People in biology don't typically take "Intelligent" Design very seriously - at least, not as a science and not in their day-to-day job. When it comes to their work, evolution remains the organizational principle. What would be necessary for "Intelligent" Design to stand out as a superior and useful explanation for the diversity of life? Is it something that Intelligent Design proponents even understand, much less are capable of producing?
PZ Myers wrote a couple of years ago:
The biologist's complaint is a simple one. When someone offers up a new explanation A for a phenomenon that has so far been explained by B, the first thing we try to come up with is an experiment which will produce different results if A is true vs. B is true. We can't do that for ID creationism.
ID creationists can't do it either. There are no experiments or observations that can be made to distinguish evolution from Intelligent Design creationism. That is a fatal flaw: it is a new hypothesis that adds absolutely nothing to existing theory, other than a great big herkin' complex entity which they have made undetectable and which they have explicitly said they will not be evaluating.
What we have here is an important ingredient in the argument that "Intelligent" Design isn't really a science. Real scientists understand that evolution works on a practical level -- it explains what it is supposed to explain and it makes testable predictions that continually work out. This doesn't mean that there isn't something better, but it does mean that if there is something better, it has to be demonstrated to be quite a bit better to even be considered (never mind adopted as a replacement).
For that to happen, though, supporters will have to be able to do what Myers describes above: provide a theory that not only delivers everything that evolution delivers (explain all of the things that evolution explains, and at least as well as evolution explains them) plus more. This new theory must explain more things than evolution -- things that evolution currently has trouble with. Only really bad theories are ever completely overturned; good theories that work are incorporated into something new and more comprehensive.
So, what does "Intelligent" Design add that is interesting, explanatory, useful, and helpful?
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