– from a

An idea promoted and disseminated by various neo-Creationist proponents (see below), not to be confused with ‘classical’ Creationism as touted by Duane Gish and numerous others.

Intelligent Design (ID) is essentially the notion that life (and the structure of the world/universe) is so remarkably complicated, diverse, and “impossibly non-random”† that ‘special creation’ by a ‘designer’ – an intelligent cause or agent – stands alone as the credible explanation for its origin and current existence, asserting that ID can be inferred by excluding all other alternative hypotheses on probabilistic grounds to account for biological history and diversity. With an emphasis that human existence and that of all other life is very much not the result of an unguided process such as Evolution by Natural Selection.

It is contended the “irreducible complexity”‡ of organisms' molecular machinery is so complex and necessitates all parts of a “biologic unit”, e.g., an eye, to work in synchrony, that it shows life must have been designed. And further supposes that if any part of an eye (or a wing, etc.) were missing this would render the organ useless and non-adaptive to the organism, thereby demonstrating, to the minds of ID defenders – in a kind of Creationist analogue to “backwards engineering” – that such forms could not have developed through a process of Evolution by Natural Selection.

What Behe intends by the term and the way in which he has defined “irreducible complexity” fails to adequately address (at least) two key points:

n	that Natural Selection can act on every component of an organism’s “functional units” at every stage of the evolutionary process and that any modification of the elements making up these ‘units’ which tends to contribute to the organism’s success becomes more likely to be passed on to subsequent generations (and spread throughout a population);
n	and that in the much-touted cases asserted by ID proponents if we were able to remove an element from one of these “biologic units” there is every probability of continued function (with reduced efficiency) or successful use in another way – which leaves claims of functional “basket cases” as, at best, doubtful.

As indicated above a significant component of the argument by ID-creationists is to ridicule what, in their eyes, is the fanciful case for Evolution. On the occasions when evidence is presented it is usually based upon their interpretations of “clockwork” patterns in nature and gaps in evolutionary theory or the fossil record. However, appeals to evidence are really superfluous since ID is not a scientific theory given the non-falsifiable footing proponents have erected the idea upon.

There are also IDers who have maintained, in contrast to Creationists (for many, if not most, ID supporters do not acknowledge that they are Creationists in another guise), that they hold no hostility towards Evolution but rather are only defending the interest of having Intelligent Design treated as though it were a legitimate scientific alternative to Darwinism – a claim which their actions seem to belie.

M Behe  "Darwin's Black Box" (1996) NY Free Press

W Demski "The Design Inference" (1998) Cambridge Uni. Press

W Demski “Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology” Cambridge Uni. Press

P Johnson  " Defeating Darwin by Opening Minds" (1997) InterVarsity Press

For an overview and critique of ID and the Intelligent Design movement from a scientific perspective see, for example:

Michael Shermer "Why Darwin Matters" (2006) Times Books/Oxford University Press

† apparently not appreciating the tendency to retain characteristics having adaptive value while "discarding" less adaptive characteristics via differential survival.

‡ excerpt from Michael Behe: “An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition non-functional”.  (emphasis added)

Consider whether the use of the word “improving” by Behe here is suitable and justified - in a particular environment having particular characteristics makes it more likely, as compared with having other characteristics (variability within populations), that organisms with the former will survive – what we might refer to as higher-level functions have emerged because this process of changes has accumulated and built upon characteristics passed on by surviving organisms – an organism living now has the characteristics it has, probabilistically, because its ancestors survived with those characteristics, that is, in consequence of Natural Selection (leaving aside mutations as a separate contributor to change).

(see also: believers, Creationism, ’Creation-science’, Darwinism, Evolution, the principle of Natural Selection, Pseudo-science)

(as well as...)

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