by Ann Coulter
The evolutionists’ other great contribution to the scientific method is to cite obvious, undisputed facts having nothing to do with evolution and brandish them as if they’ve just grown John Travolta from an earthworm.
A masterful example is this inane passage from the New York Times: Nowhere has evolution been more powerful than in its prediction that there must be a means to pass on information from one generation to another. Darwin did not know the biological mechanism of inheritance, but the theory of evolution required one… . Darwin may have been the classic scientific observer. He observed that individuals in a given species varied considerably, variations now known to be caused by mutations in their genetic code.
The idea that Darwin was the first person ever to notice that traits were hereditary and that there was variation within a species is absolute lunacy. Even B.D., before Darwin, people noticed that their children looked like them—but not exactly like them. And they didn’t understand the mechanisms of inheritance either! Yet the Times claims Darwin was the first to notice that information was passed from one generation to the next and then boasts, “The discovery of DNA, the sequencing of the human genome, the pinpointing of genetic diseases and the discovery that a continuum of life from a single cell to a human brain can be detected in DNA are all a result of evolutionary theory.”
Using the same logic, one could also claim that DNA, human genome sequencing, the discovery of genetic diseases, and the growth of the human brain are also a direct result of generations of humans saying, Hey! Look—little Billy has his father’s nose! But we don’t teach, Hey! Look—little Billy has his father’s nose! as a groundbreaking scientific discovery.
The same article reports that Darwin “also realized that constraints of food and habitat sharply limited population growth; not every individual could survive and reproduce.”
Will Darwin’s wondrous feats never end? Darwin’s The Origin of Species was published in 1859—about ten years after the Irish potato famine killed one million people and drove another million to flee the country (1845-48). I believe other people besides Darwin may have noticed that the absence of food limited population growth. Darwin’s innovation was that mutation + death would produce a new species. And yet the Irish are still Irish. The only new species we got out of the Irish potato famine was the blight-resistant Idaho potato, invented by intelligent designer Luther Burbank, American plant breeder.
The only evidence for Darwin’s theory of evolution is fake evidence, and every time Darwiniacs are caught hawking fake “proof,” they complain that it’s merely a “gap” in the theory. The Darwiniacs play a shell game with the evidence, but the evidence is never under any of the shells. The point isn’t that schoolchildren should be “taught the controversy”—schoolchildren should be taught the truth. This includes:
• the truth about the entire fossil record, which shows a very non-Darwinian progression, noticeably lacking the vast number of transitional species we ought to see
• the truth about the Cambrian explosion, in which virtually all the animal phyla suddenly appeared, with no Darwinian ancestors
• the truth about the Galapagos finch population changing not one bit since Darwin first observed the finches more than 170 years ago
• the truth about the peppered moth experiment
• the truth about Haeckel’s embryos being a fraud perpetrated by a leading German eugenicist
• the truth about the Miller-Urey experiment being based on premises that are no longer accepted
• the truth about the nonexistence of computer simulations of the evolution of the eye
These aren’t gaps in a scientific theory—there is no scientific theory. There is only a story about how a bear might have fallen into the ocean and become a whale. As Colin Patterson asked, What is any one true thing about evolution?
In the end, evolutionists’ only argument is contempt. The cultists know that if people were allowed to hear the arguments against evolution for just sixty seconds, all would be lost. So they demonize the people making those arguments. You’re just saying that because you believe in God! You probably believe in a flat Earth, too! You sound like a Holocaust revisionist! That’s all you ever get.
The evolutionists’ self-advertisements paint a different picture. A New York Times review of a book on intelligent design summarized the situation this way: Às Michael Ruse points out, modern science’s refusal to cry miracle when faced with explanatory difficulties has yielded `fantastic dividends.’ Letting divine causes fill in wherever naturalistic ones are hard to find is not only bad theology—it leaves you worshiping àGod of the gaps’—but it is also a science-stopper.” Far from chastely refusing to acknowledge miracles, evolutionists are the primary source of them. These aren’t chalk-covered scientists toiling away with their test tubes and Bunsen burners. They are religious fanatics for whom evolution must be true and any evidence to the contrary—including, for example, the entire fossil record—is something that must be explained away with a fanciful excuse, like “our evidence didn’t fossilize.”
Meanwhile, and by stark contrast, intelligent design scientists do not fill the “gaps” with God. They simply say intelligence is a force that exists in the universe and we can see its effects and what it does—in Behe’s flagellum, in the Cambrian explosion, in Gould and Eldredge’s “punctuated equilibrium.”
