It is likely that the capacity of human beings to manipulate our social and physical environments has blunted the power of natural selection to have its way with us. Even the implausibly stupid now thrive in a world that must once have been more unforgiving. Enter, thus, the intelligent design theorist. This novel breed of blockhead has carved out a niche in our political ecosystem, enjoying a symbiotic relationship with Christian fundamentalists bent on driving evolution from high school curricula.

The Intelligent Design Movement’s predecessor, “creation science,” was an attempt to sell literal readings of Genesis as plausible science. No one with a functioning neuron was buying. In 1987, the Supreme Court invalidated a Louisiana law requiring that creation science be presented in schools, deeming the law a violation of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. Dissent was confined to the jaundiced prolixities one expects from Justice Antonin Scalia.

In response, design theorists have ditched the Genesis chronology, hoping to smuggle God into science (and syllabi) through some subtler prestidigitation. They contend that science, by its own explanatory standards, cannot fully account for the complexity of life unless it invokes an intelligent designer.

A typical example is mathematician William Dembski’s argument that mathematical analysis can distinguish between “specified” organizations of phenomena (such as the words of a sonnet) and random conglomerations (such as an arbitrary string of words or President Bush’s “Plan for Victory” address). Since organisms exhibit specified rather than random complexity, Dembski contends, they must have been “designed” by an intelligent entity.

The trouble with Dembski’s argument is that Darwin never claimed adaptive traits were produced “randomly.” He instead claimed that they were produced mechanically, through physical processes of genetic mutation and natural selection. Indeed, the revolutionary importance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection lay precisely in its apparent success at explaining how blind physics could generate non-random functional organizations.

A stronger attack on Darwin comes from biochemist Michael Behe, who questions whether natural selection could in fact have produced all the complex adaptations Darwin claimed it did. Certain biological systems are “irreducibly complex;” they include multiple co-dependent components that must all be integrated for successful functioning. Yet it is statistically implausible for such functional systems to have sprung into action with a single genetic mutation. If natural selection initially had only some rudimentary element of the system to work with, why would this functionally inadequate starting point have been “selected” at all?

Hypothetical explanations of such selection are possible, especially if we remember that the earliest components of a complex adaptation may initially have performed functions quite distinct from those they later acquired in the more intricate system. Nonetheless, accounts of the evolution of complex systems are fraught with points of controversy or improbability.

Unfortunately, while this is a long-acknowledged challenge for evolutionary theorists, it does little to advocate positively for Intelligent Design. The possibility that evolutionary theory cannot yet generate stepwise accounts of how certain adaptations developed merely yields the negative point that evolutionary theory (like most fundamental science) is a work in progress. And there is no reason why an intelligent creator, rather than novel mechanistic hypotheses, should be the preferred means of filling such explanatory gaps.

Indeed, retreating to this catchall creationist solution would do nothing but preclude the future progress of knowledge. As Behe himself concedes, intelligent design theory cannot be subjected to experimental evaluation, a driving engine of scientific discovery. Thus the religiously oriented John Templeton Foundation, having funded conferences on Intelligent Design, eventually invited concrete research proposals. None arrived.

Intelligent Design is a doomed attempt to read divine purpose into physical patterns. One wishes its Christian proponents would heed Martin Luther, whose Heidelberg Disputation lambasted efforts to discern the workings of God in earthly happenings. Indeed, Darwinian realities leave life’s putative designer looking grossly sadistic or incompetent. A great deal of life – like Justice Scalia – is nasty, brutish and short.

Honest science and human compassion offer far more hope than fundamentalism of keeping the wolves of nature, and culture, at bay. We all have an interest in defending their privileged place in the public curriculum.

Sam Harding-Forrester is a senior in LAS. His column appears every Thursday. He can be reached at [email protected].