When it comes to evolution, liberal and conservative commentators often have no idea what the controversy is actually about.

James Klinghoffer explains in this post on Evolution News. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

Among hot-button controversies of the day, Darwinian evolution may be unique in being a question on which people express forceful opinions all the time, at high levels of the media and politics, all under a protocol where it’s the norm to have not even a basic idea what you’re talking about.

So Wall Street Journal online columnist James Taranto tries to take to task author Jacob Weisberg for Weisberg’s column on Slate that includes this derisive reference to Republicans in Congress:

Some of the congressional Republicans who are preventing action to help the economy are simply intellectual primitives who reject modern economics on the same basis that they reject Darwin and climate science.

Weisberg has demonstrated ignorant prejudice in the past. He has written elsewherethat intelligent design is the assertion “that gaps in evolutionary science prove God must have had a role in creation.” But Taranto, a conservative, seems to understand even less than Weisberg.

He nicely offers that Weisberg could be more polite in casting insults:

Darwin is a red herring here. Although disparaging people for holding harmless religious beliefs as “intellectual primitives” is awfully uncivil, we agree with Weisberg that people who “reject” the theory of natural selection are mistaken.

I’ve never met a single person, nor heard of one, who “rejects” natural selection. This is not a matter of science but of sociology: They do not exist.

If anyone did reject natural selection, they would be not only “mistaken” but probably delusional. In reality, the evolution debate turns, in part, on the question of how much of life’s history can be explained in the neo-Darwinian terms of natural selection operating unguided on chance genetic variation. Darwin skeptics argue, not on the basis of “religious beliefs” whether harmless or otherwise, that the development of complex life may be explained in this Darwinian fashion only up to a point.

Read the rest.

If you are reading an article about intelligent design and evolution, and it is devoid of references to specified complexity, probability bounds and protein sequences, then stop reading that article. If the article contains any mention of God or the Bible, then it is also a useless article, because the controversy is about what the scientific evidence shows – not about religion.

Intelligent design is a scientific theory. Opposition to evolution is based solely on scientific concerns. There should be no talk of “beliefs” in articles about evolution and ID. There should only the experimental results showing what natural causes can and cannot do to produce certain effects in nature, like functional proteins. Either we have the means to create these effects using natural mechanisms, or we require intelligent causes to explain them (as in other sciences, like archaeology). That is the issue. Unfortunately, most journalists don’t know that, because they are not reading any science books written in the last 20 years.

To understand intelligent design, read this FAQ. Then read “Signature in the Cell” by Stephen C. Meyer.