Our friend Steve Martin has just finished a neat guest-post series on "Evangelicals, Evolution, and Academics" over on his blog, and he's posted an index to the series for easy searching. Check out what some of the biggest names in the field have to say about the topic.

Back in December, we told you about Christine Comer, who was forced to resign as the director of science curriculum for the Texas Education Agency after she forwarded an email message from the National Center for Science Education (a pro-evolution group) announcing that Barbara Forrest would be speaking in Austin about the "intelligent design" movement in a talk called "Inside Creationism's Trojan Horse." Comer said she was just passing on information; the agency saw it a bias endorsement and terminated her employment. Now, Comer has filed a lawsuit against the agency and Education Commissioner Robert Scott, saying that she was illegally fired and giving us a better and clearer look at the chain of events and the emails that were sent around.
In brief: Comer says she was fired because she wasn't neutral on the topic of creationism, as the agency requires—a policy that is unconstitutional because it endorses religion, she says. She's asking the court to overturn the policy, declare her firing unconstitutional, and require the agency to give her back her job. —Heather Wax

FROM KARL GIBERSON: Since I teach at a Christian college, I don't spend a lot of time hanging out with atheists and agnostics. Most of the ones I know personally—Ron Numbers, E.O. Wilson, Michael Ruse, Dan Dennett—are delightful, interesting people that I would be happy to have dinner with; in fact I have had dinner with Numbers and Ruse. But these guys, of course, are the elite of the nonbelievers and, for whatever reason, seem cool-headed, civil, and committed to respectful discourse.
I have always wondered what the more rank-and-file atheists are like. Well, after reading the responses to my interview on Salon.com, I know. They are rude, and seem every bit as narrow and intolerant as fundamentalist Christians. Just as I worry that fundamentalists want to take over the country and impose their way of thinking on the rest of us, I would worry if this crew took over. They seem completely opposed to pluralism and resentful that I have written a book suggesting that Darwinians and Christians might be able to get along. (Incidentally, Ruse has written a similar book, Can a Darwinian be a Christian?, that I prefer to my own on this topic.)

FROM KARL GIBERSON: Well, I thought Bill Dembski hated my guts. But he is a bosom buddy compared to PZ Myers.

Harvard psychiatrist Dr. George Vaillant was on WBUR's "On Point" with guest host Jane Clayson yesterday, making the case that we're hard-wired for spirituality, which he defines in terms of positive emotions like trust, hope, love, and joy. These positive emotions—which are present in our hymns and songs, but not in psychiatric textbooks—are remarkably adaptive and housed in a different part of the brain (the limbic system) than the creeds and dogmas of our religious beliefs (which are housed in the neocortex), he says. Vaillant fleshes out this argument, looking at faith through neuroscience, in his new book Spiritual Evolution, which draws a strong distinction between spirituality and religion. "Like breathing, our spirituality is common to us all," he writes. "On the one hand, religion asks us to learn from the experience of our tribe; spirituality urges us to savor our own experience. On the other hand, religious helps us to mistrust the experience of other tribes; spirituality helps us to regard the experience of our foreigner as valuable too." The book, Vaillant says, is written for readers "seeking to have both their spiritual hearts and their scientific intellects taken seriously," and its goal is to "restore our faith in spirituality as an essential human striving." —Heather Wax

FROM KARL GIBERSON: Salon.com made its interview with me the top story this morning, which has done wonders for the Amazon ranking of my book, Saving Darwin. There are already more than a hundred letters in response, some of them pretty vicious. I guess some people don't want Darwin saved, at least not by a Christian.

Get involved: A new project at the University of Michigan is trying something different in its attempt to get at the values that influence our political decisions. Rather than use random polling, the OurValues project asks participants to voluntarily respond to questions about a number of hot-button issues through a Web site—and the answers to these "flash-polls" will then inform a national study on "Americans' Evolving Values" from the university's Institute for Social Research. This larger study will look at the interaction between values, principles, and political and religious behaviors.
Wayne Baker, the sociologist who's leading the site's discussions, says he's excited by the "open source" nature of the project and the idea that it will be based on "the wisdom of crowds" rather than a closed circle of scholars. —Stephen Mapes