence for her "alternative hypothesis." She repeatedly assures us that God exists (not just any God -- the Christian God), that there is only one God (she's no Hindu, folks), that we are made in the image of said God, that the Christian Bible, like Antonin Scalia's Constitution, "is not a 'living' document" (that is, not susceptible to changing interpretation; so does she think that Genesis is literally true?), and that God just might have used evolution as part of His plan. What makes her so sure about all this? And how does she know that the Supreme Being, even if It exists, goes by the name of Yahweh, rather than Allah, Wotan, Zeus, or Mabel? If Coulter just knows these things by faith alone, she should say so, and then tell us why she's so sure that what Parsees or Zunis just know is wrong. I, for one, am not prepared to believe that Ann Coulter is made in God's image without seeing some proof.

Moreover, if evolution is wrong, why is it the central paradigm of biology? According to Coulter, it's all a big con game. In smoky back rooms at annual meetings, evolutionists plot ways to jam Darwin down America's throat, knowing that even though it is scientifically incorrect, Darwinism (Coulter says) "lets them off the hook morally. Do whatever you feel like doing -- screw your secretary, kill Grandma, abort your defective child -- Darwin says it will benefit humanity!"

Unfortunately for Coulter (but fortunately for humanity), science doesn't work this way. Scientists gain fame and high reputation not for propping up their personal prejudices, but for finding out facts about nature. And if evolution really were wrong, the renegade scientist who disproved it -- and showed that generations of his predecessors were misled -- would reach the top of the scientific ladder in one leap, gaining fame and riches. All it would take to trash Darwinism is a simple demonstration that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, or that our closest genetic relative is the rabbit. There is no cabal, no back-room conspiracy. Instead, the empirical evidence for evolution just keeps piling up, year after year.

As for biologists' supposed agenda of godlessness -- how ridiculous! Yes, a lot of scientists are atheists, but most have better things to do than deliberately destroy people's faith. This goes doubly for the many scientists -- roughly a third of them -- who are religious. After all, one of the most vocal (and effective) opponents of ID is Ken Miller of Brown University, a devout Catholic.

The real reason Coulter goes after evolution is not because it's wrong, but because she doesn't like it -- it doesn't accord with how she thinks the world should be. That's because she feels, along with many Americans, that "Darwin's theory overturned every aspect of Biblical morality." What's so sad -- not so much for Coulter as for Americans as a whole -- is that this idea is simply wrong. Darwinism, after all, is just a body of thought about the origin and change of biological diversity, not a handbook of ethics. (I just consulted my copy of The Origin of Species, and I swear that there's nothing in there about abortion or eugenics, much less about shtupping one's secretary.)

If Coulter were right, evolutionists would be the most beastly people on earth, not to be trusted in the vicinity of a goat. But I've been around biologists all of my adult life, and I can tell you that they're a lot more civil than, say, Coulter. It's a simple fact that you don't need the Bible -- or even religion -- to be moral. Buddhists, Hindus, and Jews, who don't follow the New Testament, usually behave responsibly despite this problem; and atheists and agnostics derive morality from non-biblical philosophy. In fact, one of the most ethical people I know is Coulter's version of the Antichrist: the atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins (more about that below). Dawkins would never say -- as Coulter does -- that Cindy Sheehan doesn't look good in shorts, that Al Franken resembles a monkey, or that 9/11 widows enjoyed the deaths of their husbands. Isn't there something in the Bible about doing unto others?

The mistake of equating Darwinism with a code of behavior leads Coulter into her most idiotic accusation: that the Holocaust and numberless murders of Stalin can be laid at Darwin's door. "From Marx to Hitler, the men responsible for the greatest mass murders of the twentieth century were avid Darwinists." Anyone who is religious should be very careful about saying something like this, because, throughout history, more killings have been done in the name of religion than of anything else. What's going on in the Middle East, and what happened in Serbia and Northern Ireland? What was the Inquisition about, and the Crusades, and the slaughter following the partition of India? Religion, of course -- or rather, religiously inspired killing. (Come to think of it, the reason Hitler singled out the Jews is that Christians regarded them for centuries as the killers of Christ. And I don't remember any mention of Darwinism in the Moscow Doctors' Trial.) If Darwin is guilty of genocide, then so are God, Jesus, Brahma, Martin Luther, and countless popes.

As Coulter well knows, the misuse of an idea for evil purposes does not mean that idea is wrong. In fact, she accuses liberals of making this very error: She attacks them for worrying that the message of racial inequality conveyed by the book The Bell Curve could promote genocide: "Only liberals could interpret a statement that people have varying IQs as a call to start killing people." Back at you, Ann: Only conservatives could interpret a statement that species evolved as a call to start killing people.

