Jewcy on Evolution

The wonderfully named online magazine Jewcy, has been hosting a discussion about evolution and ID. Three entries so far:

Neal Pollack gets the ball rolling by suggesting that he wants his children to grow up “utterly intolerant” of creationism. My kind of guy!

Discovery Institute flak David Klinghoffer recites the standard talking points.

Yours truly brings it home with this eloquent missive.

I certainly like where Pollack ends up:

A parent can no longer assume that his children won't encounter anti-evolutionary propaganda. While I'm skeptical about religion, I'm not opposed to faith and spirituality. Elijah goes to a Jewish preschool, after all. But the other side preaches a dangerous ideology. When faith gets in the way of facts, I get angry.

Well said! Alas, I fear he may be remembering a golden age that never existed:

But times have changed. Back then, evolution was as accepted as the Earth's rotation on its axis. The Scopes Monkey trial was 60 years in the rear-view. Hard Darwinian science had trumped the skeptics and the nincompoops. I doubted evolution no more than I doubted that my heart pumped blood through my body.

That's certainly how scientists viewed the matter then, and continue to view the matter now. But I suspect the public was not so in tune with this view as Pollack seems to think. More realistic was that evolution played such a small role in school science classes, that it was easy for people just to ignore the issue altogether.

As for Klinghoffer, you might remember him as the fellow who wrote about the Richard Sternberg affair for The Wall Street Journal. In Klinghoffer's straight-from-Neptune version, Richard Sternberg was a courageous seeker of the truth oppressed to the point of career ruin by Darwinian stormtroopers angered by his publication of a pro-ID paper in the journal he edited. The simple reality was that Sternberg abused his position as editor to publish a very bad pro-ID paper, and in retribution for embarrassing everyone associated with the journal was made to suffer some disapproving looks from his colleagues. Ed Brayton states it plain.

Anyway, Klinghoffer is in full talking point mode:

ID theory represents an inference from scientific facts, facts agreed to by all scientists, like the nanotechnology in the living cell and the information-rich software of DNA. This is not Bible-based creationism. No Darwin critic that I know differs from established scientific conclusions about the age of the earth or of the universe since the moment of the Big Bang. The issue dividing Darwin advocates and Design theorists is a question of the interpretation of universally accepted data for the purpose of describing events in the distant past.

Get the idea? I'll leave the refutation as an exercise to my readers.

Anyway, go read the whole exchange. Do it now!