Here is part 3 of James Downard’s autopsy of Ann Coulter’s book. As before, I am only posting this guest contribution by Jim Downard as a courtesy to him, without having myself contributed to it. Further installments from Jim are expected.
The last four chapters of Ann Coulter’s latest bestseller, Godless: The Church of Liberalism (thus a third of her book) are devoted to roasting “Darwiniac cultists” for their evolutionary delusions. As explored in the first two parts, Coulter’s ebullient confidence is inversely proportional to her knowledge. In the third part of an ongoing investigation of how Coulter could come to believe the things she does, James Downard looks into the background for one of her baldest assertions: the supposed bankruptcy of Archaeopteryx as a bird-reptile intermediate.
Continue reading Secondary Addiction, part 3, on Talk Reason
You may find this article intersting:
Harris MP, Hasso SM, Ferguson MW, Fallon JF. The development of archosaurian first-generation teeth in a chicken mutant. Curr Biol. 2006 Feb 21;16(4):371-7.
So, rather than gathering information from recognized, noted scientists in their fields, Coulter selected Behe, Berlinski and Dembski. Does she dismiss all others??? What makes these three opinions more valuable or factual than the real leaders in these fields???
This speaks to her motives and agenda. Again, like a poorly written ID or Creationist paper (lol), Coulter has revealed that she is seeking not to learn but, to validate her own beliefs.
After all, why talk someone who doesn’t say what you want to hear?
Nothing changes. Suppose that archaeopteryx is an unfortunate “sad birdlike animal,” wouldn’t that argue against the superb designer?
I at least like the “birdlike” adjective, showing that despite themselves the creationists recognize that it’s no house sparrow, or some other unequivocal modern bird. Did the old line, “it’s just a bird” finally die out among the pseudoscientists?
Wells and Coulter try to spin what is a none-too excellent bird specimen by today’s standards into a liability for evolution, rather than a crushing defeat for the hypothesis of a god-like (has to be godlike, since only gods have completely unknown purposes) designer. The tables are turned, so that “poor design” (compared to modern birds) tells for the designer, while reptilian birds cannot be transitional organisms.
Same old, I know.
What I thought worth mentioning is that technically Coulter is nonetheless right that archaeopteryx is no “transitional” in the strict sense. It may be two or three branches off of the line leading to modern birds, according to the cladists. I know, of course, that the creationists are badly misusing the near-inevitability that we will not find the “true transitional” in any ancient evolutionary sequence.
However, I expect it would be better to try to dispel the misperceptions fostered by IDists etc. than to set the stage for further technically correct statements that archaeopteryx is not transitional to modern birds. Archaeopteryx is part of the adaptive radiation that eventually led to modern birds, and as such is quite informative re the closely related “true transitional”.
Will there ever be a forum in which we could press for a credible IDist explanation for archaeopteryx, rather than simply responding to their ignorant attacks upon the evidence? Downard’s response is necessary and useful, however the IDists once again manage to raise the questions, however badly, while they are do not, and cannot be compelled or cajoled into, telling us what sort of explanation they might have for an unfortunate “sad birdlike animal.”
Does archaeopteryx evince the marks of rational design (which surely would be the best indication of design possible–if perhaps even that is not conclusive by itself (animals produce what appear to be “rational design”))? No? Does it include the marks of derivation, as any evolutionary explanation would require? Certainly.
To be sure, they haven’t been writing for anyone but those religiously committed to antievolution for a long time, thus they never have to give an explanation for an unfortunate “sad birdlike animal.” None of them want actual explanations for phenomena, rather they insist on “design” to be the template for all allowable explanations.
Glen D http://tinyurl.com/b8ykm
Thanks again Mark and James.
Near the top of Section 6 there is a minor typographic error;
This is (2000, 123-126)
Not entirely, her “tutors” and she are no-brainers and lazy.
Excellent! Science vs “Sciency”… Thanks for doing all this work.
