Good post. However, I would argue that in one sense, Dembsky is technically correct when he says beavers use intelligence to construct dams. Intelligence -- in the way most recent investigators conceive the term -- is made up of a wide spectrum of behaviors. It begins on a low end with things as simple as the construction of crystals and the folding of proteins, to simple sense-action behaviors and instincts, to learning, and finally to insight and self-awareness.
In this respect, "stack sticks where you hear running water," is part of this hierarchy of intelligence. Perhaps where Dembsky makes a mistake is in limiting intelligence to the more advanced categories of insight and self-awareness. ID, in this view, is more properly an acronym for "Insight-based Design."
When we talk about things like determining whether an exterrestrial radio signal indicates "intelligent life," the ID movement views it as a problem in placing something in a scholastic category (intelligent vs. non-intelligent); mainstream science, by contrast, is actually asking whether the signal is interesting in a way that other things we know about and consider common are not. For ID, the issue of intelligence is qualitative, for mainstream science it is quantitative.
This also explains the differing views towards genetic and evolutionary programming and modeling. ID views the results as invalid, since the involvement of a intelligence (us), has contaminated the process. Mainstream science doesn't see an issue, because it sees the barrier between intelligence and non-intelligence as artificial and susceptible to reductionistic investigation.
As a person of faith, I do not find the mainstream/reductionistic view threatening. However, I do understand the discomfort some religious people have with this view.
-Neil