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Oh, I how I wish I had written this.
Mind the Gaps. Intelligent design as an answer to all life's great conundrums. [Slate Magazine]
Dahlia Lithwick is good.
[Intelligent Design] says, 'You know those damn theoretical gaps and conundrums that send microbiology graduate students into dank basement laboratories at 3 a.m.? They don't need to be resolved at all. Go back to bed, sleepy little grad students. God fills those gaps."
We have to have our humor and sarcasm. Otherwise we'd be crying - no, wailing and gnashing our teeth - over the assault on science in this nation.
For a look at what's going on in Dover, PA, read what our friends at the Discovery Institute blog have to say about the latest goings-on at the trial. Then read what the folks at Panda's Thumb have to say about DI's commentary.
These two blog entries provide as tidy an illustration as one could ask for of how easily the ID forces spin their reality - Barbara Forrest is a big fat liar! - and then how difficult a rebuttal is - it takes so much work and effort and detailed information that the audience can be lost long before you are halfway there.
- ID - you can't listen to this woman, she's a liar and all her supposed evidence is hearsay!
- Ahhhh....So simple, so succinct, so sufficient.
- The response - many paragraphs long, and you'll have to read these court transcripts and then parse them and then let me explain the difference between the standards for evidence in academic publishing versus in a court of law and...are you still with me?
- Wha?....Say, did you hear about that Forrest woman? I heard she was a liar.
I think I have to go back to writing about science and engineering's entrenched and sometimes hostile resistance to diversity for awhile, just to cheer myself up.
4:49:56 PM 
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I am a huge mega-fan of The New Yorker. And you might be, too, after you read their take on Intelligent Design, by Paul Rudnick, in the Shouts & Murmurs feature.
Here's a teaser quote, to make you go read the whole thing:
Day No. 1:
And the Lord God said, 'Let there be light,' and lo, there was light. But then the Lord God said, 'Wait, what if I make it a sort of rosy, sunset-at-the-beach, filtered half-light, so that everything else I design will look younger?
'I'm loving that,' said Buddha. 'It's new.'
'You should design a restaurant,' added Allah.
Just wait till you get to the part where the Inca sun god scoffs at the Lord God and brings up evolution. :)
4:40:12 PM
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