Coulter clearly knows better. I conclude that the trash-talking blonde bit is just a shtick (admittedly, a clever one) calculated to make her rich and famous. (Look at her website, where she whines regularly that she is not getting enough notice.) Her hyper-conservativism seems no more grounded than her faith. She has claimed that the Bible is her favorite book, she is rumored to go to church, and on the cover of Godless you see a cross dangling tantalizingly in her décolletage. But could anybody who absorbed the Sermon on the Mount write, as she does of Richard Dawkins, "I defy any of my coreligionists to tell me they do not laugh at the idea of Dawkins burning in hell"? Well, I wouldn't want Coulter to roast (there's not much meat there anyway), but I wish she'd shut up and learn something about evolution. Her case for ID involves the same stupid arguments that fundamentalists have made for a hundred years. They're about as convincing as the blonde hair that gets her so much attention. By their roots shall ye know them.

If you want to embarrass yourself (by posting the skull chart) go ahead. - DannyTN

All right, here we go: - Quark2005

"No one ever claimed that this was lineal series of transitionals, but the relation and progression through time is clear." - Quark2005

DOUBLESPEAK Alert!!!

It's not a "lineal series of transitionals" but "the relation and progression through time is clear". HUH??? In other words, it's got FLUFF. When examined, there's not a single candidate for a transitional in the whole bunch!!

Evo's post that chart without any disclaimers every time someone says there are no ape to man transitionals. But as I will show this is FREUDENSCIENCE at it's best.

Let's remove the clutter, the normalization of size, and the skulls that were so badly damaged they could have been reconstructed into anything and see what's left....

And I do mean clutter.

G-N are all human skulls and all within the range of modern human variability.
(A) is a modern chimp, neither ancestral to humans or Australopithecus.
B,C,D, & F are all Australopithecus apes, also not ancestral to humans.
And E, like F, was in so bad of shape when found that it could have been reconstructed to be almost anything.

That's the best you could do? Please!!! If you aren't embarrassed already, then you are unshameable! But wait there's more....

To rely on them as a support for transitionals is more imagination than hard evidence. The fact that you have to rely on such pitiful specimens as I will show them to be, speaks volumes about how little evidence for ape to human transitionals there is.

Skull E

Habilis skull E, that was found crushed totally flat under a layer of limestone and underwent extensive reconstruction, massive warping of the individual parts is acknowledged. It's probably either an Australopithecus or a Boisei like the other skull that was found in the same location. A skull that damaged is a blank slate for an Evo's imagination to run wild with.

Smithsonian on Skull E.

(E) OH62 was initially assigned to Habilis because of the similarity of the palate to that of skull Stw53, However, Kuman and Clarke list several major morphological traits of Stw 53 that they believe warrant its inclusion in the genus Australopithecus, including teeth that are very large and a braincase that is frontally narrow and restricted. So if Stw53 is a Austalopithecus, then OH62 probably is too. However scans of the inner ear, seemed to indicate human. So I'll grant you that there is ambiguity about E, but the specimen is so damaged that it shouldn't be considered evidence of anything except evolutionist desperation.

Skull F 1470

D and F weren't initially recognized as Australopithicus. F is skull ER-1470, which was reconstructed out of 100 pieces. In true evo bias fashion, it was first reconstructed to have a flat human like face, making it a "transitional", every evo's heart's desire.> But once the Creationist, Christopher Hummer, was finally allowed to examine it and started pointing out similarities to Austraopithecus skulls, it was reconstructed again and determined to be nothing but a large brained Australopithecus.

The Rise and Fall of skull 1470

Skull D

Inner ear scans of D (Skull 1813) and F indicate that both were knuckle walkers like Australopithicus. That puts them squarely back into the camp of Australopithicus and out of the Habilis category.

Human Skulls G-N

Why so many human skulls? It's called FLUFFING. Put enough human skulls in the chart, and maybe people will think you have a transition going on. You could find as much variability in Human skulls using 21th century skulls as you have demonstrated here. Nevertheless, let's take a closer look.

Skull G - Erectus

There are 17 defining traits for Erectus. All 17 can still be found in the human population. A group of over 200 living Australian Aborigines were found to share 14 of those 17 traits with Erectus. Except for the presumed age of Erectus skulls, there's really no reason to consider them to be different from Modern Humans. How different is the cranial-vault thickness of Homo erectus from modern man?

Skull I - Broken Hill #1 aka Rhodesia Man.

I especially like the inclusion of (I) the badly diseased Bunker Hill skull. Even the Smithsonian acknowledges the skull is diseased. Dr. Jack Cuozzo examined and x-rayed the skull and says the skull "cries out disease" and is thickened from severe acromegaly (excess secretion of growth hormone in adulthood).

