To be fair, ['εvəʊ 'dεvəʊ] doesn't sound great but it did occur to me that creationists may have wished to promote the eevo-deevo pronunication because eevo is almost homophonous with evil. Then again, devo (with an open e) sounds quite a lot like devil, so this theory probably isn't very sound.
Another linguistically interesting point is the use of the suffix -o after the shortened form of development, which is a very Gallic form of clipping (intello (intellectual), sciences po (political science), etc.). I suppose that in this case, the desire to create a catchy name for the field (provided by the repeated sounds) overcame the rules for word truncation.
In any case, whether it should be pronounced evil-devo or evo-devil, the podcast and special issue of the NY Times were both very interesting.
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