Thanks for your post Nausicaa. Let me reiterate that I'm not trying to prove any preconceived idea, I'm just acting out the process of applying the scientific method in a series of "thought experiments" to the pseudoscience of intelligent design.
I begin by excluding irreducible complexity from the center stage, it's a straightforward creationist concept which was relabeled at the last minute for legal reasons. I don't mind coming back to it later when it is appropriate but I don't have any interest in debating it straightforwardly, there are several actual biology fans here who refute it throroughly in appropriate threads.
So what does that leave? Anything?
The general idea with intelligent design (as distinct from straight creationism) is that design theory works on natural stuff as well as artificial, and a design implies a designer. This might just be a semantic ghost, yes? But let's follow it through anyway. The claim is advanced that this theoretical designer must be intelligent, and furthermore must be more intelligent than us, because some of this stuff we see is really amazing, some of it is even so amazing, that we haven't figured out how to do it ourselves yet.
ID is supposed to be true, in short, even if evolution itself is a perfectly good fact. This is where it parts ways with IC and other creationist concepts. It's supposed to be genuine
science. It claims to be rooted in information theory, it wants us to think it has whole new insights into intelligence.
So I say fine, let's do science with it. Let's walk through some basic "is this idea nonsense?" kind of thought experiments with it and see if we can get it to predict anything that is testable. One might think for example, that an Intelligent Designer would produce designs that were superior to the sort of thing we puny mortals would tend to come up with. Now the best refutation of this is to point at a few choice samples like our lower back and the hyena's penis, maybe some babies born with their lips stuck to their forehead and so on, and say Come on, that's not real freaking smart is it? Who designed that?
The evidence we actually get from nature doesn't look like intentional design, it's more like an ongoing half-assed process that is extraordinarily wasteful and perverse. In other words, it looks less like the products of our design, and more like the contents of our heads. We think all sorts of things, and various totally weird ideas can change back and forth into other things and so on, before we really make our mind up about anything, and even then we are often wrong. The world is similarly inclined.
So fine, we have learned something about our hypothesis. If we are really doing science we modify our hypothesis and move on. The "design" we see in nature is, perhaps, the naked thought of some sort of thinking being. Creepy, huh? But I don't know if it's still science at that point, that sounds like poetry to me.
And from there it's a straighforward compare and contrast between evolution and intelligence. Yes, evolution is like intelligence in many ways (if creatures are like thoughts.) Is it, are they? Catholic Scientist and Hoot Mon worked it thoroughly from there. Spider webs are amazing, but they aren't the product of a brain. Single-celled insects are amazing, still no brain involved. Mental activity required to be called "intelligence".
And so it goes, evolution isn't intelligent, evolution isn't the intelligence of the earth, evolution is perhaps
like intelligence. Ok, in what ways? Well, it solves problems. Is that another ghost? Ok, it remembers some things, it even reuses things it learns in one place at some other point where they turn out useful. Still no? Hmm, why not?
And even if it isn't a "real intelligence" it's, you know, so amazing, it ought to get extra credit. I mean, its thoughts are
things! That's an amazing thing isn't it. Think as hard as we want, when it's time to make our thoughts real, we have to get up and do some actual work. Right? No?
But honestly, we have cut some extreme slack to get the hypothesis along this far. Let's do that one more time, and let's test it. How do we test intelligence? What's the name of that number, how is it calculated?