Godless: The Church of Liberalism

by Ann Coulter

  In 1979, David Raup, a geologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, described the problem this way:

  The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with darwinian [sic] natural selection as we would like it to be. Darwin was completely aware of this. He was embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn’t look the way he predicted it would and, as a result, he devoted a long section of his Origin of Species to an attempt to explain and rationalize the differences. There were several problems, but the principal one was that the geologic record did not then and still does not yield a finely graduated chain of slow and progressive evolution.

  Things have only gotten worse in the intervening twenty years. It was one thing for Darwin to rationalize the lack of fossil evidence on the grounds that “only a small portion of the world is known with accuracy.” It’s another thing entirely for today’s biologists to be still clinging to the argument from ignorance. One hundred fifty years have passed with vast awards and accolades dangling before any paleontologist who could locate a fossil proving evolution.

  Dr. Raup said:

  [W]e are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transitions than we had in Darwin’s time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of darwinian [sic] change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information—what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic.”

  Darwin’s disciples simply assert that evolution led from this species to that by the process of random mutation—with cruel nature striking down the genetic losers—and to hell with the fossil record’s showing nothing of the sort. At some point, it’s not even pseudoscience anymore, it’s just a crazy religious cult. If mutations are utterly random—as Darwinism claims—there ought to be an infinite variety of transitional animals with small mutations that eventually led to a magnificent new attribute like a wing or a lung. Unlike most high school biology teachers lying to your children about evolution, Darwin was at least aware of what the fossil record ought to show if his theory was correct. He said there would be “interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps.”

  But we don’t have “interminable varieties.” We don’t have fossils “connecting” the extinct to the extant. We don’t have the “finest graduated steps.” What the fossil record shows is sudden bursts of all manner of animals, modest change, and then sudden and total extinction. Dinosaurs appeared, lived for 150 million years, and then disappeared, only to be quickly replaced with mammals. Neither the creation nor the extinction of dinosaurs was accomplished by a gradual process of any sort.

  You also never see the mutations that turned out to be clunkers, like the dog that mutated webbed feet or the fish that mutated fur. To the contrary, all the changes always seem to follow a straight line.

  But if the mutations were really random, with Mother Nature ruthlessly striking down the genetic losers, then for every mutation that was desirable, there ought to be a staggering number that are undesirable. Otherwise, the mutations aren’t random, they are deliberate—and then you get into all the hocus-pocus about an “intelligent designer” and will probably start speaking in tongues and going to NASCAR races. But that’s not what the fossil record shows. We don’t have fossils for the vast quantity of hapless creatures that ought to have died out in a survival-of-the-fittest regime.

  The evolution cultists hypothesize—since this is a real science, as opposed to intelligent design, which is just a bunch of crazy conjectures—that the bad mutations didn’t stick around long enough to leave fossils. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain: the clunkier mutations simply never fossilized, and why are you asking so many questions?

  Or they revert to Darwin’s excuse of 150 years ago about the paucity of the fossil record. If that explains anything, it only explains why we wouldn’t find one particular unfit mutation—say, if we went looking only for the dog with webbed feet. It doesn’t explain why we don’t find any bad mutations—a dog that mutated antennae, or gills, or a tail on its head. In order to mutate the good stuff, like a bird’s lung, there would have to be countless mutations that were at least better than what existed before. If each one of the incremental mutations is more “fit” than what preceded it—which it has to be in order to survive—those transitional mutations should have stayed around long enough to appear in the fossil record, before mutating their way to something even better. But in the course of millions and millions of years, all we see are slight variations on the final product.

  There is no reason to expect, for example, that the first place our eyes ever appeared was on the front of our faces. Why don’t we have ancestors with eyes on the bottom of their feet, on their arms, or on the top of their heads? Eyes might be best positioned in the front of our heads, but eyes on the bottom of our feet are better than no eyes at all, and so should have stuck around at least for a while in the fossil record. But they’re not there.

  We’re not talking about The Swan on NBC. This is evolution! This is the completely accidental process that created butterfly wings, bat radar, the human brain, and the millions of species alive today. The theory of evolution requires hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of mutations just to create an eye. (No one has any idea how many mutations would be required to create an eye.) A process that is supposed to have transformed an amoeba into Jerry Garcia by “random mutation” must have produced some spectacular failures. Why can’t we find any of the amusing ones?

  The late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, one of evolution’s most passionate defenders, called the “extreme rarity” of transitional animals the “trade secret of paleontology.” He said, “The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of the branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.” (Gould was also the guy who tried to disprove the idea of IQ and lost that debate, too. Poor Gould will go down in history as the Robert E. Lee of science, the last passionate defender of lost causes.) Paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Robert Carroll admits, “Very few intermediates between groups are known from the fossil record.”

