A couple of months ago, The New York Times noted that quite a few scientists just don't feel like sticking up for evolution if it means they actually have to talk to people who don't agree with them:

When the Kansas State Board of Education decided to hold hearings this spring on what the state's schoolchildren should be taught about evolution, Dr. Kenneth R. Miller was invited to testify....

Dr. Miller is a professor of biology at Brown University, a co-author of widely used high school and college biology texts, an ardent advocate of the teaching of evolution - and a person of faith....

But Dr. Miller declined to testify. And he was not alone. Mainstream scientists, even those who have long urged researchers to speak with a louder voice in public debates, stayed away from Kansas.

In general, they offered two reasons for the decision: that the outcome of the hearings was a foregone conclusion, and that participating in them would only strengthen the idea in some minds that there was a serious debate in science about the power of the theory of evolution.

"We on the science side of things strong-armed the Kansas hearings because we realized this was not a scientific exchange, it was a political show trial," said Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, which promotes the teaching of evolution. "We are never going to solve it by throwing science at it."

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, a large organization of researchers and teachers, and the publisher of the journal Science, also declined to participate....

Today the Times, gratifyingly, finds that there are at least a few evolution supporters who don't throw up their hands when they realize they might get their hair mussed:

Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution.

They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply....

That encounter and others like it provided the impetus for a training session here in August. Dr. Durkee and scores of other volunteers and staff members from the museum and elsewhere crowded into a meeting room to hear advice from the museum director, Warren D. Allmon, on ways to deal with visitors who reject settled precepts of science on religious grounds.

Similar efforts are under way or planned around the country as science museums and other institutions struggle to contend with challenges to the theory of evolution that they say are growing common and sometimes aggressive....

Bravo to the museum directors. To the rest of you? Thanks for nothing.

Look, I don't want to downplay the unpleasantness of all this. But this is a war for the minds of American children, now and in the future, and it's a war we have to win. Knowledgeable people have to stand up and tell the evolution opponents, politely but firmly, why they're wrong. Retreat to an ivory tower is not an option. The zealots aren't going to be swayed, but fence-sitters, especially in communities with a strong anti-evolution presence, need to hear from people who argue as forcefully for evolution as the zealots do for the other side.

Oddly, we learn from the first article that Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education thought it was pointless to send an evolution defender to Kansas, while from the second article we learn that Dr. Scott is developing training programs for museum personnel. Maybe we should stop expecting museum staffers to do the arrow-catching all by themselves and put a few academic superstars through that training.