Godless: The Church of Liberalism

by Ann Coulter

  No one disputes that organisms can develop small improvements on something that already exists, otherwise there would be no health clubs. The interesting question is not: How did a primitive eye be-come a complex eye? (And for the record, Darwinism can’t explain that either.) The interesting question is: How did the “light-sensitive cells” come to exist in the first place? Darwin’s solution is like explaining how humans evolved by saying, “Assume Dennis Kucinich. Now, through slight improvements over a billion years, successive generations would eventually become taller, grow opposable thumbs, and generally be-come more humanlike until one day—wham!—you have yourself a human being.”

  Even if they start with light-sensitive cells, Darwin’s apostles still can’t get to an eye. There have long been bald assertions by Darwiniacs of the existence of a computer simulation of the evolution of the eye. The webpage of the National Science Teachers Association baldly states, “Computer simulations of natural selection are common, such as the computer simulation of the evolution of the eye as described in [Richard] Dawkins.”

  In his book River Out of Eden, Dawkins blathers on and on about “computer models of evolving eyes.” But the computer simulation turned out to have as much basis in reality as the idea that domestic violence increases on Super Bowl Sunday. David Berlinski got to the bottom of the famed computer simulation, tracking down the scientists alleged to have performed this wondrous feat, and discovered—as described in a tour de force article in Commentary magazine—it didn’t exist.

  In The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, Tom Bethell quotes Berlinski’s summary of the evidence:

  This notion that there is somewhere a computer model of the evolutionary development of the eye is an urban myth. Such a model does not exist. There is no such model anywhere in any laboratory. No one has the faintest idea how to make one. The whole story was fabricated out of thin air by Richard Dawkins. The senior author of the study on which Dawkins based his claim—Dan E. Nilsson—has explicitly rejected the idea that his laboratory has ever produced a computer simulation of the eye’s development.”

  In other words, River Out of Eden is the Darwiniacs’ version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

  Back to the Wall Street Journal’s “science reporter.” After demonstrating that she is an ignoramus, Begley accuses critics of evolution of having small minds for refusing to believe in evolution. She calls the Behe argument a variant on all arguments against evolution (which she’s apparently growing a little tired of): “the argument from personal incredulity.” This, Begley defines as “I can’t see how natural forces could produce this, so it must be the work of God.”

  Begley’s argument is called the “argument from the counterintuitive,” which says, “It’s counterintuitive, so it must be true” (and I’ll sound really smart if I say so). “It’s the same compulsion that drives insecure adolescents to make counterintuitive, cryptic, and otherwise odd statements.” (“Play the game, don’t let the game play you.” Huh?) I’d be more impressed by Begley’s outre spirit if she took up smoking.

  Taking its place among such giants as the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, evolution is, indeed, counterintuitive. So it’s got the counterintuitive part down pat. What it doesn’t have, and what the theory of relativity, curved space, and black holes do, is any evidence that it is true.

  Begley imagines she has proved Behe wrong by announcing that some of the 200 parts of the animal cell’s motor have other functions. This is like explaining that the Mona Lisa is an accident of nature by saying paint has many other functions. There’s still that crucial step of assembling them all together, at one time, into the Mona Lisa. It doesn’t matter if 200 mutations happened at once or over a billion years. All 200 mutations would have to (1) occur, (2) be the “most fit,” (3) survive long enough to exist at the same time and place, in order to (4) assemble themselves into a working flagellum. The cell is as complicated a structure as the entire city of New York. Natural selection has never been demonstrated to change anything fancier than the shape of a bird’s beak.

  The evolutionists’ response is Well, it’s possible. You can’t say it couldn’t “possibly” happen—and that was the test Darwin of Nazareth set for himself It’s also possible that galactic ruler Xenu brought billions of people to Earth 75 million years ago, piled them around volcanoes, and blew them up with hydrogen bombs, sending their souls flying every which way until they landed on the bodies of living humans, where they still invisibly reside today—as Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard claimed. Yes, it’s possible.

  On April 7, 2006—more than two years after Sharon Begley informed Wall Street Journal readers that the irreducible complexity argument had been solved eons ago and she was frankly bored with the subject—the New York Times ran a front-page article declaring that researchers had finally produced a “counterargument to doubters of evolution who question how a progression of small changes could produce the intricate mechanisms found in living cells.” This was under the headline “Study, in a First, Explains Evolution’s Molecular Advance.” At least we finally had a clear admission that the irreducible complexity argument had not been answered before this. But look at the allegedly “complex” mechanism that scientists asserted—not proved, asserted—might have arisen by natural selection: a two-part molecular mechanism, the hormone and its receptor. Two parts! Even a mousetrap—Behe’s simplest example of a complex mechanism—has three parts. And, of course, they still hadn’t shown that the hormone-receptor pair could be produced by natural selection, only that this simple two-part mechanism might be produced by natural selection. That’s front-page news for the state religion.