Evolutionists keep modifying their theory to say, “Assume a miracle,” and the intelligent design scientists say, “Hey, does anyone else notice that it’s always the same miracle?” It’s a miracle of design. Design in the universe may well be explained by something other than God, but we’ll never know as long as everyone is required to pretend it’s not there. To say intelligent design scientists are merely “filling in the gaps” with God is like saying Sir Isaac Newton “filled in the gaps” with the theory of gravity. He saw stuff dropping to the ground and tried to explain it. If only the Darwiniacs had been around, they could have told Newton, I don’t see anything dropping! It’s just an accident!
Do you believe in God or something?
Nor are intelligent design scientists looking at things they can’t explain: Quite the opposite. They are looking at things they can explain but which Darwin didn’t even know about, like the internal mechanism of the cell, and saying, That wasn’t created by natural selection—that required high-tech engineering. By contrast, the evolution cult members look at things they can’t explain and say, We can’t explain it, but the one thing we do know is that there is no intelligence in the universe. It must have been random chance, or it’s not “science.”
10
THE SCIENTIFIC
METHOD OF STONING
AND BURNING
The single greatest victory of the Darwiniacs is in the realm of rhetoric, not science.
They have persuaded the slumbering masses that anyone who questions the theory of evolution must do so out of religious fervor. No matter what argument you make against evolution, the response is Well, you know it’s possible to believe in evolution and believe in God. Yes, and it’s possible to believe in Spiderman and believe in God, but that doesn’t prove Spiderman is true.
I admire the rhetorical technique and plan to use it during all future disputes.
Your time is up on the StairMaster.
You’re just saying that because you believe in God.
This is the express checkout lane.
Oh, I get it—you believe in God.
On August 24, 2005, the New York Times was required to run this amusing “correction”:
A front-page article on Sunday about the Discovery Institute, which promotes the concept known as intelligent design to explain the origins of life, referred incorrectly to the religious affiliation of the institute’s fellows. Most are conservative Christians, including Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants—not fundamentalist Christians.
Liberals can make dazzling distinctions between different types of Muslims. Osama bin Laden, fo
r example, was a “fundamentalist” who would never have worked with a “secular” Muslim like Saddam Hussein—although liberals think Osama was willing to suspend his principles long enough to work hand-in-glove with Ronald Reagan. But anyone who questions evolution is ipso facto a “fundamentalist Christian.”
The intelligent design movement is exactly the opposite of what the Darwiniacs would have you believe. Far from six-fingered lunatics handling snakes and speaking in tongues, the ID proponents are the real scientists—biochemists, astrophysicists, chemists, and mathematicians. As Behe says, intelligent design has been around since Aristotle and its “rising fortunes have been boosted by discoveries principally in physics and astronomy,” such as the life-sustaining “coincidences” of the universe discovered by astronomers like the late Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle.
Bill Dembski has developed complicated mathematical formulas for detecting design in the universe, as distinct from chance or accident. Dembski has a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago and a master of divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. He has done postdoctoral work in mathematics at MIT, in physics at the University of Chicago, and in computer science at Princeton. He has held National Science Foundation graduate and postdoctoral fellowships. When faculty members at Baylor University erupted in rage at the research center Dembski had started up at the university to test theories of design in the universe, not one professor on the committee investigating Dembski could understand the mathematical arguments he had made.’ (But just to be safe, they abolished his research center anyway.)
In an article in the New York Times on intelligent design, the design proponents quoted in the article keep rattling off serious, scientific arguments—from Behe’s examples in molecular biology to Dembski’s mathematical formulas and statistical models. The Times reporter, who was clearly not trying to make the evolutionists sound retarded, was forced to keep describing the evolutionists’ entire retort to these arguments as: Others disagree.’
That’s it. No explanation, no specifics, just “others disagree.” The high priests of evolution have not only forgotten how to do science, they’ve lost the ability to formulate a coherent counterargument. You keep waiting to hear a serious response to arguments by people like Behe, Dembski, and Hoyle, but the evolutionists just scream that evolution is a FACT and if you don’t believe it, you must be a fundamentalist who believes the Earth is flat.
Which is rather presumptuous, considering the scientific standing of the typical evolutionist. Their grandiose self-conceptions to the contrary, the cult members are rarely scientists at all. They’re almost always biologists—the “science” with the greatest preponderance of women. The distaff MIT “scientist” who fled the room in response to Larry Summers’s remarks was, of course, a biologist. While I’m sure there have been groundbreaking discoveries about the internal digestive system of the earthworm, biologists are barely even scientists anymore. They’re classifiers, list-makers, like librarians with their Dewey decimal system. Except librarians don’t claim the Dewey decimal system holds the Rosetta Stone to the universe. There were once great biologists, but the morally vacuous ones began to promote their own at the universities. It was a sort of intelligently designed devolution. Like Marxists gradually dominating the comp lit department, biologists will only be given tenure today if they forswear any doubts about the evolution pseudoscience. Consequently, “biologist” almost always means “evolutionary biologist,” which is something like an “ESP biologist.”