  For over a hundred years, evolutionists proudly pointed to the same sad birdlike animal, Archaeopteryx, as their lone transitional fossil linking dinosaurs and birds. Discovered a few years after Darwin published The Origin of Species, Archaeopteryx was instantly hailed as the transitional species that proved Darwin’s theory. This unfortunate creature had wings, feathers, teeth, claws, and a long, bony tail. If it flew at all, it didn’t fly very well. Alas, it is now agreed that poor Archaeopteryx is no relation of modern birds. It’s just a dead end. It transitioned to nothing.

  But could Archaeopteryx be our one example of bad mutations eliminated by natural selection? Archaeopteryx can’t fill that role either, because it seems to have no predecessors. The fossils that look like Archaeopteryx lived millions of years after Archaeopteryx, and the fossils that preceded Archaeopteryx look nothing at all like it. The bizarre bird is just an odd creation that came out of nowhere and went nowhere, much like Air America Radio.

  The Washington Post defended the state religion by referring to evidence that does not exist—the countless bad mutations—in order to rationalize the apparent designed progression of the fossil record: “This appearance of `perfect fit’ makes it seem as if organisms must have been the product of an intelligent force. But this appearance of perfection is deceiving. It gives no hint of the numberless evolutionary dead ends—lineages that, according to the fossil record, survived for a while but then di
ed out, probably because changes in the environment made their once-perfect designs not so perfect anymore.”

  That would have been a creditable defense of the Darwiniacs’ crackpot religion in 1859. But if there were—as Darwin supposed and the Washington Post asserts 150 years later in defiance of the facts—”numberless evolutionary dead ends,” we ought to have found a whole bunch of them by now. In fact, we ought to have found more dead ends than evolutionary advances—a lot more.

  Niles Eldredge, Gould’s collaborator, has devoted himself to reconciling evolutionary theory with the fossil record. But even Eldredge complained of the famous “evolutionary” horse sequence purporting to show diminutive horses “evolving” into modern stallions, saying the sequence is entirely “speculative” and yet is “presented as the literal truth in textbook after textbook.” Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago claims it is “flat wrong” to say that the fossil record does not show “a smooth, unambiguous transitional series linking, let’s say, the first small horse to today’s horse.” Coyne ought to apply for a job at the American Museum of Natural History. Much to its embarrassment, the museum has had to rearrange its famous “horse sequence.”

  The more advances paleontologists make in uncovering the fossil record, the more absurd the evolution fable becomes. Most nettle-some for evolutionists is the Cambrian period, showing a vast quantity of plants and animals appearing on the scene in the blink of an evolutionary eye more than 500 million years ago. In a period of less than 10 million years, there is a sudden explosion of nearly all the animal phyla we have today. As leading Darwin cultist Richard Dawkins describes the Cambrian fossils, “It is as though they were just planted there, without evolutionary history.” Darwin himself referred to the great difficulty of explaining the absence of “vast piles of strata rich in fossils” before the Cambrian explosion.

  Origin of Species–thumpers prefer to ignore the Cambrian explosion and prattle instead about the “evolution” of “girl crushes”—as one article did in the New York Times Style section. (“Social scientists suspect such emotions are part of women’s nature, feelings that evolution may have favored because they helped women bond with one another and work cooperatively”—and you know how cooperative we gals are.) This is where all the deep thinking about evolution is being done these days, in the “social sciences” and the Style section of the New York Times.

  Or the Darwiniacs lie about the duration of the Cambrian period, as Jerry Coyne does to nerd public policy wonks reading the New Republic who don’t know any better. Referring to “the so-called ‘Cambrian explosion’ “—as if even the name is a fraud— Coyne writes,” `Short period’ here means geologically short, in this case 10 million to 30 million years.” This is both misleading and false (which isn’t easy!). The best estimate for the duration of the Cambrian explosion is not 10 to 30 million years, as evolutionists like Coyne often claim, but 5 to 10 million years. And that is the maximum length. When dealing with rocks half a billion years old, it’s impossible to resolve times to less than 5 to 10 million years (just as with a telescope it’s impossible to distinguish two faraway objects if they are close together). In other words, the explosion of animal life could have happened in an instant, but from our present perspective we can’t narrow it down to anything more precise than a window of about 5 to 10 million years. If intelligent design is a crackpot theory being hawked by religious nuts, why are its opponents the ones always caught telling big whoppers?

  These great practitioners of the scientific method, dispassionately pursuing the evidence wherever it may lead, simply pretend the Cambrian explosion didn’t happen (the “so-called” Cambrian explosion, as Coyne says), and anyone who mentions it is a creationist nut. The New York Times will write honestly about Air America’s ratings before high school biology textbooks will tell the truth about the Cambrian explosion.

  When forced to pony up an answer, Darwin’s disciples say, Assume a can opener. Assume that the creatures that preceded the Cambrian era failed to fossilize (as they said about the intermediate fossils that also aren’t there). Assume they were soft-bodied creatures evolving like mad, but leaving no record because of their squishy little microscopic bodies. Yes, that would explain it! The evolutionists had no evidence to support that assumption, but at least it couldn’t be disproved—so it was at least on a par with the Flatulent Raccoon Theory of life’s origins.

