Stultis, you wrote:
>> The subject is Ann Coulter on evolution. Ichneumon's post was entirely focused on exactly that subject.
which is incorrect in two ways:
1) The thread topic concerns Peter Olofsson's view on Coulter.
2) Ichneumon's post was retaliatory and heavy handed.
The real bones of contention involve secularism and Christianity and the weapons of choice are TOE and ID which are not necessarily exclusionary. The 'studity' and Talibanism you point to is unkind, unwarranted, and not something one can prove.
The bit of Coulter that I quoted claimed that Gould and Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium" entails that evolution can happened really fast and then "stop happening at all for 150 million years"!
I'm sorry, but that simply IS stupid, by any measure.
The punctuationists posited that most evolution occurs in association with speciation events. Punctuationists note that the average species (which is long-lived, widely distributed and numerous enough to be represented in the fossil record in the first place) survives, I forget exactly, but something like 2 million years.
Even if you take the most extreme, dogmatic, simplistic or stereotypical version of punc eq -- for instance ignoring the fact that the vast majority of evolutionists think that both punctuated and gradual patterns of change occur and can be found in the fossil record, and that even punctuationists admit that some evolution occurs between speciation events -- you still can't get anything like "150 million years" of evolution "stopping" out of the theory.
Coulter's depiction gets even stupider if you continue the quote:
Basically, what happens is this: Your parents are slugs and then suddenly--but totally at random--you evolve into a gecko and your brother evolves into a shark and your sister evolves into a polar bear and the guy down the street evolves into a porpoise and so on--and then everybody relaxes by the pool for 150 million years, virtually unchanged.
My comparing Coulter to Rosie O'Donnel was actually restrained. Even Rosie has yet to say anything quite this stupid.
As to the Taliban comment, it was not mine and I noted that I thought it over the top. I just thought it was funny/ironic that another Freeper responded to it with Talibanesque rhetoric. Not to mention in a manner that denied central Christian doctrine (e.g. treating beliefs about evolution as a salvational matter).