An anonymous poster has challenged Ann Coulter’s rebuttal of Darwin in her recent book "Godless," as described in my previous post. This post will add additional source m
aterial as to why Ann Coulter is right and anonymous is wrong.Anonymous poo-poos Coulter’s use of the Cambrian period as proof that the appearance of new species in the fossil record were often sudden and vast, not steady and gradual as in Darwin's theory.
Here’s what Wikipedia says about the Cambrian period – pretty much the same way it is described by Coulter.
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The Cambrian is a major division of the geologic timescale that begins about 542 mya (million years ago) at the end of the Proterozoic eon and ended about 488.3 Ma with the beginning of the Ordovician period (ICS, 2004). It is the first period of the Paleozoic era of the Phanerozoic eon. The Cambrian is the earliest period in whose rocks are found numerous large, distinctly-fossilizable multicellular organisms that are more complex than sponges or medusoids. During this time, roughly fifty separate major groups of organisms or "phyla" (a phylum defines the basic body plan of some group of modern or extinct animals) emerged suddenly, in most cases without evident precursors. This radiation of animal phyla is referred to as the Cambrian explosion.
As for the mathematical possibility that life on earth evolved by random chance, Coulter quotes some very distinguished scientists who reject Darwin’s theory.
The first of these scientists is Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, who wrote a book called “Darwin’s Black Box.” Behe describes various “irreducibly complex” mechanisms (of which there are thousands) whose creation by chance is mathematically absurd. These include complex cellular structures, blood clotting mechanisms and the eye, among others. Coulter quotes several other prominent scientists conceding points to Behe, i.e there is no comprehensive and detailed explanation of the probable steps in the evolution of these mechanisms.
Two other distinguished scientists who have demonstrated the statistical impossibility of Darwin’s evolution are Cambridge astrophysicist Fred Hoyle and his collaborator Chandra Wickramasinghe. Hoyle and Wickramsinghe were awarded the Dag Hammarskjold Gold Medal for Science in 1996. Hoyle won several medals on his own, including the Oxford Prize and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. Wickramasinghe holds the highest doctorate degree from Cambridge and is professor of applied mathematics and astronomy at Cardiff University.
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe are both atheists. I doubt that they believed the earth was created in six days or that it is only 6,000 years old. Anyone who disputes evolution is often categorized as a Christian fundamentalist. As Ann Couter puts it, "You will begin to notice that the Darwiniacs' answer to everything is to accuse their opponents of believing in God - and a flat Earth for good measure - even when responding to an argument based on chemistry, physics or mathematics."
Hoyle & Wickramasinghe calculated the mathematical probability that the basic enzymes of life arose from random processes. They found the odds to be 1 to 1 followed by 40 zeroes. This was, as they said, “so miniscule as to make Darwin’s theory of evolution absurd.”
Their opinion was shared by Francis Crick, winner of the Nobel Prize for his codiscovery of DNA. Crick said “The probability of life originating at random is so utterly miniscule as to make it absurd.”
David Raup, a geologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago states that Darwin was embarrassed by the lack of fossil evidence to support his theory, and devoted a long section of his Origin of Species to rationalize the difference. Raup wrote, “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.”
My anonymous poster also disputes the reality of the ACLU suing to keep information on Chinese research into the Cambrian period out of the classroom. However, they did just that. A high school biology teacher, Robert DeHart, of Burlington-Edison High School in Washington State, was their target. DeHart liked to supplement his curriculum with newspaper articles from the Boston Globe and the New York Times about the Chinese fossils of the Cambrian period. He never mentioned God. After the ACLU threatened to sue, the school removed DeHart from his biology teaching position and replaced him with a recent teaching graduate who had majored in physical education. Coulter concludes: “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.” Amen to that!
Mr. Anonymous has concluded that Coulter’s new book is nonsense and not worth reading. Don’t keep a closed mind like Mr. Anonymous. Buy and read the book. It is highly informative and funny as hell.
