Alright, I'll bite.

First, the tone of the first article you quote is regrettable. There is no a priori reason why scientists should be "depressed" to find that only 13 percent of polled Americans believe that God played no part in the origins of human beings. If this figure truly indicated a rejection of evolutionary theory, that would be disappointing, but as many scientists have tried to communicate, the conflicts between evolution and a purposeful Creator are not insurmountable. There is a qualitative difference between teaching evolution and advocating atheism.

Second, it is probably a good thing that Skell focuses on the Cambrian expansion for his transitional fossil argument, given that this remains the only real evolutionary mystery left, and that transitional fossils for the origins of all the other major divergences with which we might be concerned (vertebrates, birds, mammals, primates) are well known.

I'd even take issue with his notion that Darwinian evolution has made no contribution to experimental science. It has historically been used to make specific predictions about the sorts of genes and proteins one might find in one organism, based on apparent relationships to others. And the principles are used in the design of new therapies (SELEX and whatnot) rather commonly these days.

The rest of it is just pointing out that biology isn't physics. Big deal. George Gamow and other physicists used to make biologists quake in their shoes with cheap arguments like that, but that was back when biology, and in particular evolutionary biology, was still an infant science. Speciation is now a laboratory science, and the field in general has a large enough pool of observation and experimentation to stake a claim to more than just an alternative historical narrative.

Of course, even most Darwinists are either Creationist or IDers. The 13% is much lower in reality. As David Stove points out, they can't even explain Darwinism without resort to ID metaphors. Note that even your own bit about purposeful Darwinism guts the theory.

And the fact that Darwinism has no real world applications nor scientific backing is embarrassing, but hardly fatal. It just makes the theory a philosophy rather than a science, as Mayr is unbashful about conceding.

The point isn't that they should be depressed but that they've failed because they were wrong. No shame in that. They join the Marxists and Freudians on the 19th century trash heap.

I wonder that Paul Johnson didn't give Darwin a chapter in The Intellectuals. He only gets a couple of words in the chapter on Marx.

Darwin was British, so they bought him harder. That's why Piltdown Man and peppered moths were such easy hoaxes to sell. The Brits needed something to grip onto.

Posted this over at my blog:

A great post on evolution at Brothers Judd: THEY WOULDN'T EVEN HAVE 13% WITHOUT THE COERCION THE MONOPOLY PROVIDES. Brothers Judd often takes potshots at evolution, but this post is more substantive. They quote an article "Why Do We Evoke Darwin?" from a magazine called The Scientist: Magazine of the Life Sciences:

Darwin's theory of evolution offers a sweeping explanation of the history of life, from the earliest microscopic organisms billions of years ago to all the plants and animals around us today. Much of the evidence that might have established the theory on an unshakable empirical foundation, however, remains lost in the distant past. For instance, Darwin hoped we would discover transitional precursors to the animal forms that appear abruptly in the Cambrian strata. Since then we have found many ancient fossils - even exquisitely preserved soft-bodied creatures - but none are credible ancestors to the Cambrian animals.

Despite this and other difficulties, the modern form of Darwin's theory has been raised to its present high status because it's said to be the cornerstone of modern experimental biology. But is that correct? "While the great majority of biologists would probably agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky's dictum that 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,' most can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas," A.S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, wrote in 2000.[1] "Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one."

I would tend to agree. Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming's discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.

I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others. I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss.

In the peer-reviewed literature, the word "evolution" often occurs as a sort of coda to academic papers in experimental biology. Is the term integral or superfluous to the substance of these papers? To find out, I substituted for "evolution" some other word - "Buddhism," "Aztec cosmology," or even "creationism." I found that the substitution never touched the paper's core. This did not surprise me. From my conversations with leading researchers it had became clear that modern experimental biology gains its strength from the availability of new instruments and methodologies, not from an immersion in historical biology.

The genuine scientific contribution of Darwinian thinking can be separated from Darwinist ideology/creation-mythology by substituting the "Darwinian theory of evolution" with a "Darwinian theory of imperfect ecosystemic homeostasis."

Homeostasis is a property of living organisms, namely that the atoms of which they are physically comprised at any given time cycle in and out of them, yet the form of the organism maintains a high degree of continuity. As organisms exhibit homeostasis with respect to the atoms that comprise them, so ecosystems exhibit homeostasis with respect to the organisms that comprise them: trees, birds, insects, mammals are born, grow, and die, but the forest remains. This may be called ecosystemic homeostasis.

The Darwinian theory sheds light, both on (a) why the forest is able to maintain homeostasis, and (b) why the homeostasis is imperfect, i.e., the forest will not stay exactly the same forever (even putting to one side exogenous climatic or geological changes). The forest maintains homeostasis because organisms are adapted to their environments and achieve a sort of equilibrium; but it can change over time because the Mendelian genetics that underlies the forms of organisms, combined with natural selection and (very rarely) advantageous mutations, can enable organisms to upgrade, or to find new niches, creating ripple effects throughout the ecosystem. Experimental evidence that this kind of evolution can occur is not really needed; once the truths of Mendelian genetics (plus the possibility of mutation) are established, logic alone is enough to show that evolution is at least a possibility, though perhaps a vanishingly rare one. We don't know, based on logic alone, whether it has played a significant role in natural history or not. Perhaps fossil evidence suggests that it has played at least some role. (I'm not a paleontologist.)

That's as far as science, properly understood, can go. The unwarranted and superfluous further claim that this is how all life originated is our civilization's reigning creation-myth but is not science. We don't know how all life was created, and we probably never will. The evidence is just too scanty.