If a Designer created all species we see (extant) and potentially all extinct species. Why did the Designer made so many “dead ends” such as Archaeopteryx? Is the Designer a joker or a complete inept to produce that kind of “sad bird-like” creature. Which brings us to the following, if Archaeopteryx did not give way to modern birds, why do IDiots recognize “bird” in the critter? Their failures in logic are only surpassed by their innate stupidity.
Perhaps Coulter’s ebullience is inversely proportional to the CUBE ROOT of her knowledge…?
Thanks Jim for another superbly referenced essay. It’s great to have so many references on the subject collected and organized. I’d like to mention a couple things though. In recent analyses Archaeoteryx tends to come out on the dinosaur side rather than on the bird side, although it is rather hairsplitting. And you have lost count of all the specimens. The tenth was announced last December and discussed at the DML. It pushes Archy further in the feathered dino direction. (Technically birds are dinosaurs and I am an ape, but you know what I mean).
For the layman who can’t see how birds could be related to reptiles as you know them, let me just say that theropod dinosaurs were quite unlike today’s reptiles (other than the flying ones).
Tyrannosaurus wrote:
Why do people keep asking variants of this question? The answer is trivial—and I’m not even a bio-ID proponent.
There is nothing about the bio-ID argument that states the designer has to (a) himself have been designed (a point Dawkins can’t seem to grasp) or (b) be a perfect, benevolent designer. The essence of the claim is that the diversity of life as we see it could not have resulted from purely natural processes. Regardless of the merits of that claim, why do people insist on arguing that alleged incompetence of the designer is an argument against ID? It isn’t. The designer could be less than perfect, and he could be down-right sadistic.
Design incompetence, if it has merit, is an argument against God as the designer, but it is not an argument against ID per se.
I like that term. It’s like Truth and Truthiness. Here we have people who prefer science, the ID movement has people that like things that are “Sciency.” Sometimes, we get to see the worst of it - Sciency Truthiness.
I’ve seen over at UD that most people are ignoring James’ work by noting he’s being insulting and snarky. They’re ignoring the fact he has information to back him up.
Glen: What if archaeopteryx was a “happy birdlike animal?” That would blow Coulter’s entire thesis to Hell, wouldn’t it?
Heddle wrote:
The designer could be less than perfect, and he could be down-right sadistic.
And, um, how many ID proponents, or donors to ID-related causes, would agree with that statement as an “explanation” of anything?
Isn’t that more than half the battle, given that a first estimate of the proportion of ID supporters who believe that God is the designer is “all of ‘em”?
As much as they pretend to be keeping their mouths shut, they’re not. They can’t shut up about Jesus, Genesis, and the atheist conspiracy, and that’s why they look stupid in court, and lose, every time.
“ID per se” does not exist apart from fundamentalist apologetics sufficiently to delineate the two arguments.
heddle asked:
Your problem is that you do have to say something about the designer in order to have a scientific theory – without that all you have is an argument from ignorance.
If you don’t know what you’re talking about you don’t have a science.
So, what is intelligence? Do you know what you’re talking about?
There are several reasons for saying you need to know the designer better, first and foremost, however, is just the unscientific knowledge gained from your past posts that you’re being dishonest and that you actually do think you know some attributes of the designer. You simply refuse to put your beliefs about the designer on the chopping block of critical investigation.
What mental attributes do you think this designer had?
Did it have foresight? Did it have emotion? Did it have a goal? Why does it design life forms? Could the intelligence exist within the germ cells of every evolving organisms? Maybe it’s an almost blind Turing machine in each cell, made of a DNA tape and ribosome computer, that only senses its environment through molecules and snips and pastes sections of DNA based on minimal knowledge?
Perhaps Heddle is trying to leave open the possibility that the Designer was in fact Shiva, and that he is pissed off.
Then what, did the Designer evolve? Or more to the point, why don’t you give us a designer from which predictions are possible? Dawkins is just filling in the blanks that are left deliberately by people like you who don’t want scientific explanations.
