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In case you missed it, here’s the letter that Columbia University philosopher Philip Kitcher sent to The New York Times in response to science reporter Nicholas Wade’s review of Richard Dawkins’ new book:

In his review of The Greatest Show on Earth, Nicholas Wade charges that Richard Dawkins is guilty of a philosophical error. According to Wade, philosophers of science divide scientific propositions into three types—facts, laws and theories—and, contrary to Dawkins’s assertions, evolution, which is plainly a systematic theory, cannot count as a fact. However, contemporary philosophy of science offers a vastly more intricate vocabulary for thinking about the sciences than that presupposed in Wade’s oversimplified taxonomy and in his confused remarks about “absolute truth.” Although philosophers may quarrel with aspects of Dawkins’s arguments on a range of issues, he has a far firmer and more subtle understanding of the philosophical issues than that manifested in Wade’s review.
The crucial point is that, as Dawkins appreciates, the distinction between theory and fact, in philosophical discussions as in everyday speech, can be drawn in two quite distinct ways. On the one hand, theories are conceived as general systems for explanation and prediction, while facts are specific reports about local events and processes. On the other hand, “theory” is used to suggest that there is room for reasonable doubt, whereas “fact” suggests something so amply confirmed by the evidence that it may be accepted without debate.
Opponents of evolution slide from supposing that evolution is a theory, in the first sense, to concluding that it is (only) a theory, in the second. Any such inference is fallacious, in that many systematic approaches to domains of natural phenomena—like the understanding of chemical reactions in terms of atoms and molecules, and the study of heredity in terms of nucleic acids—are so well supported that they count as facts (in the second sense). Many scientists and philosophers who have written about evolution have pointed out that the contemporary theory that descends from Darwin has the same status—it, too, should count as a “fact.” Dawkins is entirely justified in following them.

A batch of other letters from scientists and philosophers (including one from Dan Dennett) have been posted online.

That’s what we wondered after seeing a story in the Telegraph offering “the top five arguments on either side of this monumental disagreement” over evolution. (Evolution, of course, is not a point of controversy or debate in the scientific community.) Apparently, Mark Henderson of The Times felt the same way:

It beggars belief that this list has appeared in a serious newspaper. It’s just the sort of thing that gets science reporting a bad name.
Leaving aside the fact that there is no serious scientific debate as to whether evolution has happened, as opposed to how, the arguments cited by the Telegraph, on both sides, are a mixture of the wrong, the misleading, and the irrelevant.
The very first entry is probably the worst:

“There is no evidence for evolution. There is no evidence that evolution has occurred because no transitional forms exist in fossils… Perhaps because of this, a surprising number of contemporary scientists support the Creation theory.”

There are a lot of scientists out there, and some of them are bound to believe strange things. But the idea that there’s a significant element of the scientific community that does not accept evolution is simply untrue. It’s no more a matter of serious academic debate than the existence of gravity.
The idea that there’s no evidence for evolution, however, is still more staggeringly wrong—and relying on the supposed absence of transitional fossils is just plain silly. Even the cleverer creationists out there have abandoned that one.

Matthew Nisbet and Dietram Scheufele, experts on issues related to science and the media, have a new paper in the American Journal of Botany. They argue that researchers need “a more scientific approach to science communication, i.e., one that is less exclusively driven by intuition, personal experience, or traditional ways of  ‘doing communication,’ and more by an empirical understanding of how modern societies make sense of and participate in debates over science and emerging technologies.”
As they point out, scientific illiteracy is only a small part of the problem, and “far stronger influences on opinion derive from value dispositions such as ideology, partisanship, and religious identity.”