Ann Coulter & Wm. Provine: Evolution's Odd Couple

Coulter wrote a best seller, Godless: The Church of Lliberalism. She's also a skinny attorney who hates most liberals and rants as if still married to six of them. She also dislikes Darwinism and the preferential treatment that it gets in some public schools. The distinguished evolutionary scholar, William Provine, agrees that the standard edition of evolution has some moth holes but he probably likes more liberals than does Coulter. In some respects, they complement each other and I have a perverse twitch when I read them back to back...

ANN

Coulter believes in IQ, capital punishment, and extending to unborn children the protections that we give to Illegals and criminals. (Hoorah!) And in treating criminals and illegals like we now treat unwanted fetuses. (Hoorah, again!) She makes her case on contemporary social issues for 198 pages but saves the last 100 for her thoughts about us Darwinians. I enjoyed the first part but felt "unfair" and sometimes embarrassed in the second. I also enjoyed some of her comments about my less-gifted contemporaries: "No one disputes that a monkey looks like a human, especially in the case of Al Franken." WOW!

Her wit and arguments impress me, she knows our flaws:

1) She accepts the notion that time and genes produce incremental changes but the random mutation into desirable traits seems implausible: many of us ordinary folks agree, always have, and don't see a need for much else. On the other hand, the cognitive types in California argue that adaptations are needed because random experiments at birth by neurons should lead only to dolts. Gould's idea was that "constraint" describes boundaries and opportunities for genetic changes and becomes plausible in the frameworks now offered by statistical physics. Design, maybe yes, and one that accelerates its skills with each generation; designer, no.

2) Selection is a tautology. So what. Tautology is an equal opportunity whore who, for some cash and a little respect, will do anything. Evolutionists are neither her first nor last customer.

3) We can't find new species and Darwin's Origins claimed to be about new species. Even the Galapagos started with 17 kinds of finch and 150 years later, Coulter finds that 17 are still there. MacArthur & Wilson, however, found that acreage determines the number of species but I'll go along that the magic 17 may be the same 17. Want more birds? Give me more land! (I understand that cichlids speciate within an African lake but I need to check on that fact.)

As for the lack of transition species in the fossil record, a) mothers eat deviants, and probably before any of them turns to rock, b) mutants need to reproduce with something and most critters, not just Tommy Cruise, are picky breeders, c) some of us argue that behavior changes occur before those of bones, and d) given the mutual resonance between critters and the worlds they make, very little might change until a rock falls. (I understand that heat shock proteins restore protein functions after a toxin or mutagen but, given enough exposure, stabilize the deviant forms into something reproducible. The deviations, however, tend to be throwbacks to earlier forms! (Lots of "maybe" here: Raff, for example, suggests that earlier DNA sequences can be active for 5 million years after their last expression. Want to see an anthropologist's ancestor?)

4) She's unrelenting. She found out about the bogus moth data and that Dawkins' story is untrue: there is no computer simulation that makes an eyeball. I suspect that she is correct that teachers still tell these stories. I also agree that a lot of evolutionists use them as examples because the story is so damned convenient. But so was the tale of Jesus walking on water. And even John Donne viewed the crucifixion as a suicide.

WILLIAM PROVINE

Provine sits in an endowed Chair in biological sciences at Cornell. He wrote a magnificent history of Sewall Wright and tells some of the debates that Wright had with Ron (RA) Fisher. (For those of you in Limbaugh's Riolinda: Wright was one of three - Fisher, Wright, & Haldane - who integrated Mendelian genetics with natural selection. Wright also gave us the foundations for path analysis, used widely in modern behavior genetics, and his model of evolutionary change is still with us and doing well.)

His "Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics" is short, rich, and surprising. Provine gave us a fine history of the debates between Darwin and Thom Huxley and Frank Galton. The former was usually an incrementalist, the latter two saw evolution as sometimes taking giant steps. Provine follows the debate up through Haldane's contributions but it continued for another 60 years. Gould is dead and Ed Wilson seems to be quieter: "All my rowdy friends done settled on down..."

