The above, a headline on the AOL News Welcome screen today.

AOL, you have got to be kidding me.

Can anybody take this question seriously? When by any measure -- income, educational achievement and opportunity, health, employment -- blacks in this country are way over-represented at the bottom? The other place blacks are over-represented, of course, is in the military. Which can seem like a good option when all your other options have been cut off. Convenient for a government that likes to fight wars and hasn't got a draft to fall back on.

And then there's this. William Gibson, one of my culture and writing heroes, posted the following on his blog in Nov. 2004.

"Re Creationism, I must point out an unfortunate subtext that's no longer quite so obvious. Having grown up in the previous iteration of the rural American south, I know that what *really* smarted about Darwin, down there, was the logical implication that blacks and whites are descended from a common ancestor. Butt-ugly, but there it is. That was the first objection to evolutionary theory that I ever heard, and it was a very common one, in fact the most common. That it was counter to Genesis seemed merely convenient, in the face of an anthropoid grand-uncle in the woodpile."

Suddenly the argument over -- and the current political climate of tolerance, if not outright support, for -- "Intelligent Design" takes on a whole new, and, as Gibson says, butt-ugly, dimension.