My genuine, heartfelt sympathies go out to Jay Mathews, who proposes today in the Washington Post that we lure "intelligent design" into the classroom so as to crush it by the awesome force of reason and logic. Heh heh heh. Ho ho ho! Ah, I remember the time, not too long ago, that I was a young neophyte guest-blogging for the Washington Monthly, putting forward a very similar "clever" idea. Rest assured, the abuse I got for even suggesting such a thing—much of it from scientists far, far smarter than I, and much of it wholly, painfully correct—was swift and merciless. So I don't envy Mathews one bit.

(And yes, yes, I've seen the light, no ID for the classroom. It's all well and good to suggest that teachers could just weigh evolution against ID in a reasoned and thoroughgoing way and thus show the latter to be wholly deficient; in practice, though, this is unlikely to happen. Reason prevails less often than we'd like to imagine. Et cetera. Oh, and go visit Panda's Thumb!)