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.

I wonder if I can start writing creationist books for the big money now.

'Tis easy!

When you sit down at the word processor just pretend that you're Lawrence O'Donnell and the evilutionists were behind the Swift Boat ads. This will ensure that you strike the proper tone and appropriate level of restraint and intellectual honesty.

You should then come up with something like this:

in the journal, ZEITSCHRIFT FUR PHYSIK 43: 172-198 in 1927.

Which was not "peer reviewed". They would take any paper that was submitted:

...And if Annalen der Physik rejected a paper, for whatever reason, any professional German physicist had an alternative: Zeitschrift für Physik. This journal would publish any paper submitted by any member of the German Physical Society. This journal published quite a few worthless papers. But it also published quite a few great papers, among them Heisenberg’s first paper on the Uncertainty Principle, a central idea in quantum mechanics. There was no way in which referees or editors could stop an idea from appearing in the professional journals. In illustration of this, the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr said, according to Abraham Pais (The Genius of Science, p. 307), that if a physicist has an idea that seems crazy and he hesitates to publish so that someone else publishes the idea first and gets the credit, he has no one to blame but himself. In other words, it never occurred to Bohr that referees or editors could stop the publication of a new idea...

Frank Tipler, Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy? 2003 p.3

Cordially,

Your supposition that Darwin's theory wasn't published, prior to his book, in the journal or proceedings of a learned society is inaccurate....were read before The Linnean Society of London in 1858, and published in their proceedings (Vol 3 1858. pp 45-62.).

Which was controlled by Darwins friends, and most certainly not judged by 'impartial' referees. I didn't say merely that it wasn't published, I said that it was not published in a peer reviewed publication, which according to freedumb2003's express stipulation is determinative of whether something is meaningless words or not.

Cordially,

Interesting that you would quote Tipler. But he is kind of on the edge.

However, your statement is still not correct. You're trying to compare modern pratices with practices in place between the world wars.

"ZEITSCHRIFT FUR PHYSIK" would not print any paper. It would print any paper from a member of the German Physical Society. It was membership in the Society, and the Society's opinion about one's work, that accounted for the peer review.

You are correct in that it is not done that way now. Now there are way too many scientists for such a process to have any chance of success.

I notice you didn't include the previous paragraph about Einstein's submission to "Annalen der Physik". It would have made your point even better. None of Einstein's 4 papers (not 3) were published with modern peer review, either.

Tipler's whole article is here.

which according to freedumb2003's express stipulation is determinative of whether something is meaningless words or not.

Which I have clarified in a subsequent post. Posting something that you know not to be true is considered bad form. Doing it in the thread where the truth is posted is also not very bright.

I will assume this was a mistake on your part and you won't repeat it.

The problem for ID is that it asserts there can be no such history.

ID does not assert a universal negative. Why is there an attempt to impose an impossible burden of proof on ID to prove a universal negative, in this case that there can be no possible Darwinian pathway? It seems to me the burden of proof is on the Darwinist to present a rigorous, thorough account of its history, since it is the Darwinist who asserts that its history is Darwinian. ID just makes the claim, based on such imponderables as the critical assembly required of the components (not just the chemical 'pathways' required) that the Darwinian mechanism is causally insufficient to produce the result.

It just got poofed into existence by a designer that takes pleasure in watching children die from dysentery.

Is that a there is no designer because a designer wouldn't have done it that way because its wrong to take pleasure in watching children die from dysentery argument? Is that a scientific argument?

Cordially,

Which I have clarified in a subsequent post. Posting something that you know not to be true is considered bad form.

Insinuating that one is lying when one is not is bad form, too. Your 'clarification' leaves a lot to be desired.

In #479 you correctly acknowledge that, "The review process wasn't then what it is today." (Of course not - that's why I brought it up; to rebut the notion that anything that is not peer reviewed is meaningless words) You dismiss that historical context as irrelevent. So then in the very next post, your #480, when you state that "Oh and I see your (now shown to be false) assertion about what wasn't peer reviewed"...has been pretty well crushed", does that mean my examples were indeed of scientists that really had been peer reviewed in the modern sense that you intended when you first brought it up? Which is it? Were they peer reviewed or not?

Cordially,

Biology cannot possibly provide a detailed history of every past event, any more than physics can provide a detailed history of the weather going back millions of years.

The question is whether it is reasonable for physicists to teach in high school the possibility that Katrina was sent by an intelligent agency to punish New Orleans for its sins, or whether a particular configuration of alleles was twiched into place by an intelligence, for some purpose.

I am told that one of the halmarks of design is purpose. Since the flagellum is the poster child for intentional design, one has to consider the designer's purpose. We know what the flagellum does: it kills children. this leads to the question of the designer's motives.

Which was controlled by Darwins friends

LOL! You realize it's obvious that you're just making this up? Which "friends" of Darwin "controlled" (any more than any member did) The Linnean Society of London? You're just saying this. You don't have the slightest idea who was on the board, or who specifically might have passed on this presentation.

Probably any member of the Society in good standing and of sound repute could have had a hearing at their meetings, schedules allowing.

Certainly Darwin had an excellent scientific reputation, both for his work as a geologist and for his zoological work (e.g. his masterful series of monographs on the barnacles). It's rather silly to suggest he would have needed some special "in" to receive a hearing.

I didn't say merely that it wasn't published

No, but the sense of what you wrote implied, incorrectly, that The Origin, Darwin's book, was the first publication of his theory.

I said that it was not published in a peer reviewed publication

There was no formal peer review system in the 1850's. This is like complaining that Jesus Christ couldn't ride a motorcycle.

The peer review process is meant to insure that published papers report work that is original and significant. This is necessary in the context of a scientific community that is larger by at least a couple orders of magnitude than that of the mid 19th Century, and with huge volumes of research reports every year. In the context of the much smaller scientific community of Darwin's day mere membership in a learned society usually represented sufficient bona fides.

which according to freedumb2003's express stipulation is determinative of whether something is meaningless words or not

Yeah. freedumb2003 said that with respect to the YEC's flawed analysis of helium leakage in zircons. Had that study been done in 1858 you'd have a point.

The problem for ID is that it asserts there can be no such history.

ID does not assert a universal negative.

No, that's exactly what ID does. Granted it doesn't assert a universal negative as a conclusion. It's worse than that. It assumes a universal negative as a premise.

Both the main methods for (putatively) inferring that this or that structure was the result of "intelligent design" -- that its is "irreducibly complex" or that it exhibits "specified complexity" -- purport that structures with either of these characteristic COULD NOT have been developed by ANY series of stepwise modifications, i.e. that there is NO POSSIBLE "naturalistic" path to their formation.

To expand on that just a bit...

ID offers not a single, solitary spec of positive evidence that anything is the result of "intelligent design". I.e. the only "evidence" offered is that the something (supposedly) designed could (supposedly) not have been developed by stepwise modification.

What's worse is that there's no proposed research program that would develop such (positive) evidence; and no apparent interest among ID'ers in developing such a research program.

Added to that is the universal resistance among ID'ers to proposing, even speculatively, and sort of "boundary conditions" to ID. IOW ID'ers won't say -- or even speculate -- about when, where, why, how, in what order, under what conditions, etc instantiations of "intelligent design" actually occur.

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