Evolutionary thought is suffused in general withan unwholesome glow. And there it is in a nutshell. The creationists (the term 'intelligent design' is a phrase the creationists use because they think it's more politically palatable) just can't stomach the idea. It's 'unwholesome'. C'mon Don.

"What good," Stephen Jay Gould asked dramatically, "is 5 percent of an eye?" He termed this question "excellent." It IS an excellent question and is easily answered (as Gould himself did many times over). Imagine you're a worm on the floor of a shallow Cambrian sea. Your 5% of an eye might just detect the shadow of a hungry ammonite passing overhead. You burrow and your blind neighbor gets eaten. You just conferred an evolutionary advantage on your offspring. The creationists just LOVE this "the eye is too complicated" load of rubbish. They continue to claim there's great scientific controversy, when we're really just focusing on small details. And they flat out lie, too.

I repeat censorship of responsible ideas that oppose the current dogma of the day is attacked just as rigorously as it was in the days of Galileo. Nobody's censoring anything, although the religious right sure is trying. As soon as the creationists come up with some testable theses, then put them forward and see if they pass muster. You'll always find a crank scientist or two who'll claim an idea is being censored, but after 150 years, Darwin's original idea has been fleshed out into a wonderful, sustaining structure. The realm of faith and philosophy and that of science are different and complementary. Pseudo-science is what's unwholesome.