Depthless: Ann Coulter and Evolution

There are few things, in my view, more infuriating than calculated mendacity. Particularly when it makes those who espouse it successful.

One of the best recent examples would have to be the half-baked notion of Intelligent Design, which, as became clear in the recent Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District trial, is nothing more than a slightly modified descendent of more literal forms of creationism. This body of 'thought' has no scientific basis and has yet to produce a single peer-reviewed article in a scientific journal presenting results involving experimentally-provable hypotheses.

Nonetheless, large majorities of Americans think this silliness should be taught in science classes alongside a body of knowledge - Darwinian evolution - which has repeatedly proved itself over nearly a century and a half to become the core of modern biological research.

The reason why such a discussion can even be taken halfway seriously has a lot to do with the decline in the level of American political discourse. Not that there was any golden age of reasoned discussion, but the current dominance of political spin, talk-radio bullies and cable news scream-fests would, I think, be seen by any reasonable person as hardly the sort of environment in which sensible and productive debate can occur. (And anyone putting forth the notion that this enormous media realm has a 'liberal bias' is being either delusional or tendentious.) The problem here is not so much partisanship itself, but rather the replacement of debate by ranting propaganda.

It is difficult to think of a more ideal exemplar of all these trends - from scientific illiteracy to bug-eyed fanaticism - than Ann Coulter. There's little point in describing her if you don't already know who she is, as it's so hard to know where to begin. But a very good beginning is Professor Jerry Coyne's demolition of her stupid recent book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism.

The book's attack on Darwinism has been, I think, somewhat overshadowed by Coulter's comments regarding a group of women whose husbands were killed in the September 11th attacks and who had the gall, from Coulter's point of view, to question post-9/11 American policy. Her comments about them (that they were 'harpies' who were essentially cashing in on their husbands' deaths) raised such a (predictable) media storm that the more significant obscenity of her book was overlooked.

Coyne does the great service of revising that gap, and - given Coulter's long history of extremist rhetoric - his review is appropriately harsh (if anything, it's more restrained than she deserves).

One worthwhile excerpt:

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.

Of course, a great part of her enjoyment is the fact that her inanity has made her so rich. And this is the kind of successful stupidity which makes my head hurt.

A more detailed refutation of the bad 'science' contained in Coulter's book - and thus, by extension, of the broader creationist positions being espoused by the ID fanatics - is provided by James Downard at the great evolution resource Talk Reason. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.)

I don't think, of course, that this kind of rational information is going to appeal to dyed-in-the-wool creationists. They are, rather by definition, beyond reason and in the realm of faith-based science.

While these views have suffered some recent defeats, they're not going away soon.

And people like Coulter are going to be making money on them for a long time to come.