Overlooked in the evolution war

Everyone's had a good time taking shots at Ann Coulter's inability to think straight. Some valiant types, like PZ Myers, have even sacrified several hours of their lives to reading and picking apart her pathetic prose. Everything she says is wrong, particularly her efforts to explain why evolution is a myth.

All well and good. This kind of response is necessary. So are international efforts like that of the recent declaration by "67 national academies of science under the united banner of the Interacademy Panel on International Issues [who] blasted the scriptural teaching of biology as a potential distortion of young minds."

But while Coulter makes the rounds of the talk shows and big-city book-signing gigs, her allies in the hinterlands are spreading the same shameful propaganda through more humble media. It's clear they're all reading from the same gospel, likely a 12th-generation photocopy of a printout from the Discovery Institute website. What with America's rural electoral bias, I suggest we should be cultivating more champions of reason and sticking it to Coulter's non-metropolitan ilk.

In my corner of western North Carolina, for example, there's a recent export from from Alabama by the name of Mike Scruggs who has managed to insinuate himself with a local right-wing media machine that prints a series of allegedly local newspapers. In a recent edition of the weekly Hendersonville Tribune, half of which was actually an insert from the John Locke Foundation, Scruggs was given the better part of a full page, plus the main teaser on the front, to argue that Darwinism is "crumbling" in favor of "common sense." He writes:

Despite Darwinism's revered place in science and education, clear physical evidence of one species evolving into another is completely absent. The evidence of Darwinism is a speculative connecting of the dots of very distant shaky, and questionable points of evidence.

And so on and so forth. It evokes Coulter's simplistic dismissal of the entire field of evolutionary biology when she said "There's no physical evidence for it."

The really scary thing is Scrugg's column was just the first in a series that the Tribune promises "WILL ROCK YOUR SOCKS!" (The only hint that perhaps the Tribune's readers aren't quite as keen on creationism as Scruggs and his editors is the fact that they apparently didn't think his headshot and a big NASA stock photo of the Earth from space -- you know the one -- would be enough to move the issue out of their curbside boxes, so they added a picture of the current Miss Hendersonville, a blonde bombshell in the Coulter style.)

You can read similar disingenuous denunciations and falsehoods most weeks in the letters sections of the more respectable daily newspapers in these parts. What defense of science makes it into print appears weak and half-hearted.

Everywhere you look, that ridiculous claim appears again and again. It's global, and our enemies are not overlooking rural America. Neither should we.

The latest Angus Reid poll of American attitudes on creationism are no surprise: 82 per cent believe humans were either created in the current form by god, or some kind of evolutionary process was guided by god.

The poll didn't break down the results by metro and urban responses, but I think we all know what such an analysis would say.

The fact is, there aren't a lot of bookstores around in these bucolic parts, and average folk, if they read much at all, are more likely to find time a two its for Mike Scruggs' ravings than they are to buy Ann Coulters' books. And, I contend, it's places like Hendersonville, NC, where the real battle is being played out.

Is there any coordinated effort to get the word out beyond the major metropolitan areas?