Start effin

Shankar Vedantam revisits the greatest mudslide in the history of America's intellectual erosion, "intelligent design." Highlights:

- The world's smallest violin plays for biology professor Caroline Crocker, who claims she was fired from George Mason University for teaching intelligent design. She believes in creation, claims that there is "not a lot" of evidence for evolution, and sees her role as balancing "the 'ad nauseum' pro-evolution accounts that students had long been force-fed."

"Just like they say you can't discriminate against black people, or against gays, maybe they will say you can't discriminate against Darwin-doubters," Crocker told me.

- Vedantam says ID advocates believe the tables have been turned on them.

If Galileo and Copernicus were the scientific rebels who were once punished by the dogma and authority of the church, [intelligent design] advocates now believe that they are being punished by the dogma and authority of science.

- And finally, this tragically ironic proposition:

Given that traditional people tend to have larger families, and that the doubters of natural selection are more likely than not to be religious traditionalists, I asked [Richard] Dawkins whether natural selection may favor those who don't believe in it.

He said: "That's an interesting suggestion that natural selection may favor those who do not believe in natural selection. It might be true."

Yikes. That's interesting spin on theodicy. Into the sack, Darwinists!