In the summer of 2006, I heard that a new book called Godless presented an insightful and devastating criticism of the theory of evolution. Although I learned that its author, Ann Coulter, is not a scientist but a lawyer turned author and TV pundit, she nevertheless appeared to be an intelligent and well-educated person, so I started reading. At first I was puzzled. There did not seem to be anything new; only tired and outdated antievolution arguments involving moths, finches, and fruit flies. But it wasn’t until Coulter dusted off the old Piltdown Man story that I suddenly realized: it was a hoax! And it was brilliant.
Coulter has very cleverly written a fake criticism of evolution, much like the way NYU physicist Alan Sokal in 1996 published a fake physics article in a literary journal, an affair that has become known as the “Sokal hoax.” A self-proclaimed “old unabashed leftist,” Sokal was disturbed by the sloppily antiscientific, postmodernistic mentality that had started to replace reason and rationality within the academic left and ingeniously made his point by managing to get his nonsense article published by the very people he wished to expose. … However, whereas Sokal revealed his hoax in a separate article, Coulter challenges her readers to find out the truth for themselves. Without claiming to do justice to Coulter’s multifaceted and sometimes subtle satire, I will attempt to outline some of her most amusing and salient points.
Intelligent Design and Astrology
The attacks on evolution these days come not so much from traditional creationists, adhering to the literal interpretation of Genesis, as from proponents of intelligent design (ID), the notion that some biological systems are so complicated that they must have been designed. Unlike creationists, the ID proponents refuse to identify the designer; in particular, they do not mention God. As a matter of fact, design is only defined as “anything else but chance.”
A problem with ID that has been pointed out over and over is that it isn’t much of a scientific theory, as it does not attempt to explain anything, only criticize evolutionary biology. Coulter makes this point subtly. She nicely summarizes the theory of evolution by listing the main driving forces, mutation and natural selection, and the conclusion, creation of new species. And the corresponding summary of ID? Absent! Admirably clever.
Two of the most vehement ID advocates are Michael Behe and William Dembski. Behe is a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and one of very few ID proponents who is actually a scientist with an established research record. In 1996 Behe published Darwin’s Black Box, which claims to present a biochemical challenge to evolutionary biology, a claim that has been thoroughly opposed, for example, by Brown University biology professor Kenneth Miller. It is hard for most of us to follow the technical arguments, but Behe would be the first to admit (and in fact does so on his academic Web site) that he is very lonely among his peers in advocating ID.
Coulter makes fun of Behe by vastly exaggerating his claims. For example, she claims that Behe has “disproved evolution” by demonstrating it to be a “mathematical impossibility.” The truth is that Behe, who has no expertise in mathematics, accepts much of evolutionary theory.
On occasion, Coulter’s satire is quite esoteric. Such is the case when she states, “Behe disproved evolution—unless evolution is simply a nondisprovable pseudoscience, like astrology.” To understand the subtle linking of Behe to astrology, one must be familiar with Behe’s testimony in the Dover trial in which he had to concede that if intelligent design was accepted as science, one must also accept astrology.
The other front figure, William Dembski, is a research professor in philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. I think Coulter is perhaps overly sarcastic when she lists his background: doctorate in mathematics, master of divinity degree, postdoctoral work in mathematics, physics, and computer science.
The sarcasm here is that Coulter lists postdoctoral positions in physics, mathematics, and computer science, but when one looks up Dembski’s publication record, none of these positions led to any published research. In fact, Dembski has published precisely one original research article in a reputable journal: a 1990 paper on probability theory. Coulter goes on to refer to Dembski’s “complicated mathematical formulas” and “statistical models” and jokes that there is yet no serious response. In reality, the few mathematicians who have bothered examining Dembski’s mathematics have been completely unimpressed. A nice summary and evaluation of Dembski’s oeuvre was written for the Dover trial by renowned mathematician Jeffrey Shallit. Shallit’s conclusion in one word: pseudomathematics.
