Intelligent Design / Intelligent Origin Theory may be, for the most part, old creationist arguments drssed up in a lab coat, but it does have some new twists worth addressing separately.
However, though the bulk of ID literature is devoted to recycling old errors, there are some aspects of ID that are more interesting mistakes –– where figuring out exactly how ID goes wrong can help us advance our knowledge and understand evolution better. One area where ID gets interesting is in its claims about intelligence.
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Come again?
If ID was only a collection of neocreationist claims concerning biology, it would be relatively straightforward to address. For example, the most prominent biology-related argument for ID has been due to biochemist Michael Behe [1], who claimed that certain molecular machines were "irreducibly complex." Structures such as the bacterial flagellum, he argued, could not be assembled gradually through a series of functional intermediate forms – all of their many components had to come together at once. Critics immediately pointed out that systems and their components need not have had the same functions throughout their history. Indeed, Behe has lately shifted his emphasis away from his original argument.
...Though incomplete, evidence that, for example, eubacterial flagella are related to and have evolved as secretory mechanisms [3] is compelling. Biologists need to update their responses to creationism, addressing old arguments that have now been cast in a biochemical idiom, but otherwise ID presents no challenge to biology.
So what does ID/IOT say about intelligence?
...ID claims much more than an ability to identify the work of agents about which plenty is known independently [6]. Human and animal intelligence can plausibly seen to be part of the natural world. ID is fundamentally revolutionary point of view only if intelligent agency is somehow beyond natural mechanisms.
...ID claims that this is incorrect –– that intelligent design is a third, independent mode of explanation that is not reducible to chance and necessity. Intelligence, in the ID view, is beyond physics.
In other words, the intelligent designer must be supernatural.
Dembski, in his "Design Inference" work, takes the approach of trying to rule out, in certain cases, "chance" and "necessity". "Chance" is anything that happens randomly within a given sample space, and "necessity" is anything that happens in accord with a deterministic natural law. Of course, many people run into trouble because they underestimate what can happen when both are involved in a system.
The flaw in such an argument is that it does not adequately consider combinations of chance and necessity – in the computer context, procedures combining algorithms and randomness. As it happens, we know a good deal about just what a machine with access to a truly random function can accomplish and what it cannot. It turns out that the only tasks not performable by combinations of chance and necessity are certain "oracles," and we know of nothing (humans included) that realizes such oracle-functions.
ID proponents are right to highlight the question of the origin of information. This is an interesting question. However, they treat information as a mysterious quantity and fail to make connections to established research concerning information. On top of this, they do not realize or do not acknowledge that mainstream science already possesses the critical elements of a satisfying answer to their question.
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