Letter to NPR

In your story about the hostility Smithsonian staff scientist, Richard Sternberg, suffered for approving an article on intelligent design, Dr. Sternberg states, "Why publish it? Because evolutionary biologists are thinking about this. So I thought that by putting this on the table, there could be some reasoned discourse." This sounds like euphemism for "let's create a stir." He succeeded in that. Maybe it's ended badly, but then again he did get his name in the press.

It would have been nice if senior scientists and administration at the Smithsonian had shown a little more ordinary civility to Dr. Sternberg and been more sensitive to the context in which the article was published.

On the other hand, it's not hard to foresee how intelligent design advocates will trump up this trivial publication as scientific validation of their ideology and use it as fodder to feed organizations working aggressively to displace established Darwinian principles of evolutionary biology in public school curricula while they evade the substance of the issue and utterly ignore the ample reasoned discourse on the subject already available.

Unfortunately, they will probably do the same thing with the controversy this flap has produced.