Derb, you are a marvel. Not twenty minutes after I posted my question, you put up several hundred words, entirely lucid and persuasive.

In passing, you touch on a point that has always puzzled me: science in the old USSR. You’d know more about this than I do, which is why I raise it: There were indeed a lot of pseudo-science fads that swept the country, but it’s my impression that Soviet scientists working in the “hard” subjects did a lot of good work–Sahkharov is the most obvious example, but there were others, weren’t there? I’ve always thought of this as an example of your larger point–indeed, one of your recurrent themes: that science has indeed cleared a little patch of reason in the great dark jungle. In this case, the dark and horrible jungle of Communism. But how did it happen? Did even Stalin recognize the limits of ideology? Or did the Soviets permit their physicists a certain latitude, a certain intellectual freedom, simply because they found the scientists useful to the Soviet space and weapons programs?

I don’t know Michael Behe, but I did shoot a television show last month with another proponent of Intelligent Design, Jonathan Wells. A very nice man, and, as far as I could tell, a very judicious one. He argued–and took pains to argue–only that evolution at present has certain very sharp limits, not that he or anyone else “knows” how life in its wild multiplicity actually came about. Applying Occam’s razor to certain questions, Wells contended, would lead one to suppose some form of intelligence outside the process of life itself–that is, that on certain questions evolution suggests answers so ambiguous or convoluted that positing some sort of exogenous order or intelligence seems to make more sense. At least one proponent of Intelligent Design, in other words, seems to be intellectually scrupulous. (You can check out Wells for yourself.)

And there, with thanks to Derb, this layman must let it rest.