The American Spectator

might be prepared to admit. I find ideology an easy way to pigeon-hole people into neat classifications, and personally feel that if ideology does exist, Michael Moore and Ann Coulter are one in the same. They are haters of difference, rhetorical kingpins, and masters of playing the man (or women in Ann’s case!), not the issue. When a democratically elected official takes a policy to an election and wins that election, they must be given the latitude to fulfill their policy ideals. If an individual chooses to believe in a world without God, do they not have the same valid beliefs as one who does believe in God? Ann Coulter traverses the line of religious wackiness, like the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons, as similar as the loony tirades of one Michael Moore. These two have more in common than America realizes. They are both intolerant of difference, quick to judge, and completely removed from a world of reality, where bad things happen. Fortunately for us consumers they both have entertaining things to say, and I can’t help but be intellectually challenged and provoked into thought by both of them. br> — Nathan Maskiell /p>

Far from being the “compendium of information” that your writer, Richard Kirk, claims, Coulter’s chapters on evolution are simply credulous regurgitations of the misinformation of notoriously dishonest ID-Creationist activists.

The Miller-Urey experiment (repeatedly and successfully replicated, using more accurate approximations of primordial conditions) and Ernst Haeckel’s embryo drawings (inaccurate, but long since corrected, including in some instances using actual photographs) are lifted straight from Jonathan Wells’s (a Moonie theologian who only studied biology in order to “destroy Darwinism”) dishonest “Icons of Evolution.” The blatant misrepresentations of Gould’s and Popper’s statements by ID-Creationists are an old and long-discredited trick (one which Gould himself complained bitterly about before his death), and Michael Behe (a Biochemist, not a Biologist, and one who has not written anything of significance in the last decade) is hardly a “biological heavyweight.” In fact Behe’s recent woeful performance at the Dover trial would be more likely to qualify him as a “biological incompetent.”

Claims of the statistical improbability of evolution (due to Natural Selection, it is no more “random” than the house-take in a Las Vegas casino is) have been around, and have had their naive claims debunked, for decades. The latest peddler (and one of Coulter’s main mentors on evolution) is William Dembski, whose infamous grandiosity, egotism, intellectual dishonesty and lack of mathematical rigor has rendered him an academic pariah, relegated to teaching in fundamentalist seminaries. His work has been described as “written in jello” by one of the co-originators of the theorems he based his “No Free Lunch” on.

The fact that she has the audacity to claim a lack of transitional fossils clearly demonstrates that she has never herself read Gould, who explicitly stated: “Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists —whether through design or stupidity, I do not know — as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.”

p>So in Gould’s own words, is Coulter dishonest by “design,” or merely by “stupidity”? I leave the readers to decide. Either way she is little more than the sock-puppet for the small and discredited cabal of anti-science cranks that comprises the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. br> — Tim Makinson /p>

I am two-thirds of the way through Godless by Ann Coulter. And like her other books, they are never criticized for the content, but because Ann wrote them. I am still waiting for PBS or some other liberal mucky-muck outfit to prove Ann wrong about Senator Joe McCarthy from her book Treason. Her detailing of McCarthy’s career is the first time anyone ever defended the Senator in any capacity.

p>Clearly if she were so wrong on so many counts, we’d be hearing the details…right? But all I’m hearin’ is…crickets. br> —