Atheist biologist P.Z. Myers writes:

Uh-oh. I’ve disappointed David Klinghoffer. I should probably put that on my CV.

Yes, please do so.
Regarding my post commenting on his refusal to come to blows with Stephen Meyer himself on the matter of Richard Dawkins’s argument with Meyer, P.Z. writes:

So everything in [David’s] reply was false, and he failed to address one single point in my criticism of ID. I think I know who’s running away from substance here.

He thinks I’ve “disavowed” writer Tom Gilson, who formulated a brief, accurate paragraph-length summary of an argument for intelligent design. Disavowed? Not at all. Gilson deserves praise for doing what ID’s foes typically refuse to do: at least define the basic idea. I asked you, P.Z., to grapple not with a précis but with the source material.
Look, there’s a lot to be said in praise of brief summaries. In working with writers over the years, I’ve often insisted to the more prolix that even the Bible can be summarized in a paragraph. Anything can. My mother-in-law was for decades a librarian at Columbia’s Butler Library where her job included composing brief summaries of academic works. All of that has its important place. But if you are going to criticize an idea represented in a longer piece of writing, you need to go to the source, not to the paragraph summary, or the headline. I know that Myers has dumped a bunch of unflattering adjectives on Steve Meyer’s books, as he reminds us, but that doesn’t suffice here.
It was refreshing that, on the subject of the randomness at the heart of evolution, Dawkins actually sought to rebut Meyer head-on. But P.Z. refuses, claiming that he because he didn’t like Meyer’s Signature in the Cell or Darwin’s Doubt, whereas Gilson is unknown to him, that gives the edge to answering the summary not the source. And I should be satisfied.
But that’s just silly. I’m a science consumer. Dispensing with Myers’s attitude, which just takes up space, I’d be curious to read his response to Meyer v. Dawkins. Here is the precise point at issue between the two, in Dawkins’s words:

When will these people understand that calculating how many gazillions of ways you can permute things at random is irrelevant. It’s irrelevant, as Lawrence [Krauss] said, because natural selection is a NONRANDOM process.

Let Myers defend his fellow atheist evolutionary biologist. I like to listen in when the science guys go after each other. I’m not going to give Myers a pass. Simple as that.
Here again are some relevant links:

• Meyer: “Dawkins’s Dilemma: Misrepresent the Mechanism…or Face the Math“
• Nelson: “The Epicurean Escape Hatch — Richard Dawkins Responds to Stephen Meyer“
• Lönnig : “Randomness in Natural Selection and Species as Islands in a ‘Vast Sea of Conceivable Arrangements’“
• Lönnig: “More on Randomness in Natural Selection and Evolution“

I’ll say it again. I admire Tom Gilson’s writing. What I object to is an evolution partisan using Gilson as a human shield to evade answering a detailed response from an ID theorist to a fellow ID critic.
Yeah, you could say I’m disappointed. But having followed the evolution debate closely for a while, I’m not surprised.
Image: Hiding in the Haycocks, by William Bliss Baker (1881) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.