  Evolutionists believe—purely as a matter of faith—that individual, unrelated mutations facilitated the production of all 200 necessary parts, completely by chance, and thus created the flagellum. And then they tell us they want to keep “faith” out of the classroom. Okay.

  The late Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle and his collaborator Chandra Wickramasinghe came to a similar conclusion as Behe while trying to explain the origin of life. Contrary to the image of evolution skeptics portrayed in the movie Inherit the Wind, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe were not millenarian fundamentalists making moon-shine by the river. In 1986, they were jointly awarded the International Dag Hammarskjold Gold Medal for Science. Hoyle has won the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Klumpke-Roberts Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (1977), the Royal Medal (1974), the Bruce Medal (1970), and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1968).

  Wickramasinghe holds the highest doctorate (Sc.D.) from the University of Cambridge and an honorary doctorate from the Soka University of Tokyo. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. He is a professor of appliedmathematics and astronomy at Cardiff University of Wales and director of the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology. Wickramasinghe was the first to propose the theory that dust in interstellar space and comets was mostly organic, a theory that has now been proved correct.

  Finally, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe were both atheists. Consequently, they had some odd ideas about the origin of life—but they knew enough about science to know Darwin’s theory of evolution for the creation of life was preposterous.

  Hoyle ran the numbers to determine the mathematical probability of the basic enzymes of life arising by random processes. They concluded that the odds were 1 to 1 followed by 40,000 zeroes, or “so utterly minuscule” as to make Darwin’s theory of evolution absurd. Hoyle said a “common sense interpretation of the facts” is that “a su-perintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.” His calculations from the facts, he said, “seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

  In order to explain the creation of the universe while carefully excluding God, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe came up with a theory calle
d “panspermia,” which holds that life began in space and spread to Earth by a steady influx of microscopic infectious agents delivered to Earth on comets. It’s sort of a galactic version of commercial air travel. It’s a little nutty but, unlike evolution, “panspermia” has the virtue of not being demonstrably false.

  Francis Crick, winner of the Nobel Prize for his codiscovery of DNA, also realized that the spontaneous evolution of life could not be reconciled with the facts. As he said, “The probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd.” Consequently, Crick hypothesized that highly intelligent extraterrestrials sent living cells to Earth on an unmanned spaceship, a theory he sets forth in his 1981 book, Life Itself Thus was God narrowly averted!

  While evolution fetishists turn themselves into modern-day phrenologists, real scientists are making important scientific discoveries about complex structures that keep making the random mutation part of evolution look increasingly silly.

  (And that’s not to knock phrenology, which actually made some pretty good predictions. A 1921 article on phrenology, for example, observed, “The small-nose man can not have a judicial mind, whatever his other excellencies may be. And a man whose nose upturns can no more be expected to administer justice than a pug dog can be expected to act as a shepherd.”)

  The evolutionists attack the idea of design in the universe, claiming it is a theory based on what we don’t know. The truth is exactly the reverse. The less you know about the physical world, the more plausible Darwinian evolution seems. Primitive people believed in sun gods, moon gods, and fertility gods. But as soon as humans understood the science of astronomy and reproduction (except C. Everett Koop, who still doesn’t understand that one), make-believe gods moving the sun and creating babies became a less persuasive explanation.

  Similarly, the more we know about molecules, cells, and DNA, the less plausible Darwin’s theory of natural selection becomes. So the evolutionists bring lawsuits to prevent schoolchildren from being told that natural selection can’t begin to explain such complex parts as the flagellum. DNA is—as Bill Gates says—”like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.” Darwiniacs want us to believe that DNA—something vastly more perfect and powerful and complex than Windows XP, a program that represents the culmination of tens of thousands of years of human progress—came to exist by means of nothing more than a series of random accidents starting in a puddle of prehistoric goo.

  Step Two: Survival of the Fittest Is a Tautology

  The second prong of Darwin’s “theory” is generally nothing but a circular statement: Through the process of natural selection, the “fittest” survive. Who are the “fittest”? The ones who survive! Why look—it happens every time! The “survival of the fittest” would be a joke if it weren’t part of the belief system of a fanatical cult infesting the Scientific Community.

  The beauty of having a scientific theory that’s a tautology is that it can’t be disproved. Evolution cultists denounce “Creation Science” on the grounds that it’s not “science” because it can’t be observed or empirically tested in a laboratory. Guess what else can’t be observed or empirically tested? Evolution!

  But, you say, there must be some characteristics that are inherently desirable without regard to whether or not the organism survived, such as intelligence, strength, or—to take something really obvious—a tendency to avoid eating poison. In one experiment attempting to prove evolution (and those are the only evolution experiments allowed by law), fruit flies were bred to avoid eating poison. One would think that if we could settle on one characteristic that is a priori “fit,” it would be: “Avoids eating poison.”

