How Old Is Ann Coulter

(#pharyngula on irc.synirc.net)

It only took five years. Remember, my Coulter Challenge was for someone to take any of Coulter's paragraphs about evolution from her book Godless , and cogently defend its accuracy. It's been surprising how few takers there have been: lots of wingnuts have praised the book and said it is wonderful, but no one has been willing to get specific and actually support any of its direct claims. Until now.

It takes that special combination of arrogance and ignorance to think anything Coulter said is defensible, so I suppose it's not a huge surprise that our

Liberals' creation myth is Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which is about one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor. It's a make-believe story, based on a theory that is a tautology, with no proof in the scientist's laboratory or the fossil record--and that's after 150 years of very determined looking. We wouldn't still be talking about it but for the fact that liberals think evolution disproves God.

One thing about my Coulter Challenge is that I specifically wanted just one paragraph, one idea, because the typical creationist tactic is to throw out a hundred cursory accusations in a confused mess, so that the poor scientist has to pick through a curdled puddle of logical vomit to find one addressable nugget…and then, of course, once that's been shown to be fallacious, the creationist can stand over the incoherent crapola he's spewed forth and demand that we clean everything up, or he'll declare victory.

Egnor is no exception. He can't possibly make a simple point lucidly, but has to throw out a lot of frenzied chum to distract and give him an escape hatch: so he babbles about evolution being a religion, atheists, obnoxious Darwinists, Scientology, falsifiability, yadda yadda yadda. It's badly written, sloppy thinking, and I give him a D on form alone.

Random Human Neural Firings: Why Political Current-Events Books ...

I make a point of not buying any of these books. I've been burned by them enough times to where I've soured on the entire genre. There's no point in curling up with any of them, be they slanted left, right or center. The way you "read" one of these books for maximum return is, you let someone read it who's paid to read it, let that person pick out whatever new revelations happen to be in the book (and usually they will pick out one or two), let the book pass through the one news cycle it will occupy, and then promptly forget the book ever existed. Some years down the road, these books turn up in a used bookstore like all the others. One of the reasons I like used bookstores is that they are a book's test of time. It's a test of a book's shelf life. If you see a brand new book on the shelf and it looks attractive, fine and dandy. But it may not look that way ten years down the road, and unless you're the type of person to quickly resell a book, it's going to keep sitting there on your shelf, possibly getting less attractive by the day. If you go to a used bookstore, though, and see a 10-year-old book that looks attractive, odds are you'll be fine. Political current-events books and autobiographies have the shortest shelf lives of anything likely to appear in that bookstore. Including the periodicals. The thing about a political book referencing current events is that the book ceases to be relevant as soon as the next election hits or too many of the major figures in the book (or certain key figures) leave office. It may even cease to be relevant upon some single piece of news- a bill addressing something the book spends a lot of time on is passed, for example. By the time it hits a used bookstore's shelf, it seems dated to the point of comedy, sitting alongside titles about Tip O'Neill and Dan Quayle, and books which warn of the consequences of voting incorrectly in an election from the 1980's where both winner and loser have since left public service.

God Is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything

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