Giving Darwin the Smack Down - Sub Title: What the *bleep* is "Intelligent Design?"

Well, lookie here. The Kansas School Board is having some more fun at the expense of a dead legend in science and scientific theory, one Charles Darwin.

Ask the religious fringe to explain themselves and they get all a flutter and their tounges tied so much it sounds like they are actaully speaking in tounges.

Here are some nice remarks by Clarence Darrow:

MR. DARROW--Do you think the sun was made on the fourth day?

MR. BRYAN--Yes.

MR. DARROW--And they had evening and morning without the sun?

MR. BRYAN--I am simply saying it is a period.

MR. DARROW--They had evening and morning for four periods without the sun, do you think?

MR. BRYAN--I believe in creation, as there told, and if I am not able to explain it, I will accept it.

MR. DARROW--Then YOU can explain it to suit yourself. And they had the evening and the morning before that time for three days or three periods. All right, that settles it. Now, if you call those periods, they may have been a very long time?

MR. BRYAN--They might have been.

MR. DARROW--The creation might have been going on for a very long time?

MR. BRYAN--It might have continued for millions of years.

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I may be ignorant, but I had never heard of the "Intelligent Design Netowrk," nor that there was such a philosophy as "intelligent design" before the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine started reporting the Darwinian battle being fought in Kansas. This begs the question as to what exactly is "intelligent design." It sounds, well, intelligent, as well as something involving thoughtful, very well educated individuals.

Let's let them explain themselves, slice:

The theory of intelligent design (ID) holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection. ID is thus a scientific disagreement with the core claim of evolutionary theory that the apparent design of living systems is an illusion.

In a broader sense, Intelligent Design is simply the science of design detection -- how to recognize patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose. Design detection is used in a number of scientific fields, including anthropology, forensic sciences that seek to explain the cause of events such as a death or fire, cryptanalysis and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). An inference that certain biological information may be the product of an intelligent cause can be tested or evaluated in the same manner as scientists daily test for design in other sciences.

ID is controversial because of the implications of its evidence, rather than the significant weight of its evidence. ID proponents believe science should be conducted objectively, without regard to the implications of its findings. This is particularly necessary in origins science because of its historical (and thus very subjective) nature, and because it is a science that unavoidably impacts religion.

Positive evidence of design in living systems consists of the semantic, meaningful or functional nature of biological information, the lack of any known law that can explain the sequence of symbols that carry the "messages," and statistical and experimental evidence that tends to rule out chance as a plausible explanation. Other evidence challenges the adequacy of natural or material causes to explain both the origin and diversity of life.

Intelligent Design is an intellectual movement that includes a scientific research program for investigating intelligent causes and that challenges naturalistic explanations of origins which currently drive science education and research.

End slice:

Now, I think we can all agree on a solid definition of the word "intelligent." Karl Weick (2001) has an interesting take on "design:"

Design is clearly a process of sensemaking that makes do with whatever materials are at hand...Invariable the resources are less well suited to the exact project than one would prefer but they are all there is...If we take the position that design is often emergent, improvised, locally rational, and built from whatever resources are at hand, then design loses some of its force [to explain].

So, the nice folks at IDN suggest they are deploying a "scientific" research program to debunk a set of longstanding emperical and theoretical arguments in order to specify some kind of "intelligent" design?

Should we pay attention to these folks? As a friend said in a recent email: "Beam me up Scotty, there is no intelligent life down here."