My, there sure are a lot of Darwin posts recently. It seems there is a rather major communication gap over this issue. Laying aside for a moment the scientific worthiness of Darwinian evolutionary theory, there exists a phenomenon of “metaphyiscal” Darwinism which rightly raises the hackles of anyone who can think clearly (i.e., not leftists). Many have taken an illegitimate leap from a somewhat prosaic branch of science into speculation on the nature of reality itself — territory which science necessarily cannot exhaust, given that it is anchored in empirical evidence.

Many others take an anti-intellectual hard-core biblical literalist stance. Whatever the problems of evolutionary theory (and contrary to the extremists here, there are quite serious problems with it on a purely scientific level) those who would have us accept that the planet is 4,000 “real” years old are crackpots.