  Alas, the fruit flies bred to avoid eating poison did not survive. They died out while the original dumb fruit flies with no aversion to eating poison survived to reproduce. Thus, the scientists concluded: Stupid is more fit. As the headline in the New Scientist put it, “Cleverness May Carry Survival Costs.” Yes, it’s been observed for centuries that it’s the truly stupid who are the most successful, live the longest, are the happiest, the wealthiest, the most desirable, and so on. Let’s face it: It’s the stupid who have the inside track in this world.

  This is what’s known as “A Theory Incapable of Disproof.” (Or perhaps, “A Theory Born of Self-Interest.”) The fruit fly experiment is now cited as scientific proof of evolution. So whenever you hear about the “overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution,” remember that evolutionists have put the fruit fly poison-eating experiment in their “win” column.

  Or consider the argument for evolution made in the New York Times Science section based on the human appendix. After describing how the appendix is a useless organ that can kill you, the author snidely remarks, “You sometimes hear people who say they reject evolution’s claim that our bodies show clear signs of being ìntelligently designed.’ I wonder how many of them have had appendicitis.”

  As I understand the concept behind survival of the fittest, the appendix doesn’t do much for the theory of evolution either. How does a survival-of-the-fittest regime evolve an organ that kills the host organism? Why hasn’t evolution evolved the appendix away? (Another sign that your scientific theory is in trouble: When your argument against an opposing theory also disproves your own.)

  For those of you opposed to “faith” being taught in the classroom, reflect on the answer the Times gave:

  Imagine a trait that helps an animal survive to adulthood, but that also has side effects that can cause trouble later in life. If, on balance, animals produce more offspring with the trait than without it, natural selection will favor it. [P]erhaps the appendix lifted the odds that our ancestors could resist childhood diseases and live to childbearing years. Even if it also caused deaths by appendicitis, the appendix might have been a net plus.

  So there it is: the theory of evolution is proved again. When the appendix’s use was a mystery, it proved evolution. When the appendix was thought to help humans resist childhood diseases—well, that proved evolution, too! Throw in enough words like imagine, perhaps, and might have—and you’ve got yourself a scientific theory! How about this: Imagine a giant raccoon passed gas and perhaps the resulting gas might have created the vast variety of life we see on Earth. And if you don’t accept the giant raccoon flatulence theory for the origin of life, you must be a fundamentalist Christian nut who believes the Earth is flat. That’s basically how the argument for evolution goes.

  You will begin to notice that the evolution cultists’ answer to everything is the punchline to the joke about the economist. A physicist, a chemist, and an economist are stranded on a desert island with one can of food but no can opener. The physicist says, “If we drop the can from 30 meters, the velocity plus the force will break the can open.” The chemist says, “We could heat the can to 101 degrees Celsius and the boiling reaction will burst the can.” The economist says, “Assume a can opener.”

  That’s all you ever get from evolution cultists: Assume a can opener. Assume each one of the many, many mutations necessary to create a complicated structure—like a cell or an eye—is itself beneficial and somehow makes the organism more fit. Assume completely random mutations—all individually beneficial—could come together in 200 individual parts to form a perfectly functioning mechanism such as the flagellum. Assume the appendix is a cornucopia of unknown benefits (until it kills you). Assume eating poison is good for you. These people make L. Ron Hubbard look like Aristotle.

  They ridicule us for saying, “The Bible is true because it says so right in the Bible”—which I’ve never said, by the way. Then they expect us to swallow their circular argument in support of Darwinism. To paraphrase Chico Marx, “Who are you going to believe? Me or your brilliantly designed eyes?”

  Step Three; Creating a New Species Is Still on

  Evolution’s “To-Do” List

  We haven’t even gotten to the third prong of Darwin’s theory of evolution—the point
of the whole contraption—and we’ve already had to assume miracles and stifle giggles at the key definitional term “fittest.” The big payoff of the theory that must be taught as scientific fact to small schoolchildren throughout America is this: If we combine (1) absurd assumptions about random mutation with (2) a tautology (“survival of the fittest”), we get … a whole new species!

  If you get your news from the American news media, it will come as a surprise to learn that when Darwin first published The Origin of Species, in 1859, his most virulent opponents were not fundamentalist Christians but paleontologists. It was a nice yarn Darwin had spun, but there was absolutely nothing in the fossil record to support it. Far from showing gradual change with one species slowly giving way to another, as Darwin hypothesized, the fossil record showed vast numbers of new species suddenly appearing out of nowhere, remaining largely unchanged for millions of years, and then disappearing (almost like there was a big flood or something).

  Darwin’s response was to say: Start looking! He blamed the absence of fossil support for his theory on the “extreme imperfection of the geological record.” With a little elbow grease, he was sure, paleontologists would soon produce the necessary evidence. Well, we’ve been looking for 150 years now, we’ve found a lot of fossils, and what the fossil record shows is: New species suddenly appearing out of nowhere, remaining largely unchanged for millions of years, and then suddenly disappearing.