JoshuaZ:

Overall, the impression I get of him, especially from this interview is that he's either mendacious or very confused. I suspect the second. He seems to be a textbook case of cognitive dissonance in action.

Or it might be that he has actually thought about these matters, and honestly found them confusing.

Among the contemporary high-status intellectuals who would enthusiastically affirm their belief in the theory of evolution and condemn all disbelievers in it, how many have a real understanding of it, and how many are just going along with the mainstream without any real understanding of the matter? I'd say the former group includes the actual evolutionary biologists (obviously), and also a lot of people who are literate in hard sciences and characterized by broad intellectual curiosity, but almost nobody outside of these categories -- which account for only a small minority of modern academics, and an even tinier minority of the respectable intellectual classes overall. The rest would have no problem denouncing evolution in the same terms as the most fervent creationists if it just happened to become a high status marker tomorrow; for them it would require no greater intellectual adjustment than adapting to a new fashion in hairstyles.

Darwinian evolution is a very difficult subject, which requires a great deal of counterintuitive thinking to grasp with any degree of accuracy. Smart and well-informed people who oppose it often have interesting arguments that deserve a serious refutation rather than sneering. To make a historical analogy, it's as if someone sneered at Einsten's 1930s arguments against quantum theory -- some of them were indeed a product of confusion and have been decisively refuted since, but mindlessly sneering at them is not a way to prove oneself an intellectual superior of Einstein.