A brief excerpt:
"All this is grist for debate on literary civility, of course, but Coulter's tome landed in my crosshairs on account of the third of her book (the last 4 of 11 chapters) devoted to assailing the Liberal's Creation Myth, Darwinian evolutionary theory. Her sashay into matters scientific delightfully illustrates a common theme in sloppy thinking. Coulter is a secondary citation addict. Like a scholarly lemming, she compulsively reads inaccurate antievolutionary sources and accepts them on account of their reinforcement of what she wants to be true. It never once occurs to her that she might find it prudent to check on the reliability of those sources before accompanying them off the cliff, either by investigating critical takes on those sources, or by actually inspecting the original technical literature directly."
You can go to other places like Panda's Thumb, etc., to review Coulter's "analysis". I haven't read her book yet, and I do like her. But what in the world gives her the cred to comment on this issue. I mean, the "lawyers" at DI can't even get the law right. But they still comment on complex scientific issues??? And given what DI did to the Dover School District after they cut and run, I'd sure be scared for my pocketbook if I was in Kansas.
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Coulter is a polemicist. That is the way she describes herself. It works in politics, where one of the objects is to fire up the faithful to deliver the goods at election time.
It makes no sense in science.
Given what Anthony Kennedy - say nothing of four other SCOTUS justices - can believe about the Geneva Conventions, we all of us nationwide have plenty to worry about aside from controversies over education.But to the merits of the theory that complex, specialized organs like the eye - or even "simple" cells - accidentally assembling themselves, I'm put in mind of the statement in my thermodynamics placing a probability on the proposition that a red hot iron ball, if dropped into a bucket of water, would "bounce" back to its original height and temperature due to random action of the molecules of water.
Of course the probability the book assigned to that result was very, very, very small, but the idea that it was not zero was pretty amazing to consider. And it just illustrates the point that some things can be theoretically possible and still never happen because their probability of occurrance is just too low.
If you dropped a bowling ball into a bucket of water and instead of immediately sinking to the bottom it initially bounced back up to its original height, you would conclude that a miracle had occurred. And that is what I hear Ann Coulter saying - that if the fossil record reveals basically worms, then suddenly in geological time it reveals complex animals, whatever word you use for it is simply a euphemism for a miracle.
Nothing is random if you can look close enough at its causes; evolution starts with the idea of randomness. And "chance" is the name of a Roman deity. It can be viewed as just a way of avoiding the word "miracle."