I hadn’t realized Easterbrook was also an Intelligent Design loon until I read this nice, brief dissection:

For some years now, I’ve read Easterbrook’s occasional pronouncements on evolution and have shaken my head. He likes to call evolutionary biologists fundamentalists, and claims that Intelligent Design is a “sophisticated theory now being argued out in the nation’s top universities.” It’s a “rich, absorbing hypothesis--the sort of thing that is fascinating to debate, and might get students excited about biology class to boot.” (The quotes come from a 2000 Wall St. Journal Op-ed piece. You can read the rest here, at the main web site for Intelligent Design agitprop.)

I haven’t followed Easterbrook’s career at all (neither the New Republic nor ESPN rate very highly in my interests), but I did feel a slight twinge of sympathy when I heard the guy had lost his ESPN column for making some stupid comments, simply because I don’t like to see free expression squelched, even if what he wrote was inexcusable; but this recent column in TNR Online and learning that he pimps for the Discovery Institute has caused any concern for him to evaporate. The man is a blithering twit. Let him babble, but let a thousand blogs bloom with scathing contempt for his words.