why Coulter is wrong part iii

[acroyear]

Talk Reason: arguments against creationism, intelligent design, and religious apologetics:

You may have noticed something about this posting, which should be no surprise for those who are familiar with creationist apologetics. It took many pages to explain why Coulter's single paragraph was wrong. That is one of the daunting challenges facing all who take on the Coulters of the world (or Hovinds ... or even the Discovery Institute pooh bahs). Ignorance and ideology are high compression pursuits, prone to scattershot and rhetorical excess, whereas genuine science is "slow down to thinking speed" and make sure all your facts are lined up properly.

This paragraph was the end of a fascinating article covering the history of the Archaeopteryx discovery, the nature of Europe in the Jurassic that makes fossils hard to find, and the history of pre-Tertiary bird discoveries, exploring their collective relationship to history's first transitional fossil.

Part I of that series covers Coulter's repeat if the "fittest" misconception, and part II deals with her ignorant statements about the general "lack" of transitionals (where she wouldn't even dare call the magnificently predictable Tiktaalik by name).  The latter has a nice detailed explaination of "biogeography" and how it was a major factor in finding the Tiktaalik fossil.  The upcoming part IV will spend probably a million bytes or so on why her one paragraph about the Cambrian Explosion, copied verbatim from Wells, is also utterly wrong in every word.

The other interesting thing is the crediting.  Coulter doesn't directly credit anybody in her evolution section - as Al Franken noted before, Coulter has no concept of footnotes or endnotes.  Indirectly, we know from her interviews that her main sources were Dembski, Berlinski, Johnson, and Wells.

By contrast, TalkReason cites over 100 different articles, most of them peer-reviewed from journals like Nature, Science, and Scientific American.

Comments

[thelongshot.livejournal.com]

It took many pages to explain why Coulter's single paragraph was wrong.

Which is why, in the end, Coulter is winning. She doesn't give a damn if you prove her wrong. All this does is continue to get her attention.

If the media would just stop giving her a bullhorn to sell her books, she'd go away. All she is is an attention whore. Say the most outrageous things in the world, and watch the liberals froth at the mouth.