Intelligent design
Agent: Michael Behe (b. 1952); William Dembski (b. 1960)
Source / date: Darwin’s Black Box 1996; The Design Inference 1998
Reference: Intelligent design
The formal modern argument that certain biological structures could not have been assembled by undirected steps. It produced two testable-sounding criteria — and a United States federal court ruled in 2005 that it is not science.
Class: Argues for design as a framework rather than producing a test that could fail. Judging it by experiment is a category error — so is treating it as settled.
The two criteria
Irreducible complexity (Behe): a system of interacting parts where removing any one stops the whole from functioning cannot have been built by successive small improvements, because the intermediates would be useless. The bacterial flagellum and the blood-clotting cascade are the standard examples.
Specified complexity (Dembski): an “explanatory filter” that eliminates chance and necessity and infers design from what remains.
Both were answered on their own ground. The flagellum shares components with the type III secretion system, a functional structure built from a subset of the same parts — which is precisely the sort of intermediate the argument said could not exist. Clotting cascades of reduced complexity function in other vertebrates. And an eliminative filter that infers design from the failure of the alternatives currently on the table gives no positive test of its own.
Standing, and one internal note
In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), Judge John E. Jones III — appointed by a Republican president, in a case brought by parents — ruled after a six-week trial that intelligent design is not science and that its inclusion in a public school curriculum was religious in purpose. Drafts of the textbook at issue were shown to have had “creationism” replaced with “intelligent design” term for term.
Worth recording because this app already touches it: Progress in Complexity, Information and Design (PCID), the journal edited by Dembski, is the venue that published the CTMU. The two entries sit in different sections of this app and reach it independently, which is a genuine link rather than a manufactured one.
Filed as a design framework. It is a classification, not a dismissal, and it is the same one applied to Crick and Orgel a shelf away.