Godless: The Church of Liberalism

by Ann Coulter

  Remarking on the discovery of the pre-Cambrian fossils in China, primitive-chordate specialist Nicholas Holland of San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said, “You just hardly know what order to put the material in now. I mean, you might as well just present the phyla alphabetically. It’s come to that.” As Gould admits when he says transitional forms “are generally lacking at the species level,” even the cult members can’t point to fossils showing the transition from one species to another, which I gather is the general point of the theory of evolution, subtly alluded to in the title of Darwin’s book, The Origin of Species.

  The sad state of the fossil record has led to a schism in the church of evolution. Both sets of Darwin’s disciples demand that we assume miracles to reconcile Darwinism with the fossil record, but the two branches disagree—passionately—about whose miracle is more convincing. As already mentioned, the “neo-Darwinists” respond to all problems in the fossil record by asking us to assume all the creatures we would expect to find if evolution was true and really did exist (really!) —but somehow never fossilized.

  Their hated rivals, the Darwin revisionists, tend to reside at places like Harvard and the American Museum of Natural History and have too much intellectual pride to subscribe to a clunky, obvious miracle like “none of the animals that would support our theory fossilized.” Consequently, the revisionists have given up on trying to defend the fossil record as consistent with evolution. Instead, the revisionists concocted a more sophisticated supernatural occurrence. The miracle proposed by Gould and Niles Eldredge, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, is called “punctuated equilibrium.” The gist of “punctuated equilibrium” is: Evolution, but this time—let’s make it consistent with the fossil record!

  Instead of gradual change occurring by random mutation and natural selection choosing the most “fit” to survive and reproduce—in other words, “Darwin’s theory of evolution”—Gould and Eldredge hypothesized that evolution could also happen really fast and then stop happening at all for 150 million years. Basically what happens is this: Your parents are slugs and then suddenly—but totally at random—you evolve into a gecko and your brother evolves into a shark and your sister evolves into a polar bear and the guy down the street evolves into a porpoise and so on—and then everyone relaxes by the pool for 150 million years, virtually unchanged.

  The important thing is: This happened completely by chance. In other words, the most prominent apologist for evolution came up with a theory of evolution that’s not evolution, it’s a nontheological miracle.

  9

  PROOF FOR HOW THE

  WALKMAN EVOLVED

  INTO THE iPOD BY

  RANDOM MUTATION

  Darwiniacs do not have a single observable example of one species evolving into another by the Darwinian mechanism of variation and selection. All they have is a story. It is a story that inspires fanatical devotion from the cult simply because their story excludes a creator. They have seized upon something that looks like progress from primitive life forms to more complex life forms and invented a story to explain how the various categories of animals originated. But animal sequences do not prove that the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection caused the similarities. It is just as likely that the similarities are proof of intelligent design, creationism, or the Giant Raccoon’s Flatulence theory. The animal-sequence drawings allegedly demonstrating evolution by showing, for example, a little runt horse gradually becoming a grand stallion, are just that: drawings.

  Evolutionists act as if they were the first people on Earth to notice similarities among various species, but this wasn’t a new concept. Biologists had always grouped animals by what they looked like. No one disputes that a monkey looks like a human, especially in the case of Al Franken. Evolution fetishists then position the different species in a make-believe “tree of life” and announce that they have proved evolution. The capacity to draw a diagram and come up with a story about how things might have happened is not science. Janet Reno looks like Elton John. That is not proof that Janet Reno gave birth to Elton John.

  The seductiveness of Darwinism resides in its confusion of similar structures with the engine of creation. The Darwinian sleight of hand consists of the claim that because a human hand, for example, is similar to a bat’s wing, there must be an ancestral relationship. Clearly apes look like us, but that doesn’t mean there is a lineal connection between us and the apes. It certainly does not establish the mechanism responsible for the differences.

  Despite the cult members’ occasional calm assurances that this animal evolved into that, we have no idea whatsoever if one animal descended from another. Fossils do not reveal parent/descendant relationships. It’s all guesswork, requiring frequent revision in light of new fossil discoveries. The animal-sequence drawings in biology textbooks are presented as if they are hard fact, and then a few years later, new fossil discoveries require the sequence to be completely disassembled, rearranged, and put back together again. Then the all-new animal-sequence drawing is presented as if it were hard fact, and the existence of an earlier, completely different sequence drawing is flushed down the memory hole.

  But every few years, the Darwiniacs find some odd creature that looks a little like another creature, and it is triumphantly announced that evolution has been “proved true.” Thus, for example, on April 6, 2006, the New York Times gave prime front-page, above-the-fold space to an article headlined “Fossil Called Missing Link from Sea to Land Animals.” The article quoted unnamed scientists as saying that this discovery “should undercut the argument that there is no evidence in the fossil record of one kind of creature becoming another kind.” So they found an odd-looking fish with weird appendages and pronounced the missing link between fish and land animals. But only if evolution is assumed to be true is there any basis for assuming that the fish is related to fishes without appendages or to land animals—much less for assuming that each step was produced by a brutal battle of survival of the fittest. And there is no reason to assume evolution is true until, among other things, the Darwiniacs can produce a whole glut of transitional animals—i.e., a entirely new fossil record.

