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The gang here really should not miss this spectacularly entertaining and interesting exchange of letters between David Berlinski and his critics. Berlinski wrote a piece for Commentary last year called "Has Darwin Met His Match?" (unfortunately one must pay to read it), and these letters (free) are responses and reactions to it.

Lots of luminaries chime in: Paul Gross, Jason Rosenhouse, Matt Young, George C. Williams and others pace Berlinski; Behe, Dembski, Wells, Oakes and others in conditional support.

Berlinski is my hero. This guy is the most urbane, unflappable, erudite, witty and good-natured son of a gun writing in science today, and boy can he write. Check out his skewering of Gross --- it is priceless!

The questions surrounding evolution are serious ones, and the jig is not up. Berlinski grasps the complexity of the problem in ways that many evolutionary biologists don't. He is not a cheerleader for Dembski, and in fact has concluded that Dembski's approach will not be very fruitful because it depends on probabilities, and, as he says, high improbability is not that interesting after something has already happened. In other words, a highly improbably event will occur just as often as one would expect it to occur, not more and not less. But after it's happened, one cannot argue that it could never have happened. Berlinski believes Dembski has painted himself into just such a corner.

Anyway, read these letters. Really good stuff.

Good stuff indeed. I liked these bits:

The fruits of evolutionary theory are disseminated in thousands of research articles in dozens of journals every year. Obviously, the people charged with the responsibility of entering their labs and solving problems find it useful. Numerous complex systems have been studied and the major steps of their evolution revealed. Where data are copious, they are all in accord with Darwinian expectations; where mysteries remain, the problem is a lack of data, not a lack of theoretical robustness. -JASON ROSENHOUSE

Because he cannot get his hands on the steering wheel, Mr. Berlinski reaches for the brakes, asserting that a large domain of interest is or should be permanently exempt from scientific inquiry. This has been a standard plea of the religious for the last several centuries, and Mr. Berlinski’s formulation—that the search for “the ineffable inimitable” is fruitless—is a classic of the genre. History has not been kind to those who predict an end to scientific progress, and declare God to be the sole possible explanation for the remaining mysteries. -CLAY SHIRKY

Intelligent-design theory can be summed up, as best I can determine, by two propositions: there is a creator and evolutionary theory is false. Its advocates do not believe the creator is sophisticated enough to have created our universe in such a complex way. It appears they would prefer a magician, waving a wand and shouting magical words of creation. -S.L. BACCUS