The Buzz: The Great Debate

The pitched battle between evolutionary theory and Intelligent Design has become one of the signature conflicts of the decade. On Pharyngula, PZ Myers picks up the pieces after his debate with Jerry Bergman on whether ID should be taught in schools. Unambiguously he writes, "creationists are not the heralds of a coming paradigm shift; they are the rotting detritus of the old regime of unreason." Elsewhere, on Gene Expression, Razib Khan crunches some numbers which show that 10-20% of people in certain Muslim countries believe in evolution, versus 80% in certain European countries. The support for evolution in the U.S.? 40%. Finally, on The Primate Diaries, Eric Michael Johnson parses centuries of anthropocentric thought which placed man atop the "great chain of being," with other forms of life transitioning smoothly into the inanimate. As Johnson writes, "this vision of divinely ordered perfection was dramatically ripped apart, link-by-link, on November 24, 1859," a date we will observe next week on the sesquicentennial of Darwin's Origin of Species.

Links below the fold.

• I get email on Pharyngula
• Charles Darwin was quite the infidel on Gene Expression
• Breaking the Chain: Ardipithecus Is Not A Missing Link on The Primate Diaries