I sat down and read this article by Jeff Jacoby. I'm thinking my freshman students could write a more coherent essay than this, and they shouldn't have been so quick to dismiss journalism as a career.

When John Scopes went on trial in Tennessee in 1925, religious fundamentalists fought to keep evolution out of the classroom because it was at odds with a literal reading of the Biblical creation story. Today, Darwinian fundamentalists fight to keep the evidence of intelligent design in the diversity of life on earth out of the classroom, because that would be at odds with a strictly materialist view of the world. Eighty years ago, the thought controllers wanted no Darwin; today's thought controllers want only Darwin. In both cases, the dominant attitude is authoritarian and closed-minded -- the opposite of the liberal spirit of inquiry on which good science depends.

The emphasis above is mine. Jacoby blithely glides over a crucial detail, there—what evidence? I wonder if he has actually read books by Johnson and Dembski and Behe and Wells—I have—because those books don't actually offer any evidence for Intelligent Design creationism. They typically yammer about difficulties in simplistic models of natural selection, models they don't seem to understand very well, and then throw up their hands and say, 'it's so complex, it must be designed!' All well and good, but those aren't arguments for design. I could also point to some gap in our knowledge, say that difficult and poorly understood transition from the prebiotic world, and say 'the Blue Fairies did it!'. Or I could suggest something about autocatalytic sets and ribozymes. Neither vague notions of Intelligent Design nor Blue Fairies nor ribozymes are supported by the absence of knowledge; only one of those three has any evidence behind it, or offers promise for future research. Which should be taught?

(The Blue Fairies are a much prettier idea than the other two, and have a great deal of esthetic and emotional appeal…but those aren't reasons for teaching it, either. Ideas shouldn't be taught in science class because we like them or their consequences, but because they accurately reflect the status of the natural world. And, honestly, evolution is often a harsh and ugly philosophy. But then, so's gravity.)

If intelligent design proponents were peddling Biblical creationism, the hostility aimed at them would make sense. But they aren't. Unlike creationism, which denied the earth's ancient age or that biological forms could evolve over time, intelligent design makes use of generally accepted scientific data and agrees that falsification, not revelation, is the acid test of scientific validity.

He keeps saying this, but I don't think he knows what the words mean. What scientific data? Where? I haven't seen any used by the Intelligent Design creationists. Or is he hoodwinked by the fact that people like Behe parrot well-established scientific observations, and then put a non-scientific spin on them?

I'd also argue that falsification is a simplistic and naive view of scientific validity, but if I give him that, how does Jacoby explain away the fact that Intelligent Design, where specific, has been falsified, and that the bulk of Intelligent Design 'theory' is so vague that it cannot be falsified?

In truth, intelligent design isn't a scientific theory but a restatement of a timeless argument:

Ow! I've got whiplash! Can I sue?

One moment he's saying all this stuff about how ID is all scientific and eggheady and non-godly, and now he's admitting it's not scientific and…

that the regularity and laws of the natural world imply a higher intelligence -- God, most people would say -- responsible for its design.

…implies God. Is this Jacoby fellow incapable of building a coherent argument? Does he get paid for this?

Intelligent design doesn't argue that evidence of design ends all questions or disproves Darwin. It doesn't make a religious claim. It does say that when such evidence appears, researchers should take it into account, and that the weaknesses in Darwinian theory should be acknowledged as forthrightly as the strengths.

Again with the "evidence of design". Show me some!

In the first sentence of his paragraph, he says that ID is a "restatement of a timeless [religious!] argument" implying the existence of a "higher intelligence", which he identifies as "God"; in his third sentence, he says "It doesn't make a religious claim". There is a space of 14 words between those two contradictory statements. If nothing else, this essay establishes an upper bound on the length of a train of thought that Jeff Jacoby can maintain. I suspect that he might be able to compete with a caffeinated gerbil.

That isn't primitivism or Bible-thumping or flying spaghetti. It's science.

It uses scientific data, it's not a scientific theory, it implies God, it doesn't make a religious claim, and now it's science again. I think I'm going to have to test his attention span against that of a caffeinated gerbil on meth.

Never, ever trust a creationist argument, and always check their quotations. In his essay, Jacoby quotes Darwin:

Ironically, Charles Darwin himself acknowledged that there could be reasonable challenges to his theory of natural selection -- including challenges from religious quarters. According to the sociologist and historian Rodney Stark, when ''The Origin of Species" first appeared in 1859, the Bishop of Oxford published a review in which he acknowledged that natural selection was the source of variations within species, but rejected Darwin's claim that evolution could account for the appearance of different species in the first place. Darwin read the review with interest, acknowledging in a letter that ''the bishop makes a very telling case against me."

Sure sounds like Darwin was conceding defeat, doesn't it? I was just informed by Steve Mirsky that this is a classic example of quote mining. What Darwin actually said, in full, was:

the Bishop makes a very telling case against me, by accumulating several instances where I speak doubtfully; but this is very unfair, as in such cases as this of the dog, the evidence is and must be very doubtful.

He's explaining that by singling out the areas where our knowledge is incomplete and ignoring all the parts where we have solid knowledge, the Bishop was making a false argument. I don't know that we can entirely blame Jacoby for this one; his source, Rodney Stark, seems very fond of distorting the issues with selective quoting of this sort.