Ayala speaks on ID at UCLA. Rather than bastardize any of his points third-hand, I'll just point to Mark Kleiman's excellent summary. Unfortunately the people who need convincing are not the type to be persuaded by rational debate...

And on a vaguely related point: to some extent this sort of thing is what all the fuss at FOCS is about: how do we get to the point where the issues we care about in TCS are common currency on a major political blog? I don't think the biologists see this as the debate they'd like to be having, though — it seems so pre-enlightenment.


Comments:

geomblog:
2005-10-25T13:33:55Z
Pre-enlightenment ? Do you mean that post-enlightenment, it is taken for granted that scientific discourse is a part of the general popular discussion set ?
11011110:
2005-10-25T14:46:09Z
I mean that the ID proponents seem in general to want to revert to pre-enlightenment ways of thinking.
geomblog:
2005-10-25T14:57:28Z
Ah I see. so I take it from your note that you think the focs "dustup" is a lot of sturm und drang ?
tunxeh:

11011110:
2005-10-25T15:16:47Z
Ignore the wrong-login response. Sorry about that. Anyway, no, I think the idea of publicizing our work to society is a good one. I just think it's ironic that the biologists are getting the attention we think we want, but not in a way they're likely to be happy about. A counterexample to the "any news is good news" theory of publicity.