A reprise of last night’s ballyhooed fiasco with Mike Pence. Sir Tancelot does better — he’s not evasive, at least — but to borrow a line from “The Princess Bride,” I’m not sure “intelligent design” means what he thinks it means. Near as I can tell, he’s attempting to square the circle by imagining an essentially deist god (or intelligence) that created all species in some primitive form and then let evolution go to work in turning them into the creatures we know today. I thought most ID-ers believe that life today is, more or less, how the designer originally designed it. If not, if it’s simply about proving that there’s a designer somewhere in a process that might have taken billions of years, then it’s really just Darwinism + a remote God at the very beginning, no?

I’m not sure what he means about there being no trans-species transitional fossils, either. What about Archaeopteryx?