What's the best strategy for defending evolution?

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The fact is most people are NOT scientists

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I'm glad somebody said this. There is a big tendency in America for those without any science background whatsoever to dismiss entire fields of biology offhand because it contradicts their personal mythologies, while at the same time admitting they know nothing about the particulars of the fields. For example, quite a few creationists on this board admit (or demonstrate by what they say) that they have absolutely no understanding of genetics or molecular biology but make brazen claims about the "dishonesty, stupidity, or incompetence" of actual molecular biologists. As you have suggested, people seem to equate uninformed opinion with scientific theory. They take the oversimplified press reports of scientific discoveries and think they suddenly have as much of a scientific background as a bench scientist. Science is a tough business and often counterintuitive and difficult to understand. Tough..if it was easy then everyone WOULD be a scientist instead of the vanishingly small percentage of Americans who actually are scientists.

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This is one of the key problems in science today. It is so popularized, it has shifted backwards such that moderan science is losing its rigor within the population.

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I disagree. This is the key problem with the popularization of science. Actual science is continuing as it always has. If anything the field I am working in, for example, has become even more rigorous. There is something to the ivory tower mentality among scientists. Most of my colleagues are unaware of the EvC debate. They are working scientists who get their grants funded and papers published by their peers i.e. other working scientists in their field. They could not care less what a school board consisting of non-scientists have to say about evolution or molecular biology. They may only indirectly be aware of the consequences when their labs fill up with foreign researchers who actually have a science education.What has gone wrong is that the American public has become ever more poorly educated in the sciences and rely on heresay, dumbed down accounts of scientific discoveries, and science fiction movies in determining the veracity of what science has to say...meanwhile chugging down pills and medicines that are a directly based on theories they claim are false. Sad and ironic.But I would still make the distinction that modern science has not lost its rigor. But popularization has gone so far down market that it is starting to overlap with the scientific and fact checking rigor of the Enquirer.

And that is the crux of the problem. You have those who accept their clergy's statements or religious texts with no way to asses those claims on their own. They simply accept them according to their own personal bias. Most have no way to assess scientific claims on their own but simply reject them based on their personal preferences rather than from informed reasoning. The kicker is that the latter is not necessary. Anyone can learn the science if they really want to. Scientific claims are assessible by study and experiment and there is a highly effective enterprise called methodological naturalism that is highly effective at determining what is nonesense from what is likely. And what is best is anyone regardless of their background can reproduce (or debunk) any set of experiments. Heck, most of the raw data (at least in molecular biology) is freely available online. Assessing religious claims are not (except where they make innacurate claims about physical reality such as flat earth or cud chewing rabbits) assessible in this way. Thus, creationists conflate their inability to assess their religious beliefs in an objective way with their inability and unwillingness to understand science.