Bird Flu and Love Affairs

Anne Applebaum has a column on Avian flu here. She criticizes Americans' "love affair with intelligent design," but her slight is based on the common error of failing to distinguish between microevolution, which is non-controversial, and macroevolution, which is. If she were even moderately informed about ID and the current challenges to macroevolutionary theory, she would have known that the kind of evolution she is talking about - microevolution - is not disputed. But then, why should she go to the trouble of getting moderately informed? For many of her readers, her rhetorical flourishes based on ignorance are more effective.

What are they teaching them in school these days, anyway?

Jonathan Witt discusses it here, so I don't need to say more.