What's more Dr. Cuozzo says the hole in the skull appears to be an 8mm gunshot wound complete with exit wound, which would make the skull a modern skull. (It was found at the bottom of a well.) Originally that skull was thought to be less than 40,000 years old, then it was promoted to 125,000 years old. And a French museum now promotes it as 400,000 years old. If Dr. Cuozzo is right, it's less than 100 years old. The British Museum hasn't conceded yet to Cuozzo's finding about the bullet hole. However, the diseased state of the skull is acknowledged by all. And Cuozzo points to evidence that the British Museum appears to have published pictures that hides the evidence of how badly diseased the skull is.

Whether or not there's a bullet hole, to include a badly diseased skull in a visual chart like this as representative of anything is FauxEvoImagery.
Dr. Cuozzo on the Broken Hill skull 1

Neanderthals - Skulls J-L

Why are there 3 Neanderthals, when they are considered human and not ancestral to modern human? They've lost their special status as their own species, along with the Evo fauximagery of hairy stooped over men. They had larger craniums than modern humans a fact that you can't tell because of the deceptive normalization in your skull chart.

There are 3 due to Fluffing. There are 3 Neanderthals, for the same reason that there are 8 human skulls. Because without Fluffing, your chart reduces to nothing, except the crushed remains of evolutionist dreams.

Is this really the best you can do? Two skulls (E&F) crushed beyond recognition painstakingly reconstructed and one skull (I) so diseased, it's inclusion in a visual chart like this is ludicrous.

Other Characteristics.

A review of other characteristics show that all fossils are either clearly in the ape category or clearly in the human category. Brain size is the only category that appears to approach intermediate between the Australopithecus ape and modern humans. Link for the article from which the following table is pulled follows:

Table 1: Summary of the results of analyses of characteristics of fossil Homo species [After Table 7 in Wood and Collard, Ref. 3]. 1) body size, 2) body shape, 3) locomotion, 4) jaws and teeth, 5) development and 6) brain size. H = like modern humans, A = australopith-like, I = intermediate ? = data unavailable.

Species name	1	2	3	4	5	6
H. rudolfensis	?	?	?	A	A	A
H. habilis	A	A	A	A	A	A
H. ergaster	H	H	H	H	H	A
H. erectus	H	?	H	H	?	I
H. heidelbergensis	H	?	H	H	?	A
H neanderthalensis	H	H	H	H	H	H

In order to fend off the usual bogus anti-creationist accusations of quoting out of context, Table 1 (above) has been reproduced from Table 7 in Wood and Collard exactly as it appears in their work. As can be seen, only one major constellation of traits in the specimens in question is in fact characterized as I (intermediate) between australopiths and Homo sapiens. All of the others are either unknown, clear-cut australopith in morphology, or clear-cut Homo sapiens in morphology. Now, had the hominins actually been a series of transitional forms gradually progressing from australopith to modern Homo sapiens (as commonly portrayed in textbooks), many if not most of the entries in Table 1 would instead be I (intermediate).

But it gets even worse for the evolutionist. Note that the individual hominins do not even qualify as a mosaic of australopith and Homo sapiens attributes. There is no increase in the number of human traits in the ‘series’. Most or all of the six constellations of traits dichotomize sharply along the lines of all-australopith or all Homo sapiens in terms of morphology.

The non-transitions in human evolution - on evolutionist' terms

Conclusion

That chart reduces to australopithicus ape fossils and human fossils with no evidence of intermediaries. Somewhere there is a quote of evolutionists admitting that australopithicus is more distinct from both humans and chimps than humans and chimps are from each other.

Without tricks like normalizing the skulls and fluffing, you would never dare post a chart like this. That you have, should embarrass you to no end.

This isn't representative of "transitionals". It is however, representative of the sloppy work of Dr. Theobold, who published this farce as part of his alleged 29 evidences, which are every bit as flimsy.

For Reference - FauxEvoImagery

(A) Pan troglodytes, chimpanzee, modern
(B) Australopithecus africanus, STS 5, 2.6 My
(C) Australopithecus africanus, STS 71, 2.5 My
(D) Homo habilis, KNM-ER 1813, 1.9 My
(E) Homo habilis, OH24, 1.8 My
(F) Homo rudolfensis, KNM-ER 1470, 1.8 My
(G) Homo erectus, Dmanisi cranium D2700, 1.75 My
(H) Homo ergaster (early H. erectus), KNM-ER 3733, 1.75 My
(I) Homo heidelbergensis, "Rhodesia man," 300,000 - 125,000 y
(J) Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, La Ferrassie 1, 70,000 y
(K) Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, La Chappelle-aux-Saints, 60,000 y
(L) Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, Le Moustier, 45,000 y
(M) Homo sapiens sapiens, Cro-Magnon I, 30,000 y
(N) Homo sapiens sapiens, modern

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