RE: [asa] The scientific vacuity of Ann Coulter

Coulter is purposely antogonistic - she has another word for it.

I went to see 'Agnes of God'. There had been a huge tado about it. It wasn't
a good movie. Without the tado from the religious objectors, it probably
would have done far worse than it did.

"the only bad publicity is no publicity" is all too true.

Be careful that your rebuttals don't end up getting Coulter more book sales.

-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
Behalf Of Pim van Meurs
Sent: Sunday, June 18, 2006 6:45 PM
To: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: [asa] The scientific vacuity of Ann Coulter

On Panda's Thumb, PZ Myers reports his review of Ann
Coulter's ghastly ignorant book 'Godless'. As
expected, Ann's understanding of evolutionary sciences
in particular is significantly lacking despite it
being reviewed by notable ID activists such as Dembski

<quote>I've now read all of the science-related
(that's applying the term "related" very generously)
stuff in Ann Coulter's awful, ghastly, ignorant book,
Godless, and it's a bit overwhelming. This far
right-wing political pundit with no knowledge of
science at all has written a lengthy tract that is
wall-to-wall error: To cover it all would require a
sentence-by-sentence dissection that would generate
another book, ten times longer than Coulter's, all
merely to point out that her book is pure garbage. So
I'm stumped. I'm not interested in writing such a
lengthy rebuttal, and I'm sure this is exactly what
Coulter is counting on—tell enough lazy lies, and no
one in the world will have time enough to correct them
conscientiously. She's a shameless fraud.

What to do? Well, we can't take apart the whole thing,
but what we can do is focus on individual claims and
show that Coulter is outrageously wrong—that she has
written things that indicate an utter lack of
knowledge of the subject. Some of us at the Panda's
Thumb are going to be doing just that—look there later
for more—and what I'm going to do here is address one
very broad claim that Coulter has made repeatedly, and
that is also common to many creationists.

That claim is that there is no evidence for evolution.
I know, to anybody who has even a passing acquaintance
with biology, that sounds like a ridiculous statement,
like declaring that people can live on nothing but air
and sunlight, or that yeti are transdimensional UFO
pilots. Yet Coulter baldly makes the absurd claim that
"There's no physical evidence for [evolution]", and
insists in chapter 8 of her new book that there is "no
proof in the scientist's laboratory or the fossil
record." This is like standing outside in a drenching
rainstorm and declaring that there is no evidence that
you are getting wet.</quote>

Continued at
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/06/ann_coulter_no_evidence_for_ev.ph
p

I am slowly working my way through Ann's terrible
understanding of evolutionary science myself and am
appaled at her treatment of the peppered moth. A
treatment which beats Jonathan Wells' Icons by miles.

One would expect that after the debacle of Icons and
the peppered moth, creationists would be more careful.
Ann Coulter proves one wrong.

As someone on PZ Myers' blog suggested, perhaps we are
taking Ann too seriously and she is just 'pandering'
to a group of people's beliefs for political
expedience or perhaps because 'controversy sells'.
However, if creationists or conservatives believe that
Ann Coulter's musings are anything more than
scientific ignorance, then they will be in for a big
surprise as PZ Myers has so clearly shown.

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Received on Sun Jun 18 21:00:55 2006