Wow, another Slate article is good.

Slate is a silly publication because of its intentionally misleading eye-catching link titles, and because of its often shaky intentionally contrarian stances on issues. But every once in a while - not necessarily when there's a lot of news going on, either - they bust out with some great material.

Here's another one. Its sarcasm won't win the author a starry-eyed following, but it gets right to the essential point about "Intelligent Design."

Basically, if carried to its logical conclusion, Intelligent Design states that if a scientific mystery remains a mystery for long enough, we should attribute the phenomenon to God and forget about it. Some people see ID as a sort of compromise between science and religion, since it effectively allows scientists a "window" of time in which they get their chance to explain something before the ID people come along and say "Whoa, time's up. Must be God."

But this is no compromise at all. Basically, if we put a time limit on scientists' efforts, scientists won't even try to explain phenomena that they think would take too long to figure out. Scientists will stick to the small stuff, and leave the big mysteries for the ID people to attribute to God. Thus, progress will effectively stop, at least in the U.S., leaving leadership of the world to a certan country whose name rhymes with Dinah...