Hi Brad H,
What you're describing is not the ability to recognize signs of intelligence, but just the ability to recognize signs of people. And even recognizing signs of people isn't a sure thing. Drift wood in the shape of "Marooned...send help" is obviously a sign of people to you and me, but what if it was expressed using the Arabic alphabet (Arabric reads right to left):
حيلة ... يبعث المساعدة
Not so easy to recognize as the product of people, is it? And someone raised in an Arabic country would likely have difficulty recognizing "Marooned...send help" as an indication of people, too.
What you have is an interesting hypothesis, one first clearly articulated by William Paley back in the early 1800's. He stated that the involvement of an intelligence should be accompanied by certain recognizable signs. Dembski attempted to quantify the process of recognizing intelligence involvement, but with math that, to put it kindly, he has not formally submitted to the scientific community for the peer review that all scientific contributions must undergo.
So if there are no generally accepted principles for how one recognizes the influence of an intelligence in nature, how does one recognize the intelligent influences in DNA, particularly when natural processes already account for everything we find in DNA?
One of Dembski's claims about DNA is that it is not only complex, but also specified. I agree with him, it is both complex and specified, and we already know what did the specifying: eons of trial and error experimentation using mutation and natural selection.
--Percy
Edited by Percy, : Typo.