I don't like everything she says and does but I have to say her liberal critics just cast rocks at her character , not her facts.
Okay, then this conservative critic will have to cast rocks at her "facts".
Let's start with this gem:
There is no reason to expect, for example, that the first place our eyes ever appeared was on the front of our faces. Why don’t we have ancestors with eyes on the bottom of their feet, on their arms, or on top of their heads? Eyes might be best positioned in the front of our heads, but eyes on the bottom of our feet are better than no eyes all, and so should have stuck around at least for a while in the fossil record. But they’re not there. -- Godless
Clearly, Coulter is blissfully ignorant of the fact that a starfish has its "eyes" located at the ends of its arms, and has had them there for the last 450 million years or so.
Then there's this nugget:
The evolutionists' proof is their capacity to concoct a story. They say the whale “evolved” when a bear fell into the ocean. -- Godless
First off, no evolutionary biologist in 2006 says any such thing, and I'll fork over $100 to the first person on this board who sends me a reference to a peer-reviewed journal article in the field of evolutionary biology from this century that contends any such thing. Most likely, Coulter is deliberately misrepresenting an overly speculative (and subsequently retracted) passage from
Origin of Species about how a whale-like species might evolve over time from environmental pressures by way of the mechanism of natural selection:
In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale. – Charles Darwin, Origin, ch. 6
Now, given its context within
Origin, it should be obvious to anyone not suffering from a reading comprehension problem or an intention to misrepresent that Darwin was not suggesting that an individual bear would be miraculously transformed into a whale simply be virtue of falling into the ocean. To ascribe that meaning to the passage is to reveal either severe intellectual limitations or a sincere desire to mislead. Since Coulter's educational background suggests she is far from an imbecile, one must conclude that the latter holds true. It is bad enough that she bases her crticisms of modern evolutionary theory on a 150 year old source, it's worse that she can't even do so honestly and must create a straw man. Given that Darwin was quite off base with this speculation, she would have done better criticizing the passage on its merits. She would have been recharting territory that was already surveyed by 1859, but at least she would have been honest and could then have gone on to dismantle various theories about ether and phlogiston.
Then there's this:
Continuing its tradition of helping the poor and enslaved, in 1986 the State Department Informed African nations that the United Slates would no longer provide aid to countries using DDT -- Godless
As far as I have been able to determine, no one has yet figured out where this comes from. If someone knows, please post the cite. At this moment, it appears that Ann once again is "confused" and that what she is referring to here is a 1986 telegram from George Schultz to US embassies instructing them to inform African governments that the US would not participate in programs using DDT, not that the US would cut off aid. It would seem that in Ms. Coulter's mind, Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State was a Godless liberal. As for cutting off aid to countries using DDT, this might come as a surprise to Swaziland, which did not discontinue the use of DDT (
http://www.malaria.org/DDTEconomist14_XII_00.html) and continued to receive US aid into the 90s (
http://www.census.gov/prod/2/gen/96statab/inttrade.pdf).
Of course, the DDT argument may be academic anyway. DDT resistance is already appearing in South African mosquitoes (
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...e&db=PubMed&list_uids=14651656&dopt=Abstract). But then again, Ann doesn't believe in evolution, so she probably has discounted this in her equation.
then what is mutation