The folks at the Discovery Institute (DI) are engaged in an extensive attempt to rebut my friend Dennis Venema's critiques of Stephen Meyer's surprisingly lame ID manifesto, Signature in the Cell . There are several aspects of this conversation that I hope to address in the coming days and weeks, but one jumped out at me today: the consistent confusion about natural selection in depictions of evolutionary theory by design advocates.

Not surprisingly, Hamlet weighed in on the nature vs. nurture question, at least once. It is certainly true that "the stamp of one defect" can wreak havoc on the scale that Hamlet describes, and whether the result is a debilitating physical limitation or damage to "the pales and forts of reason," the outcome is tragic by any measure.

In the cartoon version of evolution that is often employed by critics of the theory, a new protein (B) can arise from an ancestral version (A) by stepwise evolution only if each of the intermediates between A and B are functional in some way (or at least not harmful). This sounds reasonable enough, and it's a good starting point for basic evolutionary reasoning.

Three weeks ago, I went to the Cornerstone Music Festival with my two oldest kids. For the second year, I was an invited speaker in the festival's excellent seminar program. This year, my two series were entitled "Alien Worlds" and "Zombies on Jeopardy" – exploring extreme biology and human nature, respectively. It was fun, if a little too hot for a day or so. At one point, I was discussing human intelligence and its genetic underpinnings.

A few months ago, we were looking at the concept of a fitness landscape and how new technologies are creating opportunities for biologists to look in detail at relationships between genetics and fitness. The first post discussed the concepts of a fitness landscapes and adaptive walks, with some focus on the limitations of the metaphor.

A couple of months ago we started looking at the concept of fitness landscapes and at some new papers that have significantly expanded our knowledge of the maps of these hypothetical spaces. Recall that a fitness landscape, basically speaking, is a representation of the relative fitness of a biological entity, mapped with respect to some measure of genetic change or diversity.

Last month, PZ Myers wrote an interesting piece at the Panda's Thumb in which he discussed some problems with very simple models of evolutionary genetics. One of his main themes was the idea that many genetic changes are neutral with regard to fitness;

The Blind Watchmaker is a superb book by a masterful science writer. It's not just a book about evolution, or even about how evolution works. It's a book about how evolution explains design, and more specifically how natural selection accounts for design. As I wrote before, I consider chapter 3 to be the most important chapter of the book.

Back in September I wrote about the silly preoccupation on the part of various anti-evolutionists with the so-called Weasel program, a simple exercise created more than 20 years ago by Richard Dawkins to illustrate the efficacy of cumulative selection in evolutionary scenarios.

There's usually no point in piling on when the minions of the ID movement get their just deserts after some typically brainless culture-war test launch. Consider the responses (by, most notably, Ian Musgrave at the Panda's Thumb) to the most recent rendition of the ID movement's hilariously idiotic fixation on a particular computer program written by Richard Dawkins. It seems there is little to add.