My colleague David Klinghoffer has a superb post on a perennial question at Evolution News. Should we accept comments on our published articles here? David provides a fine explanation for the decision not to allow comments.The point he makes is valid: Much of the output of the Darwinian blogosphere is venom unrepeatable in polite company.

Indeed, some of our fine readers might be unable to access the Darwinists’ comments from work, due to obscenity filters. Moderating comments would be a Herculean task. Can you imagine a more unpleasant job than sifting through that?

Yet I would add that comments can be quite enlightening. A decade ago when I turned my attention to the evolution controversy, I noticed something that astonished me: the arguments by the intelligent design community were thoughtful, polite, and carefully reasoned. The arguments by the Darwinian community were crude, nasty, and illogical. Remarkably, some of the vilest arguments for the Darwinian perspective — full of crude fallacies and obscenities — were made by genuinely prominent scientists and evolutionary biologists. Pharyngula and Sandwalk and Why Evolution Is True and Panda’s Thumb can come as quite a shock if you hold scientists in high regard.

My opportunity to read the candid comments of evolutionary biologists about the scientific questions raised by the evidence for design in nature taught me a great deal about the Darwinian perspective. The real scientists — the people asking the honest questions and following the evidence — were on the intelligent design side of the debate.

So while I do understand the difficulties involved in permitting comments, I point out that permitting Darwinists to say what they think provides one of the stronger arguments we have for intelligent design. If practical, a forum for comments from the Darwinian community here at Evolution News might help advance the debate for readers today just as my glimpse into the Darwinian community helped me understand the debate a decade ago.

For my part, I say: Provide the Darwinists every opportunity to speak. One of the most devastating things intelligent design has done to Darwinism is to provoke Darwinists to try to explain themselves.

Image: � nito / Dollar Photo Club.