With Stunning Admission of Error, Scientific Name-Calling Suffers a Setback

Our colleague Sarah Chaffee this morning notes New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof's unthinking dismissal of evolution skeptics as "nincompoops." Well, we've been called worse things than that.

The discourse of name-calling is a scourge of public life today, and it's only getting worse, seen across a broad spectrum of political and scientific perspectives, with college students even more severely infected than their elders. I'm referring to the strategy of jeering at your opponents as...