  Alas, in 1984, Chinese paleontologists discovered fossils just preceding the Cambrian era, and it turned out the pre-Cambrian creatures were extraordinarily well preserved. But instead of a glut of evolutionary ancestors, all we have at the outset of the Cambrian explosion are some sad little worms and sponges. The interesting thing about the pre-Cambrian organisms is that they are soft-bodied, microscopic creatures—precisely the sort of animal the evolution cult claimed wouldn’t fossilize and therefore deprived them of crucial evidence. But now it turned out fossilization was not merely possible in the pre-Cambrian era, the pre-Cambrian beds were positively ideal for fossilization—better even than in the Cambrian period. And yet the only thing paleontologists found there was a few worms.

  The Chinese fossil discovery was, as the New York Times put it, “among the most spectacular in this century.” Scientists were calling it “genesis material.” The discovery showed “that the dramatic transformation of life from primeval single-cell organisms to the complex multicellular precursors of modern fauna was more sudden, swift and widespread than scientists had thought.” For 3 billion years, nothing but bacteria and worms and then suddenly nearly all the phyla of animal life appeared within a mere 5 to 10 million years—”as though they were just planted there.” Jan Bergstrom, a paleontologist who examined the Chinese fossils, said the Cambrian period was not “evolution,” it was “a revolution.”

  Even the famously difficult-to-evolve eye appeared at the beginning of the Cambrian period. And there were no light-sensitive pits. And yet, in 2005—or two decades after the discovery of the Chinese fossils—the New Scientist was still clinging to Darwin’s speculation that the first eyes “probably evolved from light-sensitive cells.” At least when Darwin invoked light-sensitive pits, it was merely question begging. The assertion of the “light-sensitive pits” hypothesis after the discovery of the Chinese fossils is a religious belief held in defiance of the facts.

  Andrew Knoll, Harvard professor of natural history, described the importance of the Chinese fossils, saying, “Most of everything that was going to happen, all the ways of making invertebrate animals, had already happened by the mid-Cambrian. Now, it seems the new life forms were invented within the first few million years of the Cambrian.” Unable to keep using the excuse that they had no fossil evidence because their evidence failed to fossilize, the Darwiniacs quietly returned to pretending the Cambrian explosion never happened.

  In 2005, Jerry Coyne was still trying to pass off the “hard to fossilize” argument to readers of the New Republic, writing, “We still do not understand why many groups originated in even this relatively short time, although it may reflect an artifact: the evolution of easily fossilized hard parts suddenly made organisms capable of being fossilized.” Twenty years after the Chinese fossils were discovered, Coyne was still pretending not to have heard of them.

  The preposterous conceit that the fossil record has produced a beautiful mosaic of organisms consistent with evolution except for the occasional “gap” is absurd. Evolution is nothing but a gap. It’s a conjecture about how species might have arisen that is contradicted by the fossil record and by nearly everything we have learned about molecular biology since Darwin’s day.

  Things do evolve, in a figurative sense. The fifth draft of a script is usually better than the first draft. People do get taller when there’s more protein in their diets. Ellen DeGeneres’s third TV show is better than her first two were. Okay, fine. The cult cites evidence that looks like Michelangelo’s studies for the Sistine Chapel and then claims it has proved the abs
ence of a designer—and brings lawsuits to prevent anyone from saying otherwise.

  Scientists in Communist China have more freedom of speech to discuss scientific facts bearing on evolution than we do in the United States. Chen Jun Yuan, of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, who performed the excavations, says that contrary to Dar-win’s tree of life, which predicts a few primitive organisms gradually branching out into many others, the fossil record shows just the opposite. “The base is wide,” Dr. Chen says, “and gradually narrows.” Chen concluded, “Darwinism is maybe only telling a part of the story for evolution.” (Fortunately, Dr. Chen is not in Dover, Pennsylvania, or Judge John E. Jones III would have prohibited him from saying that.)

  Meanwhile, when a high school biology teacher in America tries to tell his students about the Chinese fossils, he is banned from teaching biology. Roger DeHart used to teach biology at Burlington-Edison High School in Washington State, where he supplemented his curriculum with newspaper stories on the Chinese fossils from newspapers like the Boston Globe and the New York Times. He never mentioned God. The ACLU threatened to sue and the school removed DeHart from his class, replacing him with a recent teachers’ college graduate who had majored in physical education. Thus were the students of Burlington-Edison High School saved from having to hear scientific facts that might cause them to question their faith in the official state religion. The liberal clergy prohibit students from hearing about a fossil bed described in the New York Times as “among the most spectacular in this century.” Then they say it’s because they want to keep faith out of the classroom.

  The Cambrian period isn’t a small gap in the fossil record chock-full of evolutionary evidence. There is no evidence in the fossil record—only “ingenious excuses,” as Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson says.