The Darwin debate is getting increasingly polarized along liberal/rightwing lines, a dangerous development of liberals.
Krugman
in the Times Op Ed section section takes on the religious right on evolution. He no doubt has a point about right wing strategies on evolution, but the problem here is that liberal thought has let this one get away, the victim of its own propaganda. No use blaming Kristol for one's troubles on this score. Both takes serve an agenda, and the ID tactics are proving effective because Darwinists are so convinced they forget to do their homework. How did it happen that the ID faction managed to hijack criticism of Darwin's theory?
Krugman sermonizes on peer review. Actually that's the problem, not the solution. Darwin's theory has severe flaws, many scientists have always said so, and most of the criticisms of Darwinism spring from such scientists. Soren Lovtrup in Darwinism: Refutation of a Myth, for example, exposed the whole game a while back. The notion that scientists all agree on Darwin's theory is nonsense. Kevin Kelley in Out of Control discusses the reticence of many research scientists on evolution. All anyone ever hears is Talk.Origins quotes or the NCSE.
The basic question has never changed from the time of the first reviewers of Darwin's book: the fact of evolution was a great discovery, the theory of natural selection is another question, a theory open to many objections.
It comes as a surprise then that the position of evolutionary biologists on natural selection, but not evolution, is a very weak one, and that has nothing whatever to do with design questions. The concern here should be that non-specialists, who support a secular and liberal politics, have been set up to fail by this strategy. And Darwinian fundamentalism will fail sooner or later because it was always bad science. So much for peer review.
Peer review doesn't work on the subject of evolution, for the same reason it doesn't work in Krugman's field, mathematical economics, and in fact the testimony of hard scientists here is a complete puzzle. Or maybe not, as with mathematical economics, ideology reigns, and it reigns in the name of science, with the bogus math models dangled in front of uncomprehending outsiders to keep them confused. If peer review really worked on evolution we would have had a sensible policy a long time ago, essentially withdrawing the absurdly exaggerated claims for Darwin's theory of natural selection. Such claims make dissent inevitable.
If the scientific community were honest about the question of evolution the right's exploitation of this issue would collapse.