Surprise! Darwin had his own problems with Coulter's intellectual forebears: many of them liked the idea of evolution but couldn't appreciate Selection. Some of them had no sense of deep time, some of them (by an instinct that Coulter shares?) needed a Designer. That is, cathedrals need architects but no one remembered that architects learned from millennia of smaller churches that grew from caves.

Provine's Afterword, however, is the big story. It was written about thirty years after the rest of his book and, except for a phrase on the cover, hides behind the bibliography. Provine lists ten domains where he no longer believes as he once did. For example::

1) Selection accomplishes nothing; it an outcome, not a mechanism.

2) The evolution of ears, proteins, and genes do not necessarily parallel each other.

3) Gene pool, random drift, genetic homeostasis, species, microevolution vs. Macro...all illusory unless approached so carefully as to make them almost useless!

Darwinian theory can be a Cheshire Cat.

BOTTOM LINES

I grew up in the United States of Toby Keith, conceived by a redneck southern mother and a stoic military father. I can't stand most liberals, love evolution, and resonate with much of what Coulter and Provine say. Coulter, however, does collages, Provine lays bricks. Coulter tries to be the older sister from hell, Provine the calm uncle. Both create magnificent works. On the other hand, my mother's genes, in spite of my father's gentle manner, hunt for narcissists with whom to fight. Coulter is a natural whose talent deserves better coaching in evolutionary theory!

1) She wants equal time for Intelligent Design (ID). I don't. I spent three years of my childhood in swampy south Georgia. School opened with bowed head and mumbling lips but my grit serotonin allele,* the one my feuding mother supplied, is still pissed.** And, today, I want neither my cart nor my country to follow only one horse, reared by a fundamentalist nag.

2) The teachers that Coulter rips for messing up math and grammar do no better when they teach evolution. They would also make a mess of ID. ID is no cure for evolutionary mistakes, a more humble appreciation for what we don't know probably is.

3) We evolutionists need a good predator to keep us lean, smart, and awake. Coulter is one such. Meanwhile, she should know that most academics in the social sciences distrust people who believe in human instincts and in IQ. The faculty who don't like her also don't like us; on the other hand, Coulter and we evolutionists could sometimes get along, at least those of us who are not liberals!

4) Statistical physics, especially as translated by Philip Ball, Steven Strogatz, Duncan Watts, and Albert Barabasi, show us structures evolve and explore, structure that guide genes. Still the odd kid on the playground, I search within the boundaries of "maybe" rather than imagining someone who laid kindling and lit a fuse for the Big Bang. Did the BB left us debris that, examined with the right questions, reveals conditions in place before it happened and that, if reinstated, will make another Big Bang? My own descendants, every one of them selection's child, will figure it out...

James Brody

"5HTTLPR S, correlated with neuroticism, lower NEO scores, and greater risk for suicide or aggression, particularly if impulsive. See Lesch, KP (2003) Neuroticism and serotonin: A developmental genetic perspective. In Plomin, R., DeFries, J. Craig, I. & McGuffin, P. (Eds) (2003) Behavioral Genetics in the Postgenomic Era. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Assn. pp. 389-424. 5HTTLPR S is one partner in psychiatry's recognition that environments interact with genes. (Christ had the same short allele that I do?)
**Janisse Ray came from a people whose members often courted jail and early death. Her magnificent book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, details 1) her rearing in south Georgia and life with her bipolar father and grandfather and 2) the swampland ecology of that region and the stubborn people who settled it.

JimB

References:
Coulter, A. (2006) Godless: the Church of Lilberalism NY: Random House.
MacArthur, Robert & Wilson, E.O. (1967/2001) The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Provine W (2001) The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. (Revised Ed.) Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press.
Raff, Rudolf (1996) The Shape of Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Copyright, 2006, James Brody, all rights reserved.