Curiously, the science writers at the New York Times—as opposed to opinion writers like Paul Krugman or Style section reporters writing about “girl crushes”—have generally been extremely circumspect in what they say about evolution. The principal source for idiotic statements about the “overwhelming evidence for the theory of evolution” in the Times is letters to the editor. Writing a letter to the New York Times is what people who don’t fight think of as fighting: That’s it! I’m writing a letter! Why, I’ll take him to court! One letter writer said evolution was a “fact” equivalent to the “fact” that there was no connection between al Qaeda and Iraq. A woman doctor wrote in to say that DNA evidence “shows our common heritage with the animals with whom we share this planet.” (And Elton John gave birth to Janet Reno.) If little Miss Smartypants could prove “common heritage” from similar DNA, she’d be awarded the Nobel Prize.
* * *
THE only evolutionist who ever tried to answer questions about evolution was Stephen Jay Gould, which meant he had to keep conceding key points—so much so that Phillip Johnson called Gould the “Gorbachev of Darwinism.” If you can ever get the cult past the argument that their opponents are “fundamentalists,” it’s Game Over. I gather this is their strongest argument, since it’s the only one you hear.
When the Kansas State Board of Education decided to hold hearings to determine what schoolchildren should be taught about evolution, they sought the views of prominent evolution defenders. They invited evolutionary biologist Kenneth Miller of Brown University. They invited Eugenie Scott, Keeper of the Faith at the National Center for Science Education, a front group dedicated to banning any questioning of evolution. (Liberals love organizations with names that are the opposite of the truth, like all the Communist front groups with “American,” “peace,” and “democracy” in their titles.) And they invited anyone at all from another organization devoted to banning discussion of evolution, the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Not one of them was willing to defend evolution in a public forum. The evolution fanatics justified their disappearing act on the grounds that members of the school board did not have open minds. “The people running things,” Miller said, “were people whose minds were already made up.” This is as opposed to the minds of people who refuse to discuss the issue and keep suing to prevent anyone from challenging their theory.
Miller admitted that the refusal to debate “can be made to look as if you do not want to defend science in public, or you are too afraid to face the intelligent design people in public.” But the real reason he refused to debate, he said, was that it was not a genuine debate. Evolution is true and everyone please stop asking questions!
Scott, of the American League for Peace and Democracy, remarked sadly that she had once debated critics of evolution. “I was one of the holdouts, saying yes, appear with these guys, yes, tell them what is wrong with their ideas, go to their conferences, treat them like scholars.” Scott is to “science” what the “Reverend” Barry Lynn is to Christianity. (And both are proud recipients of the Playboy Foundation’s “First Amendment Award” for blocking the speech of religious people while not infringing on the right of overweight women to dance in public wearing only pasties.) When the evolution skeptics refused to acquiesce to Scott’s badgering, she concluded they were being dogmatic. “Our willingness to engage their ideas,” Scott said, “was not being reciprocated.” Scott had deigned to “treat them like scholars.” And yet they refused to capitulate. This is the liberal definition of an ideologue: Someone who won’t give in to them.
Nazis can march in Skokie, Democrats can fill the airwaves with treason, and Air America Radio can give Randi Rhodes access to literally hundreds of listeners every day, but the teaching of alternative theories to evolution is prohibited by law. They would prefer it if heretics from the official state religion could be put in prison and burned at the stake like Giordano Bruno.
A good example of the Darwiniacs’ “willingness to engage” others’ ideas occurred when a small school district in Pennsylvania proposed to read a statement to high school biology students mentioning intelligent design. The statement read as follows:
The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin’s theory of evolution and eventually take a standardized test of which evolution is a part.
Because Darwin’s theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not
a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence.
A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.
Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book “Of Pandas and People” is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what intelligent design actually involves.
With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of the origin of life to individual students and their families.
As a standards-driven district, class instruction focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency on standards-based assessments.
That was it. Just an alluring reference to dissent from the official state religion that the students might look up in non—school hours.
From the reaction of the evolutionists, you would think the Dover schools were teaching fisting to twelve-year-olds (when, as any student knows, that’s not covered until junior year). Going for his own Playboy First Amendment Award, federal district court judge John E. Jones III ruled that this tepid statement violated the First Amendment of the United States Constitution by establishing a religion. The last person to demonstrate such mastery of the First Amendment was erstwhile Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers.
Judge Jones—or as he came to be known, “the well-respected, Bush-appointed judge”—had spent the better part of his career on a state liquor board determining such matters as that Zippers gelatin shots may not be sold in Pennsylvania. But now he had a case that would get him noticed. As Jones confided to a New York Times reporter, when he saw the Dover evolution case mentioned on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, he excitedly brought a copy home to his wife, telling her, “I’m on the cover of Rolling Stone!” At least he didn’t pose for Vanity Fair in a Jaguar. At least not yet.