We know who the designer is claimed to be, by the way. You guys aren’t very clever in that respect (or any other that I’ve seen).
Then it can’t have resulted from known intelligence, since known intelligences exist and act according to purely natural processes (using the common scientific sense of “natural”).
And no, the essence of the ID claim is that intelligence designed life. That’s a positive claim, for which positive evidence is needed.
Because we’re able to think. You’ve got an idiot savant “designer”, who apparently is capable of designing excruciatingly complex organisms, well beyond our capabilities, who can’t manage to design a decent modern bird in the first shot. The designer is intelligent enough to design feathers and flagella, but gives the archaeopteryx teeth (heavy) and a bony (heavy again) tail.
If supposed exquisite “design” is said to point to an “intelligent designer”, then surely poorly designed organisms are counter-evidence. In reality, all of the evidence for “good designs” and for “bad designs” indicates evolutionary processes, and not design at all.
We constantly hear from IDists that this or that structure is too complex for humans to make. Design improvements on archaeopteryx are not very hard for humans to mentally produce at all.
So which is it, is the “designer” amazingly intelligent in making his creatures, or is he really poor at designing? We’re not willing to accept your standard, which is that so-called good (or more properly, truly excellent in some cases) “design” points to intelligence, while poor design points to what we do not know.
Did anyone mention sadistic designs? Did anyone say that archaeopteryx exhibits nothing that could be called “good design” if it actually were designed?
No, archaeopteryx is “well-designed” in many of its parts, while it is “poorly designed” compared to modern birds in recently adapted theropod dinosaur parts. Like evolution would predict, while at best not being a prediction of ID at all (more likely, we’d expect excellence in “design” across the board from an actual designer, or poor design across the board. Your designer of uneven prowess and/or output is unconvincing).
No one said it was incompetence across the board. And we know that God is the designer, no matter how often you protest.
And of course the real problem with “design incompetence” is that “poor designs” are not simply poorly thought out and/or executed parts of organisms, rather “poor design” has all of the marks of parts being adapted from precursors which are not very well-suited to the new use.
Btw, any intelligent designer would be expected to produce rational designs, at least sometimes. Why is there no good evidence for rational design at all, while instead we only see evolutionary adaptations?
We have an explanation for “poor design”. You have no explanation for anything. Glen D http://tinyurl.com/b8ykm
But this is vintage Heddle. You may wish to remember that Heddle routinely takes things that make no sense in his cosmology and puts them in the category of ‘miracle’. He is convinced that this is not a rhetorical trick, nor that such facts contradict his theory, nor do they lessen the ‘science’ he is trying to peddle. They’re just miracles, that’s all, and they fall outside the scope of science. But that doesn’t mean his scheme explains things poorly, certainly not…
(So maybe the bad features of archaeopteryx were a consequence of the ‘Fall’?)
heddle wrote
I agree (!) with heddle on point 2 (as did Darwin), but not on point 1. Try running a putative designer with the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to do the designing (and manufacturing) through any of Dembski’s design detection apparatus (EF, CSI, SC) to learn why.
RBH
Glen Davidson wrote:
The designer could have evolved. Nothing precludes it. You are making a lot of (false, as it turns out) claims about “people like me.” Dawkins has made the “then who designed the designer argument.” It’s a dumb argument when anyone makes it, including someone as smart as Dawkins. And I don’t claim ID is science, so I am under no obligation to use it to make predictions.
I suppose, if nit-picking is your form of argument. Any reasonable person would understand that I meant this: ID does not rule out that a less-than-perfect evolved intelligent creature imperfectly “built” some subset of components of life on earth. Yes, in that view it was all “natural” but what I clearly meant was that life on earth (in this view) required intelligent intervention, and did not arise solely by evolutionary processes.
Again, the motivations and perceived shortcomings of the designer are not relevant. It is only a question of whether it could have happened without intelligent, though not necessarily omniscient or benevolent, intervention.
How often I protest—hmm, that would be zero, since I am on record as claiming my belief that the