A pompous kook named Bryan Appleyard has a pro-ID piece in the London Times—may I be forgiven for briefly thinking maybe America isn't damning itself with this anti-scientific tripe if we manage to poison the rest of the world with it, too?—and I'm not going to spend much time on it. I've run into Appleyard's hackwork a few times before, and I can't say that I like the flavor it leaves in my mouth. Fortunately, Educated Insolence has already given it a good going over. I'll just pick up one error that just happens to annoy me a lot—it's an idea that isn't unique to creationists, but also too common among some people who favor evolution.

Furthermore, the claims of neo-Darwinism have been expanding. In the form of evolutionary psychology it now claims to be able to explain human behaviour in spite of the fact that a key aspect of human behaviour is that it has stopped the processes of evolution, by, for example, using contraception and keeping handicapped people alive.

I'm no fan of evolutionary psychology (or Evolutionary Psychology), but it's about historical influences on human behavior; that circumstances have now changed from our prior hunter-gather environment doesn't mean past evolutionary events don't affect us. But the main bit of nonsense here is the ridiculous idea that evolution has stopped for us. It hasn't, and in fact is probably accelerating, in the sense that we've removed many selective forces that would have culled back variants in the past—we're accumulating novelties in our genomes faster than before. It should also be self-evident that not everyone has children, and different people have different numbers of children, and people have different levels of success in raising healthy children to adulthood. The only way one could think evolution has stopped is if one has a very poor idea of what evolution is.