How do Intelligent Design People act?

Hi Peg,Regarding ID books, the ones that are best known and that would provide the most ammunition for your position are Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behe and Understanding Intelligent Design: Everything You Need to Know in Plain Language by William A. Dembski. Abuse is too strong a term for my taste, but there aren't many things of a positive nature one can say about telling children you're giving them reliable and legitimate information when you're not.The science taught up to the high school level is very basic and fundamental and consists of the current very widely consensus views within science. Creation science and ID proponents want views taught that are way outside the scientific mainstream, and they're trying to achieve this not by the quality of their research but by the strength of their political efforts before school boards and state legislatures. No other science has ever entered the classrooms of this country through political mandate, and hopefully we all agree that what gets taught in science class should be legitimate science.That isn't to say creation science and ID are not valid areas of scientific inquiry. Many scientists have serious doubts that such research could ever make any scientific contributions because they seem underpinned by fundamental misunderstandings of both the nature and practice of science, but this is a free country and one can study what one wants. When creation scientists and/or ID scientists begin producing scientific advances then they'll start persuading large groups of scientists and will become part of the mainstream. But that hasn't happened yet, so teaching creation science or ID in science classrooms would not be legitimate at this point. We're not teaching string theory (an advanced and promising physics theory that has not yet been proven) in science class, either.--Percy

It depends which IDist you're talking to. Michael Behe, arguably the founder of the modern ID movement and the author of Darwin's Black Box, accepts most of evolution. It is only when it comes to the evolution of what he terms irreducibly complex microbiological structures like the bacterial flagellum and the blood clotting cascade of biochemical reactions that he believes an intelligent designer must have played a role. Hope you enjoy it. I read its predecessor, A Brief History of Time, and like most people enjoyed it a great deal.--Percy

Behe is a tenured professor and research microbiologist at Lehigh University, though his research has tailed off considerably in the last decade. He's never published nor even submitted any ID research to any scientific journals. His scientific papers are all in the field of microbiology, but none on ID, and I suspect that while he's thought and written a great deal on ID, he hasn't actually done any research on it. He has written a couple popular press books, Darwin's Black Box and more recently The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism.But I'd be hard pressed to describe how Behe might do ID research. Taking his example of the bacterial flagellum, after he's decided it couldn't possibly have evolved naturally, what next? Are there ways he could ferret out how the designer designed? What methods and tools he might have used to create/modify genes or build the first flagellum? Human designers conduct scores and scores of experiments and build a number of prototypes before hitting upon a final design - should Behe look for experimental predecessors to the bacterial flagellum?I don't know the answers to these questions, and neither would most legitimate scientists, because there seems no legitimate way to conduct research when the conclusion is decided before any of the questions have been answered, or even asked.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Punctuation.

PaulK meant to refer to Hermann Mller (not Mueller). Mller used the term interlocking complexity instead of irreducible complexity, but they are the same thing. TalkOrigins has an article about it: The article explains Behe's problem as caused by a mistaken view of evolution "as working by the gradual addition of parts," while Mller viewed it as the "gradual modifications of parts."Of course, neither view is completely correct. Evolution is not just one or the other. Both play a role. Nonetheless, viewing evolution as the "gradual modifications of parts" apparently was sufficient to lead Mller to conclude that evolution would inevitably lead to irreducible complexity.--Percy