Jim,

This is one of my favorite of your essays, it's very clear and pointed as well as candid.

I have just enough "liberal" in me to find it difficult to get through Ann Coulter's rants in anything but abstract format, so your summary was immensely helpful for me. Calmer, somewhat more diplomatic conservatives like Rick Santorum are much easier going for me, but they tend to have a duller, more equivocal appreciation of the issues that doesn't touch on the real (meaning technical) issues as well I think.

Provine is a sharp guy, I can buy the argument that selection isn't a mechanism in the same sense that Peter Corning argues against selection being a force and against Stu Kauffman's 4th law of thermodynamics. It's hard to see it being a "driver" of specific change in the sweeping sense that Dawkins sometimes seems to imply when he waxes philosophical.

It's just plain annoying though that people who need to see a "designer" hiding among the shifting clouds will take that as an excuse for supernaturalism. The point of natural science to me is admitting that there is a lot we don't know and then exploring it. Pointing out that many of the details are still missing should be a positive thing, not an excuse to burn textbooks. The mentality that slips in between political ideologies here is very frustrating to me.

I don't see natural selection being the last word in biology at all, I see it as the first step in the exploration. It is the reason why it makes sense to look for natural explanations of biological function, not the answer to their details. I doubt that the realities of biology could ever fulfill the need people have for simple explanations, so it's unavoidable that we end up inserting metaphysics at the points where we get frustrated with the limits of the explanations.

kind regards,

Todd