Maybe it's because I live in Massachusetts and not Kansas, but I really deplore the fighting back and forth between armchair (and actual) evolutionary biologist

Maybe it's because I live in Massachusetts and not Kansas, but I really deplore the fighting back and forth between armchair (and actual) evolutionary biologists with the anti-science rightwing religious groups. While I am on the side of science of course, it annoys me how counterproductive the whole fight has become. The need for evo bio people to fend off ID types in arguments has made the pro-science public less humble, and less accurate too, because we forget how little we actually know about how evolution works, and instead cling to the politically strongest ideas that science generates. In fact, many fundamental problems that need to be solved are being bullied into the margins by the need to make evolutionary theory seem stronger than it really is. In the last 10-15 years The MIT Press has put out several good books delving into the cutting edge of evolutionary theory, among other things exploring the role of complexity in evolution. It may surprise some that "natural selection" is not universally agreed on, as there is a competing paradigm in which the production of forms is the driver of change, and selection is hypothesized to be a filter, having more of a conserving than progressive force on organisms. The problem is that too many scientists outside of biology assume that the neo-Darwinian synthesis popularized by philosophers like Dennett and Dawkins (also fighters in the battle against religion, not coincidentally), is the one and established view, and allow it to shape the interpretation of results in other fields. Perhaps if we were to ignore the creationists instead of fighting them, then we could acknowledge the primitive state of our models and make some real progress.