  The successive appearance of more complex species does seem to show something that looks like progress. But that has nothing to do with the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection. One also sees progress in the Wright brothers’ increasingly complex airplanes, a master’s paintings, and the advance from the peace pipe to Marlboro Lights—progressions all notable for being the product of “intelligent designers.” The appearance of progress hardly establishes mutation and natural selection as the engine of change. To the contrary, the similarities that so mesmerize Darwiniacs look more like the progress of a designed object than the result of a series of lucky accidents. Far from the fantastic competition of a dog-eat-dog struggle to survive, we see a fossil record that reveals a rather clean, well-organized sequence.

  This is why Stephen Jay Gould referred to the absence of transitional fossils as the “trade secret” of paleontology. As a consolation prize to evolution’s lackeys who still wanted to believe the fossil record wasn’t a complete bust, Gould offered this hopeful spin: “Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.”’ Transitional forms between larger groups means evolutionists can point to reptiles appearing in the fossil record, followed by mammal-like reptiles, followed by mammals. This, they say, proves the mammals came from the reptiles.

  They have no idea if the reptiles are even related to the mammal-like reptiles, much less to the mammals. Again, fossils do not reveal a parent/descendant relationship. The cultists certainly don’t know whether any particular mammal descended from any particular reptile. But more important, the apparent progress from simple animals to more sophisticated higher animals—with no transitional species—looks a lot more like planned, deliberate progress than a series of random mutations.

  Darwiniacs love to cite, for exa
mple, the progress from the reptile’s multiboned jaw to the jaw of mammal-like reptiles with fewer bones, leading inexorably to the single-boned mammal jawbone with two bones moving to the ear. The jawbone metamorphosis didn’t prove evolution, but here at last was one small part of the fossil record that was not wildly inconsistent with the theory of evolution—in contradistinction to the Cambrian period and the absence of transitional species, for example. That’s “proof” when it comes to the state religion: For not disproving evolution, the vertebrate jawbone is said to prove evolution. Michael Moore’s essence is consistent with the Flatulent Raccoon Theory for the origin of life. On Darwiniacs’ standard of proof for themselves, the Flatulent Raccoon Theory has thus been proved true.

  In fact and to the contrary, the much-celebrated migration of the reptile jawbone raises more questions for the theory of evolution than it answers. How did that happen? How, that is, did those bones figure out just where to go? One would think that if they had perfect independence in migrating anywhere, the bones would have landed all over the place, but no, we have no evidence, over the course of the reptile-to-mammal transition, that those wandering bones had any other destination in mind than the one they ultimately found.

  When asked for proof, all evolutionists can do is point to structural differences in broad categories of animals—the “larger groups” mentioned by Gould—as if the very thing they were trying to explain constituted an explanation. Yes, we know a lizard is different from a squirrel. Despite the claims of Darwin’s apostles, people knew that even before Darwin! The question is: Was it the process of natural selection that turned the lizard into the squirrel?

  The evolutionists’ proof is their capacity to concoct a story. They say the whale “evolved” when a bear fell into the ocean. The bat “evolved” when squirrels developed flaps that helped them leap longer distances and fall to the ground more slowly. This isn’t a joke. Cult member Richard Dawkins writes in Climbing Mount Improbable:

  To begin with, an ancestor like an ordinary squirrel, living up trees without any special gliding membrane, leaps across short gaps. [It could jump a bit farther with a flap of skin to provide resistance.] So natural selection favors individuals with slightly pouchy skin around the arm or leg joints, and this becomes the norm… . Now any individuals with an even larger skin web can leap a few inches further. So in later generations this extension of skin becomes the norm, and so on…. It is possible that true flying, as seen in bats, birds and pterosaurs, evolved from gliding ancestors like these. Most of these animals can control their direction and speed of their glide so as to land at a predetermined spot. It is easy to imagine true flapping flight evolving from repetition of the muscular movements used to control glide direction, so average time to landing is gradually postponed over evolutionary time.

  But unlike a squirrel, the bat has a complicated set of elongated bones to support powered wings and, most famously, a sophisticated form of sonar. How did all that evolve, without making the squirrel less fit? Elongated bones would help a bat fly, but it’s hard to see how they would make a squirrel more fit, rather than gangly, unsteady, and slow.

  Needless to say, these hypothesized half-squirrel, half-bat animals do not appear anywhere in the fossil record. So however persuasive one finds the squirrel-falling-from-a-tree explanation for the evolution of the bat, there are no fossils to support it. To the contrary, the bat appears in the fossil record millions of years ago, fully formed and largely indistinguishable from today’s bats. But Darwiniacs have a squirrel and they have a bat and they have a story. Their idea of a “scientific theory” makes psychic readings look like a hard science.

  Moreover, if all species evolved from the same single-celled organism beginning in the same little mud puddle, why hasn’t the earthworm made a little more progress? Was it never, ever desirable in any of the worm’s many dirt holes to mutate eyes or legs or wings or a brain? How could one clump of cells starting in the same little puddle become a human being while others never make it past the amoeba stage? Forget getting to humans, which liberals rank as the lowest form of life. Why hasn’t the earthworm evolved into a beagle? Just for being cute, a beagle can acquire a six-room coop apartment on Park Avenue, surely an evolutionary advantage. The cult members are especially dazzled by the similar DNA in all living creatures. The human genome is 98.7 percent identical with the chimpanzee’s. On the basis of this intriguing fact, psychology professor Roger Fouts of Central Washington University argues that humans “are simply odd looking apes” in a book titled Next of Kin: What Chimpanzees Have Taught Me About Who We Are.

  Except the genome argument proves too much. The human genome is 35 percent identical to that of a daffodil. I think even a Darwiniac would admit humans are not 35 percent identical to a daffodil. Again, the cult’s smoking gun of evolutionary proof turns out to be an imaginary water pistol.

  * * *

  THE “mountains of evidence” for evolution we keep hearing about mostly consist of changes less impressive than those produced every day at the Bliss Spa in New York City. Now and then, nature gives some species a Botox shot, but it generally wears off and the basic model returns. Finches on the Galapagos Islands with deeper beaks begin to outnumber finches with shallower beaks during a drought—and then the population of shallow-beaked finches immediately re-bounds after a rainy season. Bacteria develop a resistance to antibiotics and viruses develop resistance to antiviral medication—but nothing new is ever created. A bacterium remains a bacterium, a virus remains a virus, a finch remains a finch. Even the evolution fetishists do not claim that a mutating AIDS virus is on its way up the tree of life, soon to be a kangaroo. If a rapidly mutating bacterium or virus were proof of “evolution,” then after 3 billion years of nonstop evolution, the only life forms we would have on Earth would be extremely sturdy bacteria and viruses. Humans develop a tolerance for alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine, but no one imagines a high tolerance for alcohol will somehow lead to a new organ, like a tail or a pair of wings.

  Darwin’s Galapagos finches are boldly cited as living proof of the creative power of natural selection. It is triumphantly stated that “now” there are thirteen finch species in the Galapagos Islands, which allegedly evolved from a single finch species. Yes, today there are thirteen species of finches on the Galapagos Islands. Guess how many there were when Darwin first discovered them in 1835? That’s right! Thirteen species. Darwin hypothesized that the thirteen species he found might have “evolved” from one species, just as evolutionists hypothesize that the bat might have “evolved” from a clumsy squirrel. The Galapagos finches are evidence of nothing but the evolutionists’ ability to make up stories.

  If anything, the finches are a major blow to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Despite major changes in the environment on the Galapagos Islands, the formation of new species has never been observed there. There were thirteen species in 1835, and after more than 170 years of wild variation in the environment, mutation, and “natural selection,” there are still thirteen species. The finches’ beaks have moved back and forth in shape and nothing more.

  In a 1991 Scientific American, Darwinist Peter Grant effused about the famous finches, saying that if droughts came only once a decade, natural selection “would transform one species into another within 200 years.” Well, it’s been 170 years since Darwin first saw them and we’re still waiting. If it rained this year, the Galapagos finch population would look exactly like the finch population Darwin first found there. If it was dry, it would look like the finch population he would have found a few years later.

  Human breeders have not been able to produce one biologically novel structure in the laboratory—much less a new animal species—even under artificial conditions. No such demonstration exists; none has ever been provided. The fruit fly has been abused, mutilated, and stressed over the course of thousands and thousands of generations. The poor dumb creature remains what it has always been, a fruit fly in the first instance, dumb in the second. This neg
ative result is perfectly consistent with the long history of breeding experiments, which demonstrate beyond question that species may be changed only within very narrow margins of variability. No practical breeder imagines, for example, that he will ever succeed in creating a chicken with antennae or a pig with a dorsal fin.

  Amid this dismal record, there have been a few exciting developments for the Darwiniacs. There was the discovery of a manlike ape that looked like a transitional fossil between ape and man—the long-sought after “missing link.” There were drawings of embryos demonstrating that vertebrates all looked alike in the earliest stages of development. There was the peppered moth that became darker—allegedly to better camouflage itself from predatory birds—when industrial air pollution blackened the trees in England. It wasn’t terribly impressive in terms of “evidence,” but it filled out a few pages in biology textbooks claiming evolution was a FACT.

  And then, one by one, each of these pillars of evidence for evolution was exposed as a fraud. (Ironically, each appeared to have been an intelligently designed prank.) It’s difficult to imagine that any other “scientific” theory has been beset with as many hoaxes as the theory of evolution—always a good sign of a serious scientific endeavor.

  On April Fools’ Day, 2005, Scientific American magazine ran a mock editorial apologizing for accepting the “so-called theory of evolution.” (Scientific American also sneered at the “alleged” flights of the Wright brothers in 1906—two years after they had flown their first airplanes.) The magazine sarcastically apologized for its belief in the theory of evolution, saying scientists had